Exporting a Movie from iMovie to DVD

If your iMovie movie is less than 90 minutes long, you can put it on a DVD disk that can be played in most standard DVD players. You will need to supply a blank DVD-R disk, which can be purchased at many local retail outlets.

To create a DVD of your movie created in iMovie, first make sure you have everything the way you want it in iMovie, including chapter markers. Save your iMovie project.

Next, consult with an instructional technologist to be sure that the computer power and screensaver settings are appropriate for burning a DVD. Some settings can only be changed while logged into an administrative account.

Launch iMovie, if necessary, and click the iDVD button to switch to the iDVD pane.

In the iDVD pane of iMovie, click Create iDVD Project to create a project and launch iDVD.

When iDVD has launched, you can safely close iMovie. Your movie will open in iDVD with a default theme for your DVD menu. Click the Customize button to see the available themes.

Scroll through the themes in the Customize window. To select a theme, simply click on it.

You can change any text that is displayed by clicking to select it and then typing your desired text. Many themes have one or more "drop zones" where you can display a photo or a movie. To place a movie or a photo in a drop zone, simply drag the movie or photo from the finder into the drop area.

A movie placed in one of these drop zones will loop through the first 30 seconds of the movie while the DVD menu is active if the Motion button is selected (green) before you begin to burn the DVD.

When you have everything set the way you want the DVD menu to look, you are almost ready to burn the DVD. Before you begin to burn you should let iDVD finish encoding your movie files. To check on the status of the encoding, open the Customize window and click the Status button at the top of the window. You should see a list of the Assets in your project and a blue bar indicating the encoding progress.

For best results, wait until the Status reports Done before beginning to burn your DVD. Typically it will take 2 -3 minutes to encode each minute of video.

Save your project once your assets have finished encoding. If you have not already turned off the screensaver, do so now, and double check that other energy saving settings are set to Never. Your Instructional Technologist can help you with these settings.

You are now ready to burn your DVD. Select File > Burn DVD... from the iDVD menu.

You will be prompted to insert a blank DVD-R.

It may take about an hour to burn the DVD, depending on the length of your movie. When it is finished, you will be asked if you would like to burn another DVD of the same movie. A second copy of the movie burned immediately after the first will burn more quickly, as the encoding of the movie and the theme has already been done.

 

 

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