Section 18.5. Archiving Your Project

18.5. 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.

POWER USERS' CLINIC
Hacking iDVD

As you've probably discovered , the iDVD program icon isn't really an application icon at allit's a Mac OS X package (Section 4.13). Because Mac OS X programs are often built as packages in this way, they give you a great opportunity to hack the program itselfto change its look, reassign its keystrokes, and so on.

This is a rush, an illicit -feeling power trip, but it doesn't actually hurt anything. As long as you've got your original iLife DVD on hand, so that you can install a fresh, unmodified copy of iDVD if necessary, you can do whatever you want to a copy and still sleep peacefully at night.

You can find step-by-step instructions for a sample Franken iDVD project on this book's "Missing CD" page at www.missingmanuals.com. It walks you through the process of adding a Mute button to the main iDVD screen, so you can shut up the music momentarily without stopping the animation.

In early 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 packs a solution into iDVD 6. 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.

1. Save your project .

   If you forget this step, iDVD will remind you.

2. Choose File Archive Project .

   The Save As panel shown in Figure 18-5 appears.

   Figure 18-5. 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.

   

3. 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 .

   "Include encoded files" is the more important option, 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.

4. 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 (Section 4.13). Inside its Contents Resources folder, new folders called Assets and Themes store the extra archived elements (Figure 18-6).

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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 you'll pay for this gesture in re-encoding time when you're ready to burn your discs.

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Figure 18-6. 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.

18.5.1.

18.5.1.1. 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, transfer it using iChat, 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.