Making a Movie in iMovie HD and iDVD 5: Visual QuickProject Guide

Whether black, cobalt, or any other available hue, blank clips are placeholders added between video clips. Insert these clips to help you adjust and perfect the timing of your movie.

The (rather lengthy) process of etching data into a DVD disc's surface to create a disc that a consumer DVD player or computer with a DVD drive can read.

A segment of video or audio.

Remnant of an audio or video segment, sometimes caused by overzealous cropping or trimming.

This control, found in earlier versions of iMovie, let you adjust the speed of your footage, clip by clip. In iMovie HD, the Clip Speed slider has been replaced by the Fast/Slow/Reverse effect.

One of two modes of the Timeline, the Clip Viewer displays clips in play order, using large thumbnail previews to help you identify them.

Filmstrip icon that appears above the Timeline. Click this icon to display the Clip Viewer.

This virtual display case, also known as the Shelf, sits to the right of the Monitor. Your video clips are stored here, arranged on a grid. Use the scroll bar to view more clips.

Delete frames that are outside a selected portion of a clip. Choose Crop from the Edit menu.

These triangular shapes appear when you position the mouse pointer just below the Scrubber Bar. Click and drag these markers to select a portion of your clip.

Commonly used transition where the end of one clip fades into the beginning of the next clip.

The area where most of iDVD's options and controls are stored. It houses the Themes, Settings, Media, and Status panes.

A click-and-drag editing technique, performed in the Timeline Viewer. Shortening clips by Direct Trimming works faster than cropping, and allows unwanted frames to be hidden instead of deleted. Clips with a straight edge (or two) have been trimmed.

A special area in several iDVD themes where photos or movies can play within the menu to add more visual interest.

Short for Digital Versatile Disc, this plastic platter packs nearly seven times the data into the same space as a compact disc: a CD stores roughly 700 MB, while a DVD holds approximately 4.7 GB.

Stands for Digital Versatile Disc-Recordable. These discs can be burned once, and then played back in nearly any consumer DVD player and DVD capable computer. Use DVD-R (General) for your iDVD projects; DVD-R (Authoring) discs are not supported by iDVD. A similar format is DVD+R.

Stands for Digital Versatile Disc-Read Only Memory. The format of a digital video disc that holds data which doesn't need to be played back automatically in a DVD player. Data can be stored but not altered in this format.

Stands for Digital Versatile Disc-Rewritable. These discs can be burned more than once, and are good for burning test versions of your iDVD projects. A similar format is DVD+RW.

A special visual touch to enhance your movie. Choose from a variety of styles including Black & White, Earthquake, and Fairy Dustor layer them upon the same clip for snazzier results.

In iDVD, the method by which your movie is compressed and formatted to fit onto a DVD disc. iDVD offers two types of encoding: Best Quality and Best Performance.

A high-speed serial data bus that can move large amounts of data between computers and peripheral devices. Use a high-speed FireWire connection to import your footage from your camcorder into iMovie on your computer.

Movie clips, raw or edited; the stuff you download from your camcorder into iMovie and eventually turn into a finished project.

A single picture on a strip of film or video, or a single photo exposure.

A unit of computer data or storage space equivalent to 1,024 megabytes (MB).

A high-definition video format supported by iMovie HD. It can be shot in two varieties, depending on the camera: 1080i is an interlaced video frame at a size of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels; 720p is progressive-scan video at 1,280 by 720 pixels. The high-definition video is compressed in-camera using MPEG-2 compression, which is why HDV is considered a lower-end high-def format.

Created in iMovie, these titled thumbnails indicate a new section that will appear as a separate section in iDVD. Clicking a chapter marker in iMovie also lets you jump to specific scenes in the film.

Copying video and audio from your camera to your computer's hard disk, using a FireWire cable, iMovie, and a huge amount of hard disk space.

Hard, quick transition between clips.

A method of panning, zooming in, or zooming out on a still photo; named after the acclaimed documentary filmmaker who popularized the technique.

