Hi - this is really basic stuff for all you guys out there - I'm hoping someone can spare a fraction of their knowledge and share it with a beginner!

Don't ask me why but i bought a new ibook in April 06 with no dvd-burning capabilities and no space to store video input. My partner has a powerbook g4, with a UJ-825 burner, that seems to have a maximum burning speed of 2x.

We've bought a maxtor turbo external hard drive, with the idea that i could edit movies on my imovie HD (6.0.3), keep them on the maxtor, then attach it to my partner's computer to burn onto dvd.

I've made my little masterpiece, and seemingly do successfully burn a dvd (on verbatim DVD-R up to 16 x). But then it doesn't play the movie.. it either says project files are missing, or it's locked. sometimes it tells me there are files that dont belong in the project, but they're all the project files! When I try to drag the project/movie from the hard drive folder directly onto my desktop it tells me there's no space- even though it's apparently 250KB and I apparently have 8GB free space in my computer. arrgh!

It shouldn't matter that the imovie versions are different should it? (I don't open imovie to burn the dvd)

Any help would be very much appreciated!

Where did you save you iDVD project file? If it is saved somewhere on your iBook, you need to copy it to the external HD and when you plug that into the other puter, paste that project file into the Finder and try to open that

As for free space, you should always have a minimum 25% free space (on both drives) for the encoding/burning

Victor,

Thanks for replying... it's been an imovie project, not an iDvd project... i just tried to drag it from the external hd into iDvd, but it says it is "unsupported file type; unknown format"...??? do you always have to go through idvd to make a dvd?

(I told you I'm a beginner!)

i'll take a stab at it...did you export your file first? you can't just drag an imovie file into iDVD. you have to compress your file out of the timeline. i'll try to walk you through it. since you're using two different versions of iMovie, your best bet is to convert to Quicktime .dv format. this should work in any version.

in iMovie:
pull down

>File
>Share
>Quicktime
Compress movie for: Full Quality

When the "Save" window comes up, be sure to pay attention to "Where" and choose the right destination.

Go to your destination (saving to Desktop is efficient but also chews up RAM memory, if your desktop becomes overly cluttered...). you should see a file title.dv

you should be able to move this file freely between computers via the hard drive, and it should drag and drop in iDVD or you can use the import command. best of luck. hope this helps.

Normally with matched versions of iMovie and iDVD, you don't have to export out to Quicktime to get your project into iMovie. You can either "share to iDVD" or drag the iMovie project straight into iDVD. But I know iMovie 6 projects won't work with iDVD 5. Here are your options:

1) the exporting out to Quicktime procedure should work fine, but you won't have any chapter markers.

2) If your iBook has iDVD 6 installed on it (even without a DVD burner), then you could use the "save as disc image" option from the File menu, and then burn that image to a DVD on your Powerbook.

3) I think your iMovie 6 project will open in iMovie 5 on your Powerbook. Then click on the "send to iDVD" button in the chapter markers pane (this button was relocated to a menu option for iMovie 6). I'm not sure why iMovie 5 and 6 can read the same files but iDVD 5 can't, but that was my experience.

Hope that helps.

-Terence

no, iMovie 6 won't open in iMovie 5. there is no backward compatability between these programs, only forward compatibility (e.g. 5 will open in 6, but not the other way around--that's how Mac makes their money...). that's why i suggested rendering into Quicktime instead of clicking it straight in iDVD, so that the project can be copied quickly and moved freely between the two programs.

no, iMovie 6 won't open in iMovie 5. there is no backward compatability between these programs, only forward compatibility (e.g. 5 will open in 6, but not the other way around--that's how Mac makes their money...). that's why i suggested rendering into Quicktime instead of clicking it straight in iDVD, so that the project can be copied quickly and moved freely between the two programs.

In general, full version software updates typically mean a significant change in file format such that the older version won't open files created or edited with the new version. However, we were so frustrated by some of the speed issues with iMovie 6 and iDVD 6 that we reverted back to version 5 several times and never had compatibility issues. We also had v5 and v6 running on two different computers for a while, and could switch projects back and forth between the two computers. We typically work with fairly simple movies, so it may be that including some iMovie 6 features will break backwards compatibility. Its been a while, so I checked the net and found a blog where someone reported the same thing:
danslagle.com/blog/?m=200601

It was rather nice of Apple to have engineered in backwards compatibility, although we couldn't get iMovie 6 and iDVD 5 to co-exist. Unfortunately, they did engineer in ways to make money -- slow down basic tasks so that critical functions no longer perform acceptably, thus providing motivation for hardware upgrades. Why things like full-screen playback, preview framerate during import, and iDVD audio rendering should be noticably slower in the v6 upgrades is beyond me. I'm sure Apple would say that it runs just fine on a dual-core, AGP graphics Intel iMac.

Mary -- As far as the options for burning your project, iDVD 6 may not have come pre-installed on your iBook, but it very well might be on the software installation discs. So pull out your iLife '06 install disc, do a custom install to see if you can install iDVD '06 on your iBook, and then you can render the project to a disc image on that computer, and burn the image with Disc Utility on your Powerbook. That's probably the most seemless option.

-Terence