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 upConnect 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!
5 comments:
This, friends, is one of the features that makes iDVD great. How incredibly useful! It's like we suddenly now have 50 direct video-to-DVD burners in Meyer! (Look around, there are Macs all around you.)
A few caveats to the process:
-If you're working on your own Mac, keep an eye on the total free space on your primary hard disk. If you don't have at least 10-20 GB of free space, I suspect the project could fail to complete.
-If you have large gaps in your tape, you may end up with an incomplete DVD. iDVD may automatically stop importing footage after 10 seconds of blank tape and move on to the DVD burning stage.
-If you actually want DVD menus, photo slideshows, etc, but also want iDVD to do most of the design work for you, try the Magic iDVD mode instead.
I helped by playing guinea pig :P
every time i use idvd one step dvd it fails to work i have tried and tried following all the instructions it just sits there and does nothing happens. I have done it the hard way by downloading first then burning to a disc via imovies can anyone help?
10 to 20 GB of free space on our primary hard drives? Well who has that? Is there a way to designate an external drive for iDVD Onetouch project creation?
I have 15Gig free on my hard disk and after 2.5 hours of waiting, my OneStep failed in the multiplexing stage. GRRRRR. So I would recommend the 20G. It was 60 min of video.
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