iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Phase 2: 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 16-2).

DVD chapters let viewers skip to predefined starting points within a movie, or pick up where they last left off watching, either by using the scene menu or by pressing the Next Chapter or Previous Chapter buttons on the remote control.

As part of its effort to de-emphasize the DVD, Apple took the chapter-marker feature out of iMovie '08—but when the uproar was deafening, restored it in iMovie '09, better than ever.

Actually, there are four ways to go about it. In spite of iMovie '09's chapter-marking prowess, all four options have their place:

• Use iMovie '09. Hands down the easiest and most convenient. This will probably be your chapter marker of choice 99 percent of the time.

  

  Figure 16-2. Most DVDs have 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.

• Export the movie to iMovie 6. If you ended up with your movie in iMovie 6 (the reasons and method are covered on Parallel cutting), you can head straight from there to iDVD. The older iMovie has a really great chapter-adding feature.

• Export the movie to GarageBand. GarageBand has convenient chapter-adding features, ...