iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Phase 1: Insert Chapter Markers

If you’ve ever rented or bought a movie on DVD, you’re already familiar with chapters, better known as scenes (Figure 20-1).

DVD chapters let viewers skip to predefined starting points within a movie, or pick up where they last left off watching, by either using the scene menu or pressing the Next Chapter or Previous Chapter buttons on the remote control. Thanks to the partnership of iMovie and iDVD, you can add markers to your own movies that perfectly replicate this feature. Here’s how to go about it.

Figure 20-1. Most DVDs offer something called a scene menu like this one (from the movie Ronin), which lets viewers jump directly to their favorite scenes in the movie. Your DVD scene menus probably won’t be quite this elaborate, but you get the idea.

1. In iMovie, click the iDVD button.

   You’ll find it among the other palette buttons, just to the right of the Effects button, as shown in Figure 20-2. In any case, the iDVD palette now opens.

   

   Figure 20-2. The iDVD palette lets you add, remove, and name chapters—and then publish your iMovies to iDVD. New iMovie chapters are numbered sequentially, as they appear in your movie from left to right. Chapter references appear in your timeline as small yellow diamonds, just above the video track. iMovie can add up to 99 ...