Create a Video DVD in (Nearly) One Step!

Sometimes, you just want to take your miniDV camcorder footage and burn a video DVD with no editing, no flashy menus nor titles nor transitions - just the footage. The "OneStep DVD" mode in iDVD 6 let's you do just that. You'll be amazed how simple this really is:

Step 1: Get what you need
Okay, we assume you've already recorded your movie onto a miniDV tape, otherwise, what are you waiting for? You'll also need a miniDV camcorder, a 4-pin-to-6-pin (or Large-to-Small) FireWire Cable, a blank DVD-R disc, and a Mac with iDVD 6 (a nutritious part of Apple iLife 06) installed.

Step 2: Hook it up
Connect your camcorder to the Mac using the FireWire cable. Turn on your camcorder to VCR or Playback mode.

Step 3: OneStep
Open the iDVD application. If a white project panel opens up, click the large OneStep DVD button. If iDVD automatically opens up an existing project, just click File > OneStep DVD to start a new project.

At this point, if you have not already inserted a blank DVD into the Mac's DVD drive, you will be prompted to insert one. Go ahead and do so. If your camcorder isn't detected, go ahead and repeat Step 2.

Step 4: Do nothing
If you followed all of the steps above, you should now be simply waiting for iDVD to rewind the tape, import the footage from it, and burn it on to the blank DVD. This might take a while if you've got a lot of video. As a general rule of thumb, it requires at least 2-3 times the length of your video to complete the process. (i.e. a 1-hour tape should take slightly less than 3 hours to fully process from tape to DVD.) Watching iDVD process your video is also somewhat hypnotic if you're a fan of progress bars, and I wouldn't recommend against it.

Step 5: And you're done (maybe)!
Once iDVD is finished burning a copy of the disc for you, it will eject the DVD and display a little message informing you of this grand technological achievement. But don't hit the Done button so quickly. If you wish to make another copy of the same movie, this is your golden moment, because you can do so by inserting another blank DVD. Once you hit Done, iDVD will delete the temporary project it has created, and you will have to go through the entire tape-importing procedure again if you want another copy (or you'll have to look for a tutorial on how to efficiently copy homemade video DVDs).


One Last Note of Great Usefulness
Now, what if you simply wanted to make a menuless DVD out of a random video or an iMovie project instead of from camcorder footage? iDVD actually has another trick hidden up its sleeve. If you want to do this, just open up a new iDVD project, and choose File > OneStep DVD from Movie.... You will be prompted for a movie file (either an iMovie project or any video that can be played in QuickTime). Once you insert a blank DVD, away it goes! That was easy, wasn't it?

Happy Burning!

How to Download YouTube Videos

As winter quarter draws to an end in the academic frenzy known as Dead Week, many students have been working on final presentations in the Multimedia Studio. Not surprisingly, YouTube has become a popular source of content for presentations. Rather than relying on a stable wireless connection in the classroom and waiting for the video to stream or, even worse, getting a "Video has been removed by user" or "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Fuji Television Network, Inc." message, here are some tips! (Thanks to James and Vincent for letting me know this could be done!)

A Google search for "download youtube" will return a multitude of results. Most sites prompt the user to paste in the URL of the YouTube video, e.g. "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHzdsFiBbFc" and will either download the video or return the URL at which the video can be downloaded.

The downloaded video will be in FLV format (You may have to rename the file with an "FLV" extension), which is playable using VLC and other media players. Downloaded videos are generally 320 by 240 pixels.

Here are screenshots of some of the sites which worked:

Javimoya.com has a download tool which also supports downloading from GoogleVideo, Dailymotion, and other sites. Other than occasional network error messages, the site worked reliably.



Qoogle Video and TechCrunch have simple interfaces and consistent performance.




As for converting FLV files to more widely playable formats, a Google search for "convert flv" will direct you to programs for download, not all of them free. Vixy.net offers a download-free option; users simply enter a YouTube link and download directly to MOV (QuickTime-compatible), AVI (Windows Media Player-compatible), MP4 (iPod-compatible), and MP3 (audio only).



As a note, the site occasionally gave me a busy server error, but retrying eventually worked with all the YouTube videos I tested. A 2-min video took me approximately 4 min to convert to AVI or MOV. While the MOV files seem to play on any computer with QuickTime installed, not all computers have the codecs necessary to play the AVI files. However, the computers in our Multimedia Studio supported playback in Powerpoint for both the AVI and MOV files -- it can be done!

That's all for today. In other news, tomorrow is a dual holiday day!! Both Pi Day and White Day fall on March 14.