iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Chapter 20. From iMovie to iDVD

IDVD lets you turn your iMovie movies and iPhoto slideshows into Holly-wood-style DVDs that play on most standard DVD players. As you’ll see in the following chapters, iDVD 4 is loaded with enhancements that can make your DVDs look breathtakingly close to the commercial Hollywood discs on the shelves at Blockbuster.

The software requirement is iDVD. The hardware requirement is a DVD recording drive, preferably an Apple SuperDrive built into your Mac.

Note

The word is preferably a built-in SuperDrive, because there are two circumstances in which you don’t need one.

One is that although you need a SuperDrive to burn a DVD, you can do the design work on another machine. That’s a great feature in, for example, school computer labs that have 12 Macs, but only two that can burn DVDs. (For step-by-step instructions, see page 504.)

The other is that a sneaky secret feature in iDVD 4 lets you use an external DVD burner, or even a non-Apple DVD burner, to create DVDs. See page 467.

Why iDVD?

You already know from Chapter 19 that you can export your finished iMovie project back to a good old VHS cassette, one of the world’s most sure-fire distribution methods. Anyone who doesn’t have a VCR in this day and age probably wouldn’t appreciate your cinematic genius anyway.

But preserving your work on a DVD gives you a boatload of benefits. DVDs are cheap, compact, long-lived, easy to mail—and they never need rewinding.

Still, there are reasons to pause before committing your ...