iDVD - I was able to make a DVD with no dropped frames

The first few times that I attempted to create a DVD of some of my home recordings I always ended up with a final product that was about 15 fps. I had to start digging around as to the cause of the dropped frames. What was strange was that when viewing the captured video and also the edited video before I would import it into iDVD, it looked fantastic.

I did some looking around and it seems that the poor end result is actually caused by the export format of iMovie. I was new to using it so I chose to export the video through the share options so that it was integrated in the iDVD media chooser. That I believe saves it in .M4V format and the forum post that I found suggested to export the movie in .DV format. To do this you need to choose to export via Quicktime. In the save window you have all the options you need to change the export format, one of them being .DV.

This is a good way to do it because you captured in .DV format to your iMovie, you are not losing anything during export. So now iDVD has almost a raw format because .DV doesn’t have any compression.

It seems to take longer to compile the final version of the disc through iDVD but the iMovie export is definitely faster. I chose to perform the iDVD burn overnight and in the morning it was ready.