Section 12.6. Burning QuickTime Movie CDs

12.6. Burning QuickTime Movie CDs

As you may have read in the previous chapter, iMovie makes it easy to preserve your masterpiece on videotape, suitable for distribution to your admiring fans. As you'll read in Chapters 15 through 18, you can retain even more of your digital quality and still reach the masses by burning your opus onto a DVD.

There is, however, an in-between step. You can also preserve your QuickTime movie files (the ones you export from iMovie using the instructions in this chapter) on a CD.

Of course, in the world of video, what's meant by "CD" varies dramatically. There have been as many different incarnations of videodiscs as there have been of Madonna. These days, if you claim to have put video on a CD, you probably mean one of these two things:

• You took some ordinary QuickTime movies and burned them onto a CD (or a DVD, for that matter), which you can play only on the computer. You insert the disc, see the icon for the QuickTime movie file, and double-click it. You then watch it in the QuickTime Player program (see Chapter 14).

• You created a Video CD, a weird, low-budget cousin of the DVD. A Video CD is indeed a videodisc, and it can indeed be played by many DVD players. But the quality is no better than that of a VHS videocassette. (Technically speaking, this disc contains an MPEG-1 movie file, as opposed to the MPEG-2 files on DVDs.)

The following discussion offers a road map for creating both kinds of "video CDs."

12.6.1. Burning a CD or DVD for File Storage

Having exported a QuickTime movie as described in this chapter, it may be that you simply want to store it where it isn't eating up the space on your hard drive. Or maybe you want to distribute a few of these movies to friends , but because QuickTime movies are much too big to fit on floppies or Zip disks, a CD-ROM seems like a convenient and inexpensive way to go.

Figure 12-9. Top: Choose Open Finder. Then click OK. Drag your QuickTime movies onto the CD icon on your desktop.
Middle: Drag the "loaded" CD or DVD onto the Burn icon on the Dock. Or, as shown here, Control-click its icon and choose Burn Disc.
Bottom: Confirm your choice in this box.

If your Mac, like all Macs made since about 2001, has a CD burner , you're good to go. This drive can accept either CD-R (recordable) discs, which can't be erased, or CD-RW (rewritable) discs, which are slightly more expensive than standard blank CD-R discsbut you can erase and rerecord them over and over.

In fact, if your Mac can burn DVDs (DVD-R or DVD-RW discs), you can use blank DVDs instead of CDs. Either way, the following steps show you how to use discs as data repositories for backing up your QuickTime movies and iMovie projects. The resulting disc will not play on a TV. (For that, see Chapter 15.)

You can buy blank CDs and DVDs very inexpensively in bulk via the Web. (To find the best prices, visit www.shopper.com or www.buy.com and search for the terms blank CD-R or blank CD-RW. )

Insert a blank disc into your Mac. After a moment, the Mac displays a dialog box asking, in effect, what you want to do with this blank CD (Figure 12-9, top).

Choose Open Finder and click OK. You'll see the disc's icon appear on the desktop after a moment (Figure 12-9, middle). At this point, you can begin dragging your QuickTime movie files or iMovie project files onto it, exactly as though it were a teeny, tiny hard drive. You can add, remove, reorganize, and rename the files on it just as you would in any standard Finder window. You can even rename the disc itself just as you would a file or folder.

When the disk contains the files you want to immortalize, do one of these things:

• Choose File Burn Disc.

• Drag the disc's icon toward the Trash icon on the Dock. As soon as you begin to drag, the Trash icon turns into what looks like a bright yellow fallout-shelter logo. Drop the disc's icon onto it.

• Control-click the disc's icon on the Dock and choose Burn Disc from the contextual menu that appears (Figure 12-9, middle).

In any case, the dialog box shown at bottom in Figure 12-9 now appears. Click Burn. The Mac's laser proceeds to record the CD or DVD, which can take some time. Fortunately, you're free to switch into another program and continue using your Mac.

