Exporting to Media Browser & Chapters etc

Question

Hi People,
I just finished editing my wedding video in iMovie 08 and everything looks great. I need to add chapters so that my relatives can skip to different locations in the movie. I read that the only way to add chapters is to add it to the media browser and then send it into garage band.....create the chapters there and then export it to iDVD. I tried this with a short test movie with only about 2 minutes of footage and it works fine. When I try to add my wedding video to the media browser it starts off and says it will take about 350 minutes to export...it exports for a few hours and then fails with an error (I think the error code might have been -43 but cant remember..and refers to startup disk, I think being too full..)
My wedding video is huge.. being 3 hours the raw files were about 50 or 60 gig. I have done all of my editing from an external drive that has about 70 gig free and ideally this is where I would want to export the finished movie to. I do not have more than about 6gb left on my MacBook Pro...
1: Is there a way to make chapters without using media browser?
2: If media browser is the only option for chapters how can I get media browser to use the external drive when it is exporting.
Thanks - Justin

Answer 1

1: Is there a way to make chapters without using media browser?
Yes. Garageband should be able to chapter any QT compatible video you can bring into it whether brought in via the Media Browser, the Finder, or "drag 'n dropped" from the desktop. Further, the Media Browser employs H.264/AAC compression as the export default, so while the files are small, it can take hours to compress very long files. You could, for instance, export your project to your hard drive via the "Using QT" export option to a less compressed format such as DV or AIC to your 70 GBs space with an AIC/Linear PCM probably requiring 30 plus GBs or a DV taking closer to 40 and I would normally expect this export to be quicker than H.264/AAC. However, if you still prefer the H.264/AAC built-in preset, use the "Export Movie..." option to select the same size file using the same Media Browser settings, but place the file on your external drive where you want it.
2: If media browser is the only option for chapters how can I get media browser to use the external drive when it is exporting.
Media Browser files are stored in a folder within a project's "package." Since these files are stored on the start-up drive by default and there is no user preference to relocate them, I would not normally recommend the average user attempt to set up the console workaround described elsewhere in this forum when so many other easier solutions are open to you in this case.
ADDITION NOTES: Don't know if you are burning to dual-layer device or not. (I.e., iDVD will not write a single-layer 3-hour DVD.) If not, you will need to consider burning you DVD content in two parts or using an alternate allowing longer burns and use of AC3 audio rather than iDVD's PCM.