Final Cut Express and DVD burning... Be gentle.
 

Okay, I'm new to Macs, Final Cut and burning DVDs. I have searched the forum and am sure that the question has been asked but can't find it but...

Is there an easier way to burn a DVD from a FCE project than going the FCE-iMovie-iDVD route? Especially if you want a DVD without the bells, whistles and menues which iDVD seems to force on you.

a.) You're going from FCE to iMovie, then to iDVD? You don't need iMovie.

b.) Toast will burn no-frills DVDs.

If you're new to all this, I recommend Tom Wolsky's books on FCE.

I've got the Editing Workshop but, before I buy more software, my question was (with HD projects) whether there's a way to go direct from FCE to iDVD without using iMovie?

What I've done on my last couple of projects is to export a quicktime movie self contained from FC, and then start a new idvd project and just add that exported QT file to your idvd project.

Pretty simple. I've only done this with short 10 minute or so projects, but I'm guessing that idvd would "compress" the QT to fit the dvd.

Anyone else?

Jonathan

Thanks Jonathan I'll give that a try over the weekend.

Here is a post I made in a similar thread last month that includes a little bit of detail on the process (so as to avoid having to use iMovie as your intermediary. (process begins with the 5th paragraph)

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/1137689-post7.html

If you want to make a DVD without all the bells and whistles that iDVD presents by default, just select the simplest theme you can choose (or even use the theme menu options to download older Apple sourced themes from older versions of iDVD - which makes them available in the menu options....some nice simple ones there), or design your own custom theme to be extra plain and simple. Bring up the info HUD (heads up display - or content management pane) and replace theme drop-well with a single color image pane or a simple logo backdrop or whatever you create in an image editor. Placing it into the menu image drop-well will make it your menu backdrop. Then just follow the rest of the steps to drag your video into the menu and author your DVD.

Hope this helps.

-Jon

Jon, you are a darling (in a purely platonic way) I didn't find that in my forum search. Thanks also for the info on how to get a puritanical dvd menu.

Now if I could only import friggin' AVCHD as 1080 x 14....