Making VCDs

[Daniel Farley]

Josh,

You're also going to need lots of hard drive space! I can't remember what the numbers are - but video takes up lots of space. If you don't have more than 20 GB free you won't be able to put together movies longer than about 5 -  minutes (I find that for 'fun' stuff 5, maybe 6 minutes is about all the attention people will give you).

You might want to consider an internal CDRW for your iBook. A Mac net retailer was offering to sell you an upgrade kit or do it for you to obviate the requirement for an external drive. Search www.dealmac.com  or www.macintouch.com to get the actual price/retailer.

I bought an external firewire case for about $30 and then an 80GB hard drive to stuff in it for about $60, It works fine and helps keep your movie projects seperate.

DVD players list all the formats they are compatible with. Most of the mid priced versions will list "VCD" as a supported format.

A  external CDRW drive generally ships with Toast Lite - a reduced function version of Toast Pro. I'd go to the www.roxio.com (the owner of toast) to check that the lite version will also burn VCDs. Make sure you go there after you get your drive/program to get the latest updates. I burned about 4 coasters before I realized not having the latest and greatest would result  in less than satisfactory results.

Finally - VCD's are pretty cool - but after DVD quality you won't be impressed with the video quality.

Dan