Section 18.6. Archiving Your Project | iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual

18.6. Archiving Your Project

Ordinarily, iDVD doesn't store any videos , photos, or sounds in your iDVD project file. It remains a tiny, compact file that stores only pointers to those files elsewhere on your hard drive.

That's why, if you delete or move one of those media files, iDVD will mildly freak out. (See page 447 in that case.)

In previous versions of iDVD, you couldn't transfer a project from one Mac to another for this very reason. And that meant that you couldn't design a DVD on one Mac (one that lacked a DVD burner ), and then burn it on another. You also couldn't back up your project file, content that you'd included all of its pieces.

Fortunately, Apple packed a solution into iDVD 5. The Archive Project command lets you completely "de-reference" your project, so that the project file contains every file that you've incorporated into your project: movies, photos, sounds, theme components , and DVD-ROM files. Your project file is now completely self-contained, ready for backup or transfer to another computer.

It's also now really, really huge.

Follow these steps to produce your archive.

Save your project.

If you forget this step, iDVD will remind you.

Choose File Archive Project.

The Save As panel shown in Figure 18-10 appears.

Figure 18-10. The Archive Project's Save As panel lets you specify whether you want to include themes and encoded files in your archived project. You can save quite a bit of disk space by leaving these options unchecked. The Size indicator to the right of "Include themes" tells you how much space your project will occupy.

Turn the checkboxes on or off, if you like.

"Include themes" copies your theme files into the projectsomething that's unnecessary if you're using standard Apple themes. This checkbox is important only if the themes you've used come from other companies, were designed by you, or are modified versions of Apple's originals .

Figure 18-11. When archiving a project, iDVD creates additional folders within the new project bundle. The Assets folder stores original copies of your audio and video files (in the "av" subfolder), DVD-ROM content (in "data") and images (in "stills"). If you've chosen to save themes, they show up in the Themes folder.

"Include encoded files" is the more important optionon, because it's very unlikely that all of your sounds, photos, and movies are also on the destination Mac.

Turn the boxes on and off to see how much space you'll recover.

Name the archive file, choose a folder location for it, and then click Save.

Wait as iDVD builds the new archive. This can take a few minutes, so be patient. You may be working with very large files.

Archived projects look like any other projects, in that they use the same . dvdproj extension. But inside, they're very different. For proof, simply open it as a package (page 112). Inside its Contents Resources folder, new folders called Assets and Themes store the extra archived elements (Figure 18-11).

Tip: In order to turn your photos and videos into DVD material, iDVD must encode (convert) them into a format called MPEG. Depending on your Preferences settings, iDVD may constantly be working on this time-consuming task, or it may do the job only when you burn the DVD.Either way, an archived project also stores any MPEG files iDVD has created so far. They'll save you time when you burn the DVD, but they'll make the archive's file size balloon up like a blimp.If you'd rather keep the file smaller, choose Advanced

Delete Encoded Assets before saving the archive. iDVD removes the remove encoded MPEG filesbut youll pay for this gesture in re-encoding time when you're ready to burn your discs.

18.6.1. Copying the archive to a different Mac

Suppose that you've designed a DVD using a Mac that lacks a DVD burner. Now, as Apple intended, you've used the Archive command to prepare it for transfer to a Mac that does have a burner.

Transfer the archive project using any convenient method: copy it across a network, burn it to a CD or a DVD-ROM, copy it onto an iPod, or whatever. (It's too big for email, of course, but you could instead post it on a Web site for downloading.)

The project opens normally on the other machine, with all of its pieces intact and ready to touch up and burn.

18.6.2. Relinking Missing Files

When you're working with regular projects (not archived ones), iDVD is pretty helpless if you move or rename any of the photo, movie, or sound files that it expects to use in your DVD (see Figure 18-12).

If you encounter the dialog box shown in Figure 18-10 at top, click Find File, navigate to a folder that contains at least one of the files, and click Open. iDVD dutifully inspects that folder for any missing files. Repeat until you've located all the missing files.

If you can't find a filesay, you deleted one by accidentthen keep showing iDVD the files you can find. At the end of the process, click Cancel.

Your project will open just fine, but you'll see a big black space (Figure 18-12, bottom) where the missing file ought to be. At this point, you can replace it with a file that you do have.

Figure 18-12. Top: If you open a project whose original movies, photos, or sounds have been moved or renamed , you see this message. Click Cancel to proceed without those files, or click Find File to show iDVD where the file is now.
Bottom: The broken link image indicates a file that iDVD can't find. Avoid this problem by keeping all your source files on the hard drive until after you've burned your project.