I want to put my movie on DVD!

Question

I made a great slideshow in iphoto of a recent trip to the North woods and wanted to transfer (not archive) it to DVD but could not find a command to do so. Then I exported it to iDVD and played with that for a while, but found it too confusing, even following step by step with the tutorial open. After that, I had much better success with imovie HD, and improved the slideshow immensely, but still no way that I could find to export it to DVD.
Am I missing something obvious? Is the technology just not ready for this task? Or is this functionality deliberately with held?

Answer 1

Can you offer any insight as to why iMovie HD does not include the functionality to export directly to DVD?
There are several reasons iMovie doesn't do it, I suppose. The primary reason is that burning a DVD is not a simple thing. It requires a specialized application that lets us design the DVD we want, then do all the grunt work required to organize the data so a DVD player can play the DVD.
1. The slideshow movie — and whatever other content you include on the DVD — must use a file format the DVD player can understand. The files must be organized in the way the player understands.
2. All the content must be converted to MPEG-2 format, the only format DVD players understand.
3. DVD players are not smart machines. They cannot play QuickTime movies, for example, the data format iMovie uses. They can't understand any data but what follows a precise formula. They wouldn't know an iMovie project from your shoe.
4. The user expects there to be a menu screen when the DVD is done playing. Although iDVD lets us bypass that menu screen when the DVD is inserted, there must be some place to go when the movie is done.
iDVD allows us to choose a very simple menu screen or a very complex one, or even create our own. It can be anything you want.
If you choose the theme "Your Photo Here" from the "Old Themes" group of themes, for example, you can use your own photo as the menu screen. If you want simple, use an image of grey as the menu background, or whatever color you prefer.
5. iDVD offers a full range of DVD-planning options, a feature that would just complicate things if part of iMovie.
For example, I'm pretty sure your statement that iDVD "won't play other
music after sending the slideshow to iDVD," is wrong. Y
iDVD does not add its own music to an iMovie slideshow. That music ONLY comes from your iMovie project.
When you send your iMovie project to iDVD, iMovie sends it the location of a movie iMovie stores inside your project. The movie is updated each time you save your iMovie project. That movie also contains other information iDVD needs, such as the DVD chapter information you've configured in iMovie.
(To look inside the project, Control-click on the project in the Finder and choose "Show Package Contents" from the popUp menu. The movie for iDVD is inside the Shared Movies folder.)
If you've been experimenting with different slideshows in iDVD it's entirely possible you are inadvertently playing a different slideshow, perhaps one you created in iDVD itself, which iDVD DOES let you assign music to.
Remember, the iMovie slideshow isn't an actual iDVD slideshow. To iDVD, it's just a movie like any other movie, and goes in the movie area of iDVD, not the slideshow area.
It's also possible you've been editing the iMovie project after sending it to iDVD.
If iDVD is confused about the content of your slideshow movie, remove it with the menu command Advanced > Delete Encoded Assets. And remove the movie from the menu screen of iDVD and start over.
Although helpful, Help is never enough. I suggest David Pogue's book "iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual". Available at the usual places.
If I've misunderstood the problem and all you want to do is publish your iMovie project as a QuickTime movie, not a TV-playable DVD, then iDVD is not required. You can simply export the iMovie project to whatever QuickTime movie format you want and use the Finder to burn that file onto a DVD. With this approach, the movie is a computer file like any other computer file. The user won't be able to play it with a DVD player, of course, but he/she can play it on any computer that has the current version of QuickTime software installed. There will be no startup screen, of course.
iLife is a complex web of functionality. There's no clear overview of how all the iLife tools fit together. It's hard to get your head around. The iLife apps all use QuickTime, the system software that offers tons of functionality. Essentially, each iLife application — each tool — lets us use QuickTime to capture, edit and organize images, sound files and video. Then pass it around to other tools designed to do certain tasks, like burn a DVD. (The act of adding your own image to a DVD menu screen is essentially the same as adding an image to your iMovie project, isn't it. QuickTime at work. Different purpose. Same work. Both end up as an MPEG-2 file that the brain-dead DVD player can understand.)
Fortunately, there's no need to understand that underlying QuickTime architecture, but it helps to understand how the tools work together. Making mistakes is how many of us figure it out. If you're not doing that, you're the rare exception.
Karl