Burning Quicktime Movies to DVD

Question

I have some movies that I am trying to combine into 1 long movie with songs/soundtrack. My questions are:
1. Should I be creating this final product in QuickTime or should I use another program, especially for the transitions and soundtrack?
2. If QuickTime is the solution, what is the best way to get it to a DVD that plays on home players? Is this where iDVD comes into play or should I use iMovie?
Yes I have searched, but have not found answers that specifically address what I am trying to do. Thank you in advance.
iMac   Mac OS X (10.4.4)   17inch/2Ghz/1GB Memory/160GB Harddrive

Answer 1

1. Should I be creating this final product in QuickTime or should I use another program, especially for the transitions and soundtrack?My personal opinion is that any editor application will do such things easier, faster, and probably better (especially if you are a novice) than working in QT Pro alone. While I have no qualms about using QT Pro for simple taks and respect QT Kirk's ability to turn out some spectacular results with QT alone, the integrated access and built-in capabilities of even iMovie would likely be hard to match by the average user -- especially if you want professional looking transitions; overlay the song audio with volume control, fade in/out, etc.; add titles, credits, special effects, or the like.
2. If QuickTime is the solution, what is the best way to get it to a DVD that plays on home players? Is this where iDVD comes into play or should I use iMovie?No matter how you end up editing the actual content, a DVD authoring application is generally required to handle the routine actions of converting the edited content to an MPEG-2 video format, "mux" the audio contentem, create a menu if desired, as well as, the actual files in proper containers for the consumer DVD player to read/play. iDVD, DVDSP, Toast, or a number of manual utilities can perform these tasks. All current versions of these applications will readily accept any fully compatible QT compression format but for the best quality, you would normally import the DV format in which most editors natively operate and in which your edits are saved.