I'm a little pressed for time and I need to burn five copies of a 50-minute documentary onto DVD. Very basic - the movie and a static menu. I have the latest versions of both IDVD and DVD Studio Pro. Which is faster, while producing the best quality?

FYI: I'm using a 1.5 Ghz Powerbook with 2G ram.

Thanks.

Thomas

neither is going to blaze a trail but in my experience, idvd is a tad faster at just burning.

there should be a dialog where you tell it how many copies you want (or maybe it just asks upon each disc completion)

iDVD has one other feature that occasionally comes into play. It will go to 49 minutes into a 50 minute show and hang--basically forever.

No real explaination. It just goes off into never-never land and doesn't come back. I'm assuming they didn't fix that feature. It was too popular.

Koz

I LOVE iDVD!

Pound-4-Pound ($-4-$) the best software Apple ever released. It's faster than DVD Studio Pro - especially for smaller projects.

I don't know what koz is talking about here...I never had an issue encoding or playing a burned DVD-R on any set top box or computer DVD player. *CHECK THAT - once I tried encoding from media on my boot drive - which obviously failed - so I never did that again.

- Joey



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

i agree with joe, i keep idvd around just in case i need to do a one-off, quicky kinda' thing

<<<I never had an issue encoding or playing a burned DVD-R on any set top box or computer DVD player>>>

Nor have we. The problem is getting iDVD to compete the encode step. If it hits any video or audio it's not completely happy with, it just halts. No errors, no messages, no lights, no sounds. It just stops dead, generally leaving you with your finger in your ear watching that little blue barber pole and waiting until it's really obvious there's something wrong--like hours later or the next day.

That's why, as much as we like iDVD and continue to use it, we went to DVD Studio Pro for the critical work. iDVD killed us one too many times.

Koz

If you want to burn 5 copies of the same thing, then go with Roxio Toast as the software to copy DVD content. Use iDVD or DVDSP to make the first DVD and then use Toast to COPY. Preferrably make a disc image first before copying.

A disc image is like a .dmg file that Disk Copy can create, except that it is a .toast image. Using a disk image insures an exact bit copy of the original.

That requires Roxio Toast to execute a .toast disk image.

With iDVD 5 you can create a disk image. You can easily burn that with Disk Utility. No Toast required.



- Justin Barham -

iDVD asks you when it's done burning "would you like to burn another?" and you just pop in another disc and your off. Otherwise, just click "Done".

Doesn't get much easier than that

- Joey



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

For stuff that doesn't need complicated menus and is in a hurry I've gone over to using an external DVD (harddrive) recorder. Realtime encoding for the first copy, then about 10 minutes for each copy after that.

It in no way replaces the menu functions of dvdsp - or even idvd - but it's FAST for those clients who need stuff yesterday. You can still do chapters and basic menus. Ours had paid for itself several times over in the first month of operation.

We've been doing that for a while, but that assumes your original work is live video. If you start with a timeline, that may actually take longer.

Koz

Not sure what you're talking about Koz - I play out off the timeline to the DVD recorder and it (sort of) works a treat.

Our Toshiba dvd recorder does have a firewire input, but it appears to be broken. What I do is send a signal out via a DSR11, which seems to have a fairly wobbly signal, because I then need to go via a canopus box to tidy up the signal enough for the Toshiba not to see it as copy protected.

Anyway, if you got a newer burner you probably wouldn't have this trouble. It works pretty nicely once the signal is going in there ok.