Section 15.7. Phase 5: Burning Your DVD


15.7. Phase 5: Burning Your DVD

Once your menu screens are looking good, you're almost ready to burn the DVD. Before you go using up a blank disc, however, you should test it to make sure that it works on the virtual DVD player known as the Macintosh screen.

15.7.1. Previewing Your Project

iDVD's Play button ( ) lets you test your menu system to avoid unpleasant surprises . When you click it, iDVD enters Preview mode, which simulates how your DVD works on a standalone set-top DVD player. You even get a simulated remote control to help you navigate through your DVD's menus , movies, and so on, as shown in Figure 15-15.

To return to iDVD's edit mode, click Exit or Stop (the square).


Tip: Instead of using the arrow buttons on the remote to highlight and click screen buttons , just use your mouse. You'll find it's not only less clumsy, but also a decent indication of how your DVD will play back on computers that can play DVDs.

15.7.2. Maximum DVD Playback Time

When a DVD- burning program goes to work, it faces an important decision. Given that a blank single-layer DVD contains a limited amount of space (4.7 GB or so), how much picture-quality data can it afford to devote to each frame of video?

iDVD offers two approaches. You can choose the one you prefer by choosing iDVD Preferences and clicking the Projects button. Your options:

  • Best Performance . Your video will look fantastic, and your Mac will burn the disc relatively quickly. On the downside, the DVD you burn this way can contain a maximum of 60 or 74 minutes of video for standard DVDs. (You get about 120 minutes for dual layer DVDs.)

    The Best Performance option thinks like this: "Since I don't have to fit very much video on this disc, then heyI can devote the maximum amount of data to each frame of video, for great quality. But it's a fixed amount. Not having to calculate how much data to allot to each frame will save me time and make the burning process go quickly."

    Figure 15-15. To "click" your onscreen buttons, use the arrows on the remote to highlight the one you want, and then click the Enter button in the middle of the remote. Click the or buttons to skip back or forward by one chapter, or hold them down to rewind or fast-forward.
  • Best Quality . This option lets a standard DVD hold up to about 120 minutes of video. The tradeoff : It takes a lot longer to burn your DVD, as the program performs quite a bit of analysis before burning.

    This option makes iDVD think, "I'm going to use every micron of space on this blank DVD. I'm going to analyze the amount of video, and divide it into the amount of space available on the DVD. The amount of data used to describe an individual frame of video will vary from project to project, and it will take me a lot longer to burn the DVD because I'm going to have to do so much analysis. But at least my human will get two hours of great-looking video per disc."

In any case, a longer-playing disc uses a lower bit rate that is, it uses less data to describe the video, which allows iDVD to fit more information on the same size disc. For example, 60-minute iDVD projects depict video using 8 megabits (Mbps) per second; 90-minute projects use 5 Mbps; 120-minute discs use 4 Mbps.


Note: If your Mac can burn dual-layer DVDs, and you've bought dual- layer blanks, you can burn twice as much video per discor the same amount at higher quality.

15.7.3. One Last Techie Look

Part of iDVD's job is to encode (convert) your movies, music, and pictures into the MPEG-2 format required by standard DVDs. It's actually a big, hairy job, one that Apple and iDVD try to hide from you, for fear of freaking you out.

Nonetheless, if you inspect what's going on with your encoding before burning the disc, you'll be a better person for it.

To do so, open the Info Window (choose Project Project Info, or press -I). The Info dialog box appears, showing you how close you are to filling up the DVD with your movies, menus, and other elements. Proceed as described in Figure 15-16.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Hollywood, DVD Length, and You

The Hollywood DVDs I rent from Netflix are sometimes much more than two hours long. How come I'm limited to 120 minutes in iDVD ?

Most Hollywood DVDs use dual-layer technologydiscs whose tiny grooves actually have two layers , a shallow one and a deeper one, each recorded with video data. The extra layer increases the DVD's capacity from 4.37 gigabytes to nearly 8.

