Using Multiple iMovie files in iDVD

Question

After how quickly I learned to use iMovie, I'm quite upset with how difficult it is to do what I want in iDVD. Here's the issue:
My parents went on a trip last year and took a lot of video (over 9 hours). Over the past few months, I've pared this down to just under 2 1/2 hours. My sister, who is a journalist, at one point suggested extracting all the audio to make it easier to edit. I'm not sure how much easier this made it, but I did it nonetheless. This made the file just over 50GB, and it was so large that the audio was choppy when I tried to play it as one big file. So I had to cut the movie into 12 files of 10-15 minutes each and finish the editing.
The point is that now I want to make a DVD out of this, but iDVD won't let me re-combine my 12 files into one big movie with separate chapters. It wants me to have 12 separate movies, each with 3-4 scenes (and even getting it to show all 12 "Play movie" and "Select Scenes" buttons on the menu page is difficult).
Basically what I want is to show iDVD that after it plays scene 4 from file 1, it should go to scene 1 of file 2, not back to the main menu. This should of course continue until all 12 files are done. I also want the "Scene Selection" menu to include all 40-50 scenes instead of having 12 different "Scene Selection" menus, but so far as I can tell, there's no way to add something so simple as a "next" button! If I could do this, then the main menu would have only two buttons (play movie and select scenes) instead of 24.
Is there any way to make iDVD understand that these 12 files are really one movie without having to combine them all together again in iMovie? Even doing that would require me to purchase an external hard drive, since the separate files are now 60GB and I only have 47GB free space... and I don't want to paste one file into another and then immediately delete it (which I know would allow me to combine all files without need of extra space) since this leaves me with no back up if something goes wrong during the pasting of these large 4-5GB files.
Or does someone know of a different, free, iMovie-compatible (so I don't have to remake all my chapter titles) program that lets me do what I want for myself?

Answer 1

I agree with everything that F Shippey said.
For future reference, I believe that your problem started when you extracted all of the audio from your video files. When you did that, you created several audio files. The number, not the size, of audio files likely is what caused that choppy playback that in turn moved you to cut up your movie into 12 files. That made a mess, because when you exported to iDVD you were stuck with 12 movies that you cannot not combine in iDVD. Of course, you had no way of knowing that extracting the audio into several clips would cause the choppiness. (The choppiness will be only on playback, not in your final product.) You would have had to have been reading the iMovie forum for a couple of months, where audio stutter and skipping have been frequently discussed. The next time around I would suggest that you leave the audio embedded in the video and not extract it. Embedded audio does not seem to cause stutter on playback. Also, in your iMovie preferences, set your playback quality to Standard (smoother) playback, and that might help.
If your sister or friend has an apple computer with some extra disk space, you could back up your movie to that computer using a firewire connection. But external drives are so inexpensive now, you might consider buying an Apple formatted external drive for yourself. (A windows formatted one will not work.) You can always use more storage space even after you are done with this project.
Sorry for all your trouble here. We've all gone through that frustration at one time or other as we learn our way through these movie programs. The good news is that you've done nothing that isn't correctible. Some folks lose their entire project, which increases the suicide rate considerably.