Creating Your DVDs

After you are done creating your menus, importing your items, customizing everything, and have checked it all over in the Preview window, it is time to create your DVD.

Project Info

Before you actually start the creation process, it is a good idea to check the available space on your DVD. To do this, bring up the Project Info by going to the menu bar and selecting Project >> Project Info…. You can use the Project Info window to change the:

• Name of your DVD
• Video mode
• Aspect ratio
• Encoding
• DVD type

Usually you are going to be using a Single-layer DVD and are going to want to choose Best Performance as the encoding option.

A really nice feature of the Project Info box is that it tells you how full your DVD is and how the encoding will affect the quality of your project. If the white arrow on the Capacity line moves into yellow, orange, or red, then the quality of your video will not be as good. To fix this, change the encoding type from Best Performance to High Quality or even Professional Quality. If you are still in the orange or red after changing the encoding to professional quality, you should remove some items from your DVD.

Burn Your DVD

Once you have checked the Project Info, you can burn your DVD by either clicking on the BURN icon to the right of the PREVIEW icon, or by going to the menu bar and selecting File >> Burn…. Insert a recordable DVD into your DVD drive when iDVD asks you to. iDVD will start to burn your project onto the disc. Be warned that this process can take a very long time. When your DVD is done burning, your computer will eject the disc.

Disk Image

If you want to burn multiple copies of your DVD, it is often better to create a disc image to burn from. Go to the menu bar and selecting File >> Save as Disc Image…. Choose the location to save your disc image and click Save. iDVD will go through the same long process as it does when burning a DVD.

After your disc image has been saved you can use Apple's Disk Utility to burn as many copies of your DVD as you want. It will create them much faster than burning each one from iDVD.

To burn a disk from Disk Utility:

1. Open the Disk Utility application (it's in the Utilities folder, which is in the Applications folder).
2. Open your Disc Image by going to File >> Open Disk Image.
3. Select your Disc Image that you created in window and click Open. The Disc Image will show up in the left side menu.
4. Click on the top level of the Disc Image.
5. Click Burn.
6. Insert a recordable DVD into your DVD drive when it asks you to and follow any prompts that it brings up.
7. Wait for the DVD to burn (this should take much less time than it took to create the disk image in the first place).

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