iMovie® '09 & iDVD® '09® For Dummies®

Chapter 13. Making a Quick DVD

In This Chapter

• Getting a running start on your DVD project

• Making a DVD directly from your FireWire camera

It seems as though DVD technology has been around for eons, but, as we write this book, it's really only about fifteen years old! Time sure flies when you're having fun.

Nonetheless, many people feel DVDs are passé, if not completely moribund, especially in the face of HDTV, Blu-ray discs, and streaming video services such as YouTube (www.youtube.com) and Hulu (www.hulu.com). In fact, Apple itself seems ambivalent about the DVD format: iDVD is the only one of all the components of iLife '09 that didn't get even a minor update from the previous version of iLife.

But, unlike Monty Python's famous parrot, DVD is not resting, nor is it pining for the fjords. It is a stable, mature technology, and still one of the best ways to get your video creations into the hands of your friends and family.

That leaves the question, "How do you get the video onto a DVD in the first place?" In the previous chapter, we cover one way: via the Share menu in iMovie. In this chapter, you're going to get a look at two other options.

Using Magic iDVD

Like other applications in the iLife suite, iDVD keeps track of what you were working on, and it opens that project when you start iDVD. But if you have no previous project for iDVD to open, or if you close your current project, you ...