I’ll be doing a spot of video work sir a school, and they’ll likely want a DVD of it. What I don’t want is to throw an iDVD created disk at them because I’ve found in the past that this app produces less than perfect video. It tends to be blocky, and it looks like the display on a Mac running in “Thousands of colours”.

So, any recommendations of affordable (i.e. I’m not wanting to throw a huge sum of cash after this) DVD burning software? Somewhere, I have a copy of Toast kicking around somewhere, but it’s old and may not work on Mavericks. So I’m interested in anything others may have come up against. The most important thing is image fidelity - Toast > iDVD in my experience. If I can find m,y copy of Toast and get it working, then great.

Ideally, I’d hand the school a file, but you never know if they want something hard to duplicate and sell to raise some cash. I’d hope they’d just want a file, and organise the media themselves.

I have Toast Titanium 8 running fine on Mavericks, I think version 7 should work as it was a Universal Binary app, but anything older probably won't run.

Will you be doing the editing in iMovie? If so, try to work in HD if possible, then export a MP4 video file and let Toast do the compression onto DVD. Bear in mind that any DVD will a bit look ropey on a Mac as it's PAL resolution upscaled to a high resolution monitor - they tend to look better on an actual TV though!

I use Toast a lot at home, but all our students tend to use iDVD to submit work on.
The trick is, of course, to make sure what you've got going in is of decent quality in the first place. Most of our guys are working 720p or above, so going down to SD hasn't been a problem.
Might be worth having a poke at http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/Pages/English/home.html - it even appears to offer some form of menu creation if that's a requirement.

Steve: working in FCPX. I've found quality problems with iMovie in the past (I can post a link to a sample of low quality iMovie compression if you like).

Prof: I'll look at that. Thanks.