[MacDV] Re: QUES: burning movie to DVD

[Mark M. Florida]

The long short answers:

1. A QuickTime movie will play on any Mac or Windows machine with the 
QuickTime software installed.  On Macs it's a given, since it's part of 
the system software.  On Windows, it's hit or miss, but if you include 
the installer on the CD, then there's no excuse.  But I don't know if 
there's a stand-alone QuickTime installer for Windows -- the last time 
I downloaded it, it was a "net" installer, where it downloaded the 
software as it was installing it -- hardly ideal for including on a 
CD-ROM.

2. Even though your exported movie has a Premiere icon, it's still a 
QuickTime movie -- the file has Premiere set as the "Creator" and the 
"File Type" is a Premiere movie.  There are a couple of ways to make it 
open in QuickTime Player by default on Macs (rather than Premiere).  
The easiest would be to open the exported Premiere movie in QuickTime 
Player and just do a "Save As..." and make sure the "Make movie 
self-contained" box is checked -- this would set the "Creator" to 
QuickTime Player, so that would be the default app for playing the 
movie.  You may need to upgrade to QuickTime Pro for this, but 
hopefully you've already upgraded to that.  ;-)  You could also find a 
utility (on Macupdate.com or otherwise) to change the file's creator 
code to QuickTime Player's -- but that's a whole other big hairy issue 
that I'd rather not get into.

3. As long as the file name has ".mov" at the end, Windows machines 
will handle it fine.  And if you burn a PC-only CD (NOT a Mac/PC 
hybrid) with the file named ".mov", the next time you put it in your 
Mac, it will "magically" have a standard QuickTime icon and open in 
QuickTime Player by default.  If you go that route, it's probably best 
to keep the file name under 8 characters -- the Windows machines won't 
have a problem with a longer file name, but the Mac will when reading a 
PC-only disc.

4. It's probably best to use an "older" QuickTime codec like Sorensen 
2.  It's been around a while, and even if someone only has QuickTime 4, 
they'll still be able to play the movie without needing to upgrade to 
QuickTime 6.  If you keep the bitrate to around 2400 kbit/sec 
(300K/sec), it should play fine in any CD-ROM drive and still look 
decent.

5. You could also use an MPEG-1 file and put it on a CD-ROM.  You'll 
just need some software to convert it to this format (like the old 
reliable M.Pack -- but good luck finding that).

6. You could install OS X on your computer (it will go up to 10.2.8), 
and get a copy of Toast Titanium 6 and make a DVD that way.  That would 
work, but it would be REALLY S-L-O-W.  But you said you're under major 
time constraints, so that may not be an option...

Anyway, that's my 12 cents.  Hope it helps some.

- Mark