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

In Hollywood, shooting and editing a film is only the first half of the process. No matter how good the movie may be, without distribution it's going to sit anonymous on a shelf.

You're probably not aiming for a screening at the Sundance Film Festival, but currently your movie exists only on your hard disk. Now is the time to put that iDVD editing to work and burn your project to disc.

Before jumping in, I need to cover a few DVD basics.

Several flavors of blank DVDs are on the market, and iDVD 5 now supports them all: DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD+RW, and DVD-RW). The RW (rewriteable) variants are especially attractive because you can reuse them to burn copies of your project for testing.

DVD discs come in 1x, 2x, 4x, and 8x speeds. This is a measurement of how fast the SuperDrive's laser can carve data into a disc's surface. Check the specifications of your Mac at Apple's support site to determine your Super-Drive's speed: www.info.apple.com/support/applespec.html.

Also, before you burn any DVD disc, make sure your SuperDrive's firmware has been updatedon some models, using 4x-speed DVD-R media can damage the drive! Read more about it at docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86130.

(You can find the URLs above, along with other related information, at this book's companion Web site: www.necoffee.com/imovievqs/.)

If your Mac doesn't have a SuperDrive, iDVD 5 can also "burn" the project to a disc image for burning to a disc later using an external DVD burner.

Lastly, remember that a DVD disc can store roughly 4.7 GB of data (compare that to CD-Rs, which hold about 700 MB). That means you'll need to have plenty of free hard disk space available when it comes time to encode (prepare) the data and burn it.