iMovie, GarageBand and iDVD « The Beginning is the End

iMovie, GarageBand and iDVD

Last month the preschool school that I volunteer some of my time to had a graduation, and I was asked to put together some slides for the graduation. The parents also wanted a DVD of the show.

I have a mac and iLife came with it so I decided to use iMovie to generate a movie for quicktime. This process went pretty painlessly in iMovie 08. Add some photos, create transitions and add a music track, and save the movie.

The graduation went well and there was someone video tapping it. I wanted to put together the video tape and the slides for the dvd. I also wanted to add some photos of the graduation. All of this isn’t that hard for iDVD, but I wanted the video portion to have chapters.

I initially checked iMovie and found that it didn’t have chapters any more. Apple in their wisdom decided to remove features from iMovie because apparently dvds are an old technology. Anyway, after searching around some more I found that you can import the movie into garageband and add chapters there, and then export that to idvd. The basic steps for this were:

In iMovie once you have a movie done, click Share/Media Browser. Pick the resolution you want and click ok.
In GarageBand click file new and select “Create New Podcast Episode”. Pick a name and location, and click ok
In the media browser pane,find the movie and drag it to the area that says “Drag Apple Loops here.” Click “Replace” on the dialog box that comes up.
Now scrub the video for locations to place chapters. Press ‘p’ to place a chapter marker.
Once all chapters have been added, Click “Share/Export Movie to Disk”. This will save the movie with chapters.
Now open iDVD create and create a new project (or open an existing one)
On the main page, select “File/Import -> Video” Browse to the location of the saved movie and click import. This will create a “Play Movie” button and a “Scene Selection” Button.

Now save and burn some dvds.

Of course I went through a few more iterations than this to get things working. The tricky part was getting the garageband movie into iDVD. I did some googling and, the first method I found said to click on “Share/Send Movie to iDVD” . That actually worked until I needed to reopen iDVD. Then it complained about not finding “tmpmov.mov”, and things came to a crashing halt.

Searching some more indicated that I needed to share the garageband movie again, but that didn’t work because it required updating information in iDVD and that somehow messed up the chapter markers. Actually it was more complicated than that, but still wasn’t something that worked.

Eventually I tried the “Export Movie and Disk”, and tada, all was well in the universe.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 9:50 pm and is filed under Art, Mac, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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