Is there a way to exort an iDVD project back to iMovie?

Question

Hi.
I need some help please!
I made a training video a couple of years ago for a friend's company. She now would like to have additional copies burned. The problem is I saved the dvd project on my hard drive, but I deleted the imovie project.
Of course, this time she needs to change her company logo in the intro (which would require me to remove the first 5 seconds of the original movie)... and I'm unable to edit it. Can I extract the movie some how? or if save it as an "archive" would I then be able to move it to iMovie?
I would really appreciate feedback!

Answer 1

The answer depends on what you have available.
The best method is to locate the movie footage used in the original iMovie and reimport that into another iMovie project and create a new iDVD project with it. There will be no loss of quality.
Just so you know, saving your iDVD project is nearly useless without saving the movie that is in it. An iDVD project is not self-contained. Think of it as a file that holds aliases. When you create an iDVD project, the iMovie used is referenced, not physically moved into the iDVD project. Same for any photos or audio files used. It is unlike an iMovie project (at least version 6) where the movies, photos and audios ARE moved into the iMovie project. When iDVD burns a project, it collects the referenced files for the burn, but does not keep them permanently in its project. So, if you have saved any iDVD projects, and you did NOT save the media used, all you have is the 'shell' of the iDVD project. If you open it, iDVD will not be able to locate the missing media and will alert you that it cannot find the proper files.
If this is the case, and you no longer have the original movie footage, or you don't want to have to re-edit it, you will need to get one of the burned DVD disks, and extract the movie from it.
Any type of extraction of compressed data will result in some loss of quality because the data must be decompressed and then recompressed again for another DVD.
If you don't have one of the DVDs you previously burned for this project, you will not be able to create another iDVD project from the first one, and without the original movie footage, you are out of luck.
If you do have one of the old DVDs, you can use a variety of software to extract out the video: Handbrake, Ripit, or Streamclip. I have not looked into Handbrake, but many use it and think it works well. Ripit will extract the video into format for iMovie....seems easy enough as reviewed in MacWorld recently. Others use Streamclip.
If you think that you will need to create more DVDs of this project, or if you would like to save your complete iDVD projects in the future so you can burn more DVDs, you should do a 'Save as Disk Image' from within the iDVD project for each one. This process looks exactly like the burning process, with the same encoding and taking the same length of time to complete, but the end result is a disk image file, not a burned DVD disk.
The advantages of having a disk image file are several:
First, it is self-contained, with all the media data encoded in it. So now, you CAN safely delete both the original iDVD project and its original iMovie without losing the ability to burn disks in the future.
Another advantage is that it can be a backup for all your burned DVD disks. What if a disk is damaged/breaks/melts/ etc.? With a disk image file, you just burn another one.
Disk image files save drive space because they are smaller than the combination iDVD project /iMovie projects used to create them.
You never need to worry about renaming, moving, deleting or changing any of the media used in any of your projects causing iDVD to lose connection with them. All the media encoding is in the disk image file.
And, another advantage is that you can burn DVDs from the disk image file, using Disk Utility or Toast, getting more consistent burns, since you are not depending on iDVD to pull in the media.
Here are some helps for creating a disk image in iDVD:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iDVD/7.0/en/6733.html
Burning from a disk image using Disk Utility:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2087?viewlocale=en_US
If you have some previously burned DVD disks and you think you would like to have had disk images for them, you can create a disk image file from a burned DVD disk.
Here are instructions for that:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2059?viewlocale=en_US