When trying to burn dvds of sequences exported from my Avid with iDVD8, Quicktime format exports don't work, and I'm forced to use dvstream which for my current project makes the resulting dvds look crappy even on "professional" setting. I WILL BE SO GRATEFUL FOR ANY HELP OR ADVICE!

Help. I'm really frustrated! For years I've been using my Avid Xpress DV (ver 3.5) to edit and have exported a host of movies during that time using the DVstream format and for the most part it's been acceptable. For some reason I never understood, any time I attempted to use quicktime movie as the format I have never been able to get it to work. The audio works fine, but the video is not there. It's either blank or I get a solid green screen. So, as I said I'd always used dvstream. The problem is I just did 110 minute African safari documentary and the footage looks fantastic. But when I burned DVDs (using dvstream) they looked terrible. The blacks become milky, there is very noticeable compression, and it looks very soft, a hollow imitation of the original DV format footage. I've been watching it for weeks on my Trinitron production monitor so I have a good sense for how it should look, and I know it will never look as good as it does there running the source footage. But it should not look THIS BAD. I am using iDVD 8 on the "professional setting." I even cut the sequence in half to around 50 minutes and exported and burned a DVD and it looked EXACTLY the same. So I thought maybe I am using the wrong settings to export. I read around the web and was reminded of what others had been using as settings. I tried again to export and chose QT, picking Avid DV as the video compressor at ITU-R-601 and uncompressed audio, resolution DV25 NTSC 411 (and yes the right tracks are selcted etc it's not something stupid like that.) I used 720 by 480 (had been using by 720 X 486 601 non square) chose "odd" field, chose the 601 levels color etc and the same damn thing happens. In fact, when I preview the DVD in iDVD8 you can see that it won't display the video track while the audio track plays fine. I am editing but then exporting the files to burn on my new macbook pro because I have iDVD8 on it, and I thought maybe it has something to do with the codec, so i put the aviddv25 codec in my components folder in my system. When I try to play these clips in quicktime player it says it's missing software (audio is fine, video is blank) and tries to find it online, but has no clue what needs to be installed.  refuse to accept that this is the best I can get this DVD to look. It's an insult to all of our work. So I'd be tremendously grateful for any and all help or advice in this matter. Using the DVstream format makes this footage look terrible no matter what length I mae it. I'm now sitting on my hands, at a loss to fix this. I do not have the option of using another program other than iDVD so please keep responses aware of this. Sure it'd be nice to buy DVD studio Pro etc but it's not going to happen. THANKS!

No one, huh? I posted this same question in a iDVD8 Apple users forum and no responses there either. Now I'm not only frustrated, I'm deeply disappointed.

I kind of suspected that beside the fact that I consider myself fairly smart about this stuff this was actually a fairly simple problem to fix and that in my panic trying to resolve this for hours and hours I was overlooking something obvious. Despite the fact that I thought I had put the avid codec manually into what I thought was the proper system folder, a download from Avid to install the latest codecs into my macbook pro fixed it. Now I'm ready to burn and see if the discs look better. I feel a bit dumb, but very hopeful. Fingers crossed...

Let's start with the specs on your system. What version of OSX? What version of Quicktime? What CPU/ ram? I guess you're using XDV 3.5?

Actually my problem has moved on to a whole new frontier of frustrating. The issue I had here was a simple and stupid one, somehow the avid codec was not installed properly in my macbook pro which is the computer I use to burn because I can run iDVD 8 on it. Once it was installed via the Avid download, the problem disappeared. Now the problem I have is the 8 or so different test discs I've burned since with every combination of settings I can think of. The compression and colors etc all look A-OK, but every single one has the same problem, only to a different degree. It's the occassional jigsaw or whatever you want to call it (where the image spazzes out as if unable to maintain solid representations of vertical objects, especially veritcal straight lines (say as in a architectural column) most often noticeble when the camera pans. I cannot lick this problem and have spent days testing it (each burn takes 8 hrs and the avid exports at different settings take a long time too).
As I am at my wits end, and as I found previous forum threads whose solutions didn't work for me (and they didn't seem to be resolved for some users) I am going to document everything as clearly as I can and post it as a new thread.

BTW - I would love to simply delete this post or mark it as answered but don't seem to see how I can do this. This issue is no longer a problem. I have a much bigger one now!