When you watch one of these movies, you may even be able to spot the moment when the DVD player's laser jumps from one layer to the other. You'll see the movie pause for an instant during playback, always at the same place in the movie.

Amazingly, iDVD 6 can burn dual-layer discs, tooif your Mac has a DVD burner capable of burning dual-layer DVDs and you've bought dual-layer blank discs to use in it. (How do you know if your Mac has one of these super-burners? Open your Applications Utilities folder and double-click System Profiler. In the Hardware category, click Disc Burning and inspect the information that appears.)

Hollywood uses another trick, too: variable bit-rate (VBR) encoding. When creating a DVD movie for commercial distribution, professional DVD authors use advanced software to analyze each piece of the movie, using more or less data to describe each frame depending on how much action is visible. The disc stores the same amount of data as a constant bit-rate recording like the ones iDVD makes, but conserves data for when the video needs it the most.

The trouble is, VBR encoding takes a very long time. The software often requires several passes through the whole movie to analyze it and optimize the data.

Still, in iDVD 6, Apple adopted the VBR encoding scheme that it had originally offered only in its expensive, professional DVD Studio Pro software. That's why iDVD productions look so goodand take so long to encode before burning.

(Higher bit rates generally provide clearer and more accurate picture reproduction than lower bit rates, especially in action scenes. iDVD's " lowest -quality" mode4 Mbpsis still above the minimum bit rate needed for clear video.)



Tip: If iDVD doesn't display a check mark next to each item in the list, and yet it doesn't seem to be processing them automatically, make sure you've turned on background compression. Choose iDVD Preferences, click the Projects button, and turn on "Enable background encoding."The only time you'd want to turn off background encoding is when you discover that it's slowing down your Mac as you work.
Figure 15-16. This convenient Info panel offers one-stop shopping for all the details of your DVD. It tells you how much video is on the disc, how much of the DVD you're going to fill, which aspect ratio it will have, what kind of DVD (single- or duallayer) it's designed for, and so on.
Before you burn a disc, confirm that a check mark appears next to each asset (that is, each "picture, movie, soundtrack, or what have you"). And here's a tip: Click the text to the right of the meter to switch the readout from gigabytes to minutes of video.

15.7.4. Burning Your Project

When you've finished editing your disc and testing it thoroughly, it's time to proceed with your burn. This is the moment you've been waiting for.

  1. Choose File Save Project, or press -S .

    This might be a good opportunity to confirm that your hard drive has some free space, too. It needs about 10 gigabytes free.

  2. Click the Burn button twice .

    See Figure 15-17.

  3. Insert a blank DVD when the Mac asks for it .

    Be sure you're using the correct kind of disc for your DVD burner. For example, don't attempt to burn 1x or 2x blanks at 4x speed. Recent Macs can burn either DVDR or DVD+R blanks (note the minus and the plus, denoting two incompatible blank DVD formats), as well as their rerecordable, more expensiveRW and +RW counterparts.

    And then, of course, make sure you're using single-or dual-layer blanks, as appropriate.

    Figure 15-17. The first click on the gray, closed Burn button "opens" it, revealing a throbbing yellow-and-black button. The second click begins the encoding and burning process, which can take hours.
  4. Wait .

    It can take iDVD a very long time to process all of your audio, video, and photos, encoding them into the proper format for a DVD. Your wait time depends on how complex your project is and how fast your Mac is.

    Apple says that you should allow two or three minutes of processing per minute of video in your movie, but burning times vary significantly. The bottom line is that this period is usually measured in hours, not minutes.

    Eventually, though, a freshly burned DVD pops out of your drive.


Note: After your new DVD pops out, a message says, "Your disc has been created. If you want to create another DVD, insert another disc now." Sure enough, if you want to spin out multiple copies of your project, you can insert another blank DVD right then, so that iDVD can record it without having to repeat all that time-consuming encoding.Otherwise, click Done.



iMovie 6 & iDVD
iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual
ISBN: B003R4ZK42
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 203
Authors: David Pogue

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