When the recording process is over, you'll have yourself a newly minted disc that you can insert into any other Mac (and most PCs, for that matter). It will show up on that computer complete with all the files and folders you put onto it.

12.6.2. Burning a Video CD

Now, storing your QuickTime movies on a recordable CD or DVD doesn't create a videodisc. When you do this, you're simply copying a QuickTime file onto another disk, exactly as though it were a Zip disk or external hard drive. You can't play the resulting disk on a DVD player attached to your TV.

A Video CD, on the other hand, is the cheap, less talented sibling of DVD. A Video CD plays back about 60 minutes of video with roughly VHS-tape quality, 352 x 240 pixels. (Some Video CD software can create Super Video CDs, which hold 30 minutes at higher quality.)

That's not nearly as good as the original DV video. But not everyone's Mac can burn DVDsand all you need to burn a Video CD is a CD burner. Because Video CDs are so cheap to produce, they have a small cult following in North Americaand a huge following in Asia.

12.6.2.1 Where you can play your Video CDs

Commercial Video CDs play back in most recent DVD players and some laserdisc players. (As a bonus, they also play back on any modern computer, including the Mac.) Unfortunately, only certain DVD playersthose with a dual-wavelength laser can play back Video CDs that you've created. Most recent DVD players work well with homemade Video CDs, but many older models don't recognize them.

You can, and should, check the compatibility list at www.dvdrhelp.com/dvdplayers. But there's no sure way to know in advance whether a particular DVD player will play back your homemade Video CDs until you try it. Create a Video CD as described here, using the brand of blank discs that you intend to use, and then take the result to an electronics store to try it on the different DVD player models you're considering buying. (And if you already own a DVD player, insert your homemade CD and hope for the best.)

Figure 12-10. Top: If you own Toast, creating a video CD requires finding your reference movie, the .mov file shown here at bottom. Drag it into the Video panel of Toast .
Once you've loaded up Toast with movies, click the big red Record button. Toast then begins recording the video onto the CD. After about 20 minutes (depending on the speed of your burner), the deed is done. Your disc pops out of the burner like toast from a toaster. (Get it?) Now the CD is ready to play, either on your Mac or in a DVD player attached to your TV..

12.6.2.2 Making Video CDs with Toast

The easiest way to make a Video CD is to use Toast Titanium (www. roxio .com), the popular disc-burning software. (It's about $70 online.)

When your iMovie project is ready to go, save it and quit iMovie. Figure 12-10 provides all the instructions you need except for one tiny detail: finding the reference movie you're supposed to drag into the Toast window.

• If you've been editing a movie from an older version of iMovie (and it's therefore in a project folder as described on page 112), open that folder. The reference movie is the file whose name ends with .mov.

• If you've been editing a movie that began life in iMovie HD (or was "Save Project As "'ed out of iMovie HD), it's represented by a single icon on your hard drive. Control-click it. From the shortcut menu, choose Show Package Contents. Open the Shared iDVD folder. Once again, the reference movie is the file whose name ends with .mov (see Figure 12-10). (For more on iMovie files vs. iMovie folders, see page 112.)

Then proceed as shown in Figure 12-10.

Figure 12-11. Drag your QuickTime moviesfor example, the reference .mov document in each iMovie project folderinto the iVCD list. Click Convert, Image, and Burn, as each stage finishes. iVCD does the rest.
The program costs $30, but it's free for tryout purposes. (Until you pay, a watermark appears on your finished movies when the disc plays back.)

12.6.2.3 Making Video CDs with Shareware programs

Toast is a popular commercial program, but it's not the only game in town when it comes to burning Video CDs. The shareware world has nicely filled in the gaps for people who don't regularly drop $70 on a piece of utility software.

Figure 12-11, for example, illustrates iVCD (www.mireth.com), an attractive Mac OS X utility ($30) for turning QuickTime movies into Video CDs.