Teacher wants to put 30 short movies (20GB) on DV

Question

--->I need as simple and quick a DVD format as possible because I only have 2 days to get these out.
I've harvested 40 short movies (1-3 minutes in length) and want to put them on a DVD so my students can take their prized projects home before school lets out.
The movies are in .dv format so that I can reduce as much rendering as possible. The folder containing these movies totals 20 GB.
Once I have a master dvd, I'll use Toast 6 to duplicate these.
Thanks for any advise!

Answer 1

If I understand correctly, your movies are already on the hard drive, so you should be able to import the clips directly into iMovie (File->import).
Be warned that this will likely make copies of the files, taking up twice as much disk space.
Drag the clips to the movie area at the bottom of the screen in the order you want them.
Add a few chapters using the iDVD menu, for example "Movies A-D" and "Movies E-K" so that there are about 6 chapters total in your project.
Once your movie is how you want it, click the "send to iDVD" button. You cannot edit the iMovie movie and chapters after you send it to iDVD or you will encounter errors.
In iDVD choose a theme for your project (don't worry about filling the drop zones because you don't have much time to fool with this). You can spend hours and hours fooling with iDVD to get your project to look perfect -- because of your limited time, I'd recommend just doing the minimum and making sure your project will burn correctly to disk, period. If it burns right the first time in a reasonable amount of time, you can do it again and get more fancy. But chances are you'll encounter problems and all your editing time will be wasted.
In iDVD, if you have iDVD 4, double click the burn button in the lower right to burn to DVD. Make sure you have at least 20GB of scratch space available before burning a DVD. This takes several hours in iDVD 4, so it's best to do it before going to bed.
If you have iDVD 5, save it as a disk image so that if something goes wrong with the actual DVD you have the disk image. You'll want the image to make copies of your DVD anyway. iDVD 5 will seem to get stuck at the encoding audio stage -- don't quit or force quit out of it! Expect that it will take at least 3x the length of your movie on a good day, and it can take much longer. (In my worst experience it took 38 hours to do a 2 hr movie.)
Good luck!
--Beth