December 29, 2004
MacWorld rumors.
It's that time of year again...we're just two weeks away from the January MacWorld expo, and the Mac rumor sites are abuzz with possible announcements. The one a lot of people are yelling and screaming about (mostly with joy) is the possibility of a sub-$500 iMac, and that would be cool, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't affect me as an existing Mac user. No, what I'm much more excited about is this story regarding a new iLife suite.According to Think Secret, the new version of iLife will contain a new, HD-enabled version of iMovie that supports 16x9 resolutions (finally). Hopefully this also means the unbelievably frustrating DV file size limitation's been removed as well. (In the current version, large movies have to be split up to be imported into iMovie, which makes burning movies using iDVD very frustrating). But even cooler than that, is the rumor that iDVD 5 will support dual layer DVD burning. Hallelujah! Praise be to Apple. Dual layer DVD drives are remarkably cheap, but I haven't bothered upgrading because the only software that supports it right now is Toast, and that's way too bare bones for my taste (technically DVD Studio Pro supports it as well, but you still need to burn the disc using Toast, and DVDSP is way too much money for a non-pro like myself). Being able to burn a two hour movie onto one DVD at full quality makes me giddy with excitement.
Of course, since we're moving in the very near future, I'll need to sell off something to be able to afford that upgrade. Fortunately I've got a copy of Shining Force III sitting on my shelf that should be worth just enough to cover that cost. Hmm...stay tuned to eBay.
Posted by jason at December 29, 2004 12:33 PM
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Struggling with Windows' variety of DVD burning apps (some made gorgeous menus that had so little customizability that you couldn't even move a button, others let you make anything you could dream of but were too hard to use) I gotta say that I pinned hopes and dreams on iDVD when I got a Mac and it didn't turn out to be as great as I thought it'd be.
A lot of the problems, of course, are because I tried to balance out my price:benefits ratio as well as I could, and I didn't put enough into price to be able to use it well. My system flies under the minimum requirements but runs it anyway and does so like a snail, and I couldn't afford a superdrive model so I have to defend on the Hurz/Pfurz hack if I really want to make anything.
I guess I'll play with iDVD's menu creation eventually. Since I barely have the horsepower to run it, let alone render anything, I'll have to make all my movies DVD-compatable MPEG2 and move it over and you can see how the work starts adding up. :)
Maybe if that low-end machine listed above becomes a reality (highly doubt it) I'll give it another go.
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at December 30, 2004 02:02 AM
My apologies. I just realized how idiotic some of my writing up there looks. Blame caffeine. :)
Do you know if DVD-compatable MPEG files can be used in iDVD without re-enconding? I basically have this Mac for learning OS X and a PC for heavy lifting like games and video work, and am thinking about copying over some DVD-compatable video and seeing how well I can make a disc.
at December 30, 2004 02:08 AM
You can import MPEG movies into iMovie and then use them in iDVD, but there are a few wrinkles. For one, you need the MPEG2 QuickTime component, which isn't free (it's like $25, and worth it if you watch MPEGs on a Mac anyway).
The other problem is that damned filesize limitation. Anything you import into iMovie is converted into DV, and it won't let you import anything larger than 9 minutes of footage at a time. It's a real pain to split movies apart just to squeeze them into iMovie. Hopefully the next version won't have that (although it was promised last time, and it's still there).
If you want simple MPEG2 => DVD, use Toast. You can drag n' drop an MPEG2 file into Toast and burn it to a DVD with just a few clicks. The downside there is that menu creation is minimal at best, although you can hack the menu files to make it look at least slightly more appropriate for each movie.
at December 30, 2004 10:54 AM
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