Making a Mastered DVD for any DVD Player

These are basic instructions for making a DVD with a menu that will play anywhere (any TV, any computer, and any DVD player). DVD's are by their very nature just Standard Definition (i.e. NOT HD). iDVD will take your HD movie and down convert it into interlaced NTSC Standard Def video. In order to record HD video onto a physical disk you need a Blu-Ray disk and Blu-Ray burner, not something that is standard on Apple or owned by most people. This is why you are making BOTH a full quality Quicktime file (preserving HD as needed) AND a mastered DVD of your projects.

1. Export your projects as full quality Quicktime files and burn them to DVD so that you have backups (http://introto4df12.blogspot.com/2012/10/fcp-exporting-high-quality-quicktime.html).

2. Copy all of your Quicktime files to Work in Progress on one of the New School's computers (don't try to burn DVDs from your hard drive!) and open iDVD. Click "Create New Project." If you are asked, keep the aspect ratio Standard. (In order to properly display widescreen DVDs, the DVD player and TV must be able to read the widescreen aspect ratio and properly display the full menu, which most TVs and DVD players cannot do. Widescreen DVDs suffer from significant cropping when displayed on regular 4:3 TV sets.)

3. Go to iDVD> Preferences. Under "General" uncheck "Show Apple Logo Watermark."

Under "Projects" change the Encoding to Professional Quality and DVD Type to Single Layer. Name your DVD.

4. Click on "7.0 Themes" and change to "All." Scroll down to "Portfolio Color." Drag and drop your Quicktime video projects into the main area. They will appear as icons with text below.

5. To edit the buttons, click "Buttons" on the lower right to choose the shape. Then Control-click on the image and choose "Show Inspector Window" which will allow you to adjust the size, etc. of the button.

To edit the text, click twice. You can choose font, size, etc.

6. Click the Play button on the bottom right to