My First iDVD With iMovie And A Macbook

Well just before I was to leave for work the VP of Sales and Marketing came over to ask me if I knew two particular people. I said yes and he said, “Great! They’re coming over and have a favour to ask for you!”. Ok now I’m thinking this is computer related, I was close.

What they wanted was for me to take video of their little Panasonic MiniDV camcorder and produce a DVD from it that they could use for a birthday. Well the birthday happens to be our CEO’s wife’s birthday and they had some special video footage.  Guess when they needed it done by? The next day!

So what was the video about? Well it seems they went to all the places where the birthday girl shops and asked people to wish her a happy birthday so that they could surprise her with it. But that wasn’t what worried me, what worried me was which computer in our building will have a Firewire port as well as software to do what they want me to do? I looked at the Sony Vaio that one of our Accountants uses, but she wasn’t leaving for another hour and I didn’t want to spend all day at the office (I’ve already been at work for 10hrs).

Then it dawned on me, we have an Apple Macbook for testing our utilities in a Macintosh environment! Apple created the Firewire port and Apple’s are preloaded with all great and simple to use multimedia software! Yay me!

Now I have never used iDVD or iMovie but I have heard how easy it is to make simple home videos and convert them to DVDs so I just jumped into the middle of it all.

I hooked up the camcorder to the Macbook and clicked on ‘Import’ in iMovie. It did its own thing and queued up the video clips and put them nicely into a timeline for me. Sure I could of added transitions and whatknot to make it more spectacular but I’m not being paid and I probably won’t get credit for it either.

Now I was thinking; how do I create a DVD? Well I could ‘Share’ the project with iDVD and see what it comes up with. Now I haven’t really used a Macintosh since my LCIII (68k) but MacOS X isn’t really hard to use (btw I still love Mac’s file system over Windows) and all I had to do in iDVD was select a theme, have it auto-loaded the menu clips and then burn.

Burning; this is where my problem was. For some reason no matter what blank DVD media I placed into the Macbook it would always reject it and spit it back out. To test if this machine had a DVD-ROM at least I loaded up Borat. Borat started so I would assume that this Macbook does not have a DVD-Burner included, which is a shame. So I burnt the DVD to an image file and continued on.

Well to make a long story short…er. I transferred the image (133Mb) over to my PC and burnt the image using DVD Decryptor and now I have a perfectly good DVD that they can show all their friends what work they did.  

Perhaps some of the Mac users out there can confirm my suspissions of the Macbook I’ve been using doesn’t do DVD burning and that is why it would spit them out.