The wedding movie mentioned in the previous post is actually over three hours long and does not fit onto a single layer DVD. While I did buy a package of double layer (DL) DVDs I was rather shocked about their price. At nearly $2.2 they are more than 5 times as expensive as single layer DVDs. In this article, I found a useful hint of how to use Toast to compress double layer DVDs. Here’s how to do it:
- In iDVD, select “Double Layer” from the Project menu (*)
- Start Toast, go to the “Copy” tab, and make sure that the “Fit-to-DVD video
compression” box is checked in the “Formats” Options - Mount the disk image from the “Utilities” Menu
- Right click on the mounted disk image and select “Toast it”
(*) You need to have a built-in double layer DVD burner to be able to choose this option. This article describes a workaround for iDVD 5, but I have not tried it. Use at your own risk. See disclaimer.
For my 3 hour movie the quality is decent. During some scene transition it does look rather pixely, but of course I compressed it significantly from standard DVD quality.
Since I am still working out the final version of my DVD I have not yet tried to burn a double layer DVD. When burning to disk image, iDVD warns that DL DVDs burned from a disk image may not play in some DVD players and instead recommends to burn directly to DVD. I yet have to test this myself, but it certainly does not sounds reasonable that burning from a disk image should be any different than burning directly. I personally have stopped burning directly because more than once did I get an unexplained error message from iDVD resulting in a wasted DVD.