iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

What You’re in For

In the following chapters, you can read about using iDVD manually, which allows you to integrate movies, still pictures, and sound in very flexible ways. But especially at first, most people take one of the two simplest approaches: (a) create the movie in iMovie, and then hand it off to iDVD, or (b) burn a DVD directly from the camcorder tape, using the new Magic iDVD process (Section 15.8.2).

This chapter guides you through both of those rituals. Most of what you’re about to read, though, covers the iMovie-to- iDVD sequence, which entails five broad steps:

1. Prepare your audio, video, and pictures.

   In addition to movies, iDVD can incorporate audio and graphics files into your shows. iDVD doesn’t, however, offer any way to create or edit these files. You must prepare them in other programs first.

2. Insert chapter markers.

   In a commercial Hollywood DVD, you can jump around the movie without rewinding or fast-forwarding, thanks to the movie’s scene menu or chapter menu. It’s basically a screenful of bookmarks for certain scenes in the movie. (One way to create these useful scene breaks in iMovie is to position the Playhead and then choose Markers → Add Chapter Marker.)

3. Hand off to iDVD.

   iMovie and iDVD are tied together behind the scenes. The former can hand off movies to the latter, automatically creating menu buttons in the process.

4. Design the menu screen.

   In iDVD terms, menus doesn’t mean menus that drop down from the top of the screen. Instead, a DVD menu is a menu ...