[MacDV] DVD pointers?

[Michael Winter]

On Jul 28, 2004, at 11:17 AM, Dorothy Hennings wrote:

> When I try to make a DVD from iMovie4, and the encoding is proceeding, 
> I note that my external HD is really working. Does this mean the DVD 
> is getting the data from the  external HD and not from the iMovie in 
> the viewer?

I'm not sure I'm following what you're saying. There are a couple 
factors involved (if I am understanding).

1) The iMovie application. This is the software that works on a video 
project and is usually stored in the Applications folder of the boot 
drive.

2) The iMovie project. This can be anywhere (often a big external 
drive) and contains the raw video footage (in the media folder inside 
the project folder), a project description file (ends in .iMovieProj) 
which is a description of all of your editing. And finally a reference 
movie, which ends in .mov and is essentially a list of pointers to the 
various stuff you have in the media folder, and represents the movie 
you have in the timeline you see in iMovie. Since this isn't the actual 
movie it is relatively small (a few hundred kbytes for most of my 
stuff.

Now if what you've done is copy this reference file to your internal 
drive, it is as you said, just a bunch of pointers to the real data 
still on your external drive. If you want this to be a stand-alone 
movie you need to export it from iMovie, probably as a DV stream. I 
don't remember what this does to chapter markers etc. though so be 
cautious with this approach.

-Mike