iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Archiving Your Project

Ordinarily, iDVD doesn’t store any videos, photos, or sounds in your iDVD project file. It remains a tiny, compact file that stores only references that point to those files elsewhere on your hard drive.

That’s why, if you delete or move one of those media files, iDVD will mildly freak out. (See page 613 in that case.)

In previous versions of iDVD, you couldn’t transfer a project from one Mac to another for this very reason. And that meant that you couldn’t design a DVD on one Mac (one that lacked a DVD burner), and then burn it on another. You also couldn’t back up your project file, content that you’d included all of its pieces.

Fortunately, the geniuses at Apple have packed a solution into iDVD 4. The new Archive Project command lets you completely “de-reference” your project, so that the project file contains every file that you’ve incorporated into your project: movies, photos, sounds, theme components, and DVD-ROM files. Your project file is now completely self-contained, ready for backup or transfer to another computer. It’s also now really, really huge.

Follow these steps to produce your archive.

1. Save your project.

   If you forget this step, iDVD will remind you.

2. Choose File → Archive Project.

   The Save As panel shown in Figure 22-8 appears.

3. Turn the checkboxes on or off, if you like.

   “Include themes” copies your theme files into the project—something that’s unnecessary if you’re using standard iDVD 4 themes. This checkbox is important only if the themes ...