Posts Tagged ‘iDVD’

iDVD and Christmas in July

Sunday, July 27th, 2008

I’m in the middle of a passionate love-hate relationship with iLife. I’ve just finished a 25 minute movie using stills and video clips from our trip to visit family just before Christmas in 2007. It’s been great fun to “be” with them while engaging my creative/editor self.

Ornaments on Marie & Ross Bush\'s Tree

iPhoto can make a quick slide show for you with a backing track, but if you want titles and more control, you need to go to iMovie. Your photos must be in iPhoto, though! (The new iLife ’08) iMovie is a great editor for an amateur like myself. (I had played with the earlier iMovie and never quite finished a project: the Ken Burns effect with photos wasn’t as clear to use and the transitions had an odd workflow.) At over twenty minutes, i wanted my movie to have chapter markers (imagining my young nephews particularly wanting to repeat one section; my spouse’s siblings another).

If you want chapter markers, go to GarageBand.

I’m not sure i understand this division: there is definitely a great deal of audio editing in iMovie. I think i had more power to shape the volume levels in Garageband, but as someone merely mixing in existing clips, the compositional powers were not used. I’ll thank Magnatune for their reasonable licensing rates. While i looked at CCMixer and some of Archive.org’s media, i didn’t feel i could “share alike” in this project. Magnatune and Christine’s suggestions of particular works provided a great celebratory texture, despite my occasionally giving in to using some sound effects. From Garageband, to iDVD where the themes support chapter navigation and adding “extras.”

Moving between applications general meant producing the final version for that ap before going on to the next. While the applications claim to share a media library, i found it awkward to use. It’s clearly designed for the person who has all the disk space in the world, helped on by TimeMachine, no doubt. It wasn’t a barrier to my use, although i did have to use the command line to get produced movies out of the iMovie project and move them to my preferred storage location.

And now for credit and production notes, in progress:
(more…)