Chapter 19. iDVD Overview

19. iDVD Overview

iMovie took a technology dominated by professionalsmovie editingand made it easy to use for normal people. In some ways, though, iDVD is even more impressive.

Quite a lot of highly technical work goes into creating a DVDin the background. While you're focused on choosing which photo should appear on the title page of your DVD, iDVD handles the specifics of building the structure necessary for most consumer DVD players to play back your masterpiece. More importantly, it manages the MPEG-2 compression needed to cram multiple gigabytes' worth of data onto a shiny platter the size and shape of a regular audio CD.

iDVD also does something that no other program can do: it gives you style. Apple has clearly put a lot of thought into the DVD themes that ship with iDVD, making each one something you'd actually want to show off to people. An iDVD project, whether you like it or not, is polished, which goes a long way toward making people think, "Wow, I had no idea he was so talented."

This chapter offers a look at iDVD's interface and major functions in order to give you the foundation you'll need for the next chapters that deal with building projects and customizing them.

HD and iDVD

iMovie HD can create HD movies, but don't expect to create a high-definition DVD for now. No standard for high-def DVDs has been reached, despite two competing formats (Blu-ray and HD-DVD, which each have different corporate backers). So, even if iDVD could burn HD projects, no hardware exists to burn them to. As I write this, you can buy drives that read both formats, with disc writers due to appear around the corner. But an accepted standard is still on the horizon.

In the meantime, iDVD imports HD projects with ease and converts them into widescreen DV format. True, it's not the same as seeing the picture at high-definition quality, but it's a start.