In iDVD, the Map view illustrates the DVD project's content structure.

Part of iDVD's Customize panel, the Media pane allows you to access other iLife-related content, such as photos, movies, and music.

Toggle between import mode (camera icon) and edit mode (scissors icon) using this small control above the Timeline.

Preview and edit all your video clipsor play back your entire movieon this large screen in iMovie.

Movement or animation, added to increase your DVD's coolness quotient.

The signature feature of iDVD's Scrubber Bar, which lets you scroll through drop zone animations.

The process by which audio and video data are fused into one stream that DVD players can read.

An area containing goodies that can be added to create your movie, such as clips, photos, audio, titles, transitions, and effects.

Displayed below iMovie's Shelf, these icons for Clips, Photos, Audio, Titles, Transitions, Effects, and iDVD can be clicked to access all of the program's editing tools.

Inverted triangle marker that appears on the Timeline and on the Monitor's Scrubber Bar. Drag the Play-head to any frame within your movie or clip to display it in the Monitor; the numbers beside the Playhead indicate the time location within the movie.

Just as it sounds, a preview is a chance to see how an edit or application affects your movie before you commit to accepting the change. In iDVD, click the Preview button to enter Preview mode and see what your project will look like when viewed on a DVD player.

QuickTime is a highly versatile format for sharing movies as files on your hard drive.

The process of recreating clips in iMovie to incorporate new visual data such as transitions, titles, and effects.

The amount of detail in an image, represented by pixels. For example, video resolution is typically more coarse than the resolution of a photo taken with a digital still camera.

Scroll bar that allows you to move anywhere in a movie. Use the Monitor's Scrubber Bar to select a range of frames for copying, cutting, or cropping.

Part of iDVD's Customize panel, this pane lets you edit specific options such as text font and size, button styles, background images, and more.

Also called the Clips pane, this display of video clips and photos appears next to the Monitor.

Just like Grandma and Grand-pa's giant tray of vacation slides; but this one is created in iDVD by displaying pictures imported from iPhoto.

To slice a clip where the Playhead is located. Place the Playhead on the desired point in a clip and choose Split Video Clip from the Edit menu.

In iDVD, a submenu is a separate branch of the main menu, offering access to other media within your iDVD project (more movies or slideshows, for example). After creating an iDVD project from within iMovie, a button labeled Scene Selection is created; that button is actually a submenu (also known as a folder) that leads you to the chapters that comprise your movie.

Visual flavor of the backdrop for your submenu. In this book's example, iDVD's Travel 2 theme is selected for the submenu.

The overall look of a menu screen, including the visual presentation (fonts, colors, etc.) as well as the way it interacts (with motion menus, etc.).

A method all camcorders use to label and keep track of footage, where time is shown as Hours: Minutes: Seconds: Frames. In NTSC video, 30 frames equal 1 second; in PAL video, 25 frames equal 1 second.

The row beneath the Monitor where clips, photos, and transitions are arranged and edited. Made up of the Clip Viewer and Timeline Viewer.

Arranges the clips in order and also depicts their lengths. This viewer also includes audio tracks and controls for changing aspects of a clip.

The name you choose for your movie, which is formatted differently than other buttons and elements in an iDVD theme. Edit the title's text and position in iDVD's Settings pane.

Any clip containing text that is superimposed over footage. Accessed by the Titles pane.

Stylish method for moving from one clip to the next. Access transitions including Fade In, Fade Out, Push, or Twirl by clicking the Trans button just below the Shelf.

To shorten, as with a film clip. Also see Direct Trimming.

Visual depiction of a clip's sound levels, that allows you to edit audio clips with more precision.

In iMovie, zooming in refers to punching up the size of your various movie components for a better view. Zooming in is helpful when you're editing small clips or transitions.

Bottom left-hand gauge that determines how much of the Timeline is shown in the viewer: with the slider at the left, the entire movie appears in the Timeline. In the Photos pane, the Zoom slider dictates how much of a photo is visible.