[MacDV] archiving DV w/iMovie 3 and iDVD 3

[Mark M. Florida]

Just wanted to say that's a great idea -- to use a DVD as an easily 
searchable archive of a tape.  I can see doing this myself, as I'm too 
lazy to edit everything right away -- I could watch the uncut DVDs 
until I get tired of watching 20 minutes of nothing to get to the good 
1 or 2 minutes of footage, *THEN* get out the original tapes and do 
some cutting.  This will become even more viable as DVD-R prices 
steadily come down in price.

:-)

The downsides I can see to using iMovie 3/iDVD 3 are that you only get 
6 clips per screen, and there is really no way to extract the date/time 
metadata in the DV stream (or is there?), so you'd have to manually 
enter that info to have it appear as the chapter title on your DVD.  
Also, you'd have to set the chapter markers individually for each clip.

As an alternative you could just make VCDs using Toast or for a free 
solution on Mac OS X, use ffmpeg and VCD Builder 
(http://homepage.mac.com/johan/), or even use Toast to encode the MPEG 
files and VCD Builder to create menus.

2 cents.

- Mark


On Thursday, March 13, 2003, at 11:52 AM, Ray Zimmerman wrote:

> I'd like to dump a bunch of unedited DV tapes to DVD. I like the way 
> iMovie imports the tape into separate clips and would like to 
> automatically generate a DVD menu (and/or chapters) which correspond 
> to the individual clips. It would be great to have the timestamp and 
> clip length as a part of the chapter name/menu title. A menu 
> consisting of thumbnails (like the Clips panel in iMovie) would also 
> be wonderful.
>
> Basically, I'm looking for an automated (or nearly so) way to put all 
> my unedited video on DVD in a way that I can quickly see what's on 
> each tape.
>
> Can this be done with iMovie and iDVD?  Maybe with some 
> Applescripting? Or is there some other software that would help for 
> this?
>
> ( I can't be the only one who's ever wanted to do this, right? )
>
> -- 
>  Ray Zimmerman  / e-mail: rz10 at cornell.edu / 428-B Phillips Hall
>   Sr Research  /   phone: (607) 255-9645  /  Cornell University
>    Associate  /      FAX: (815) 377-3932 /   Ithaca, NY  14853
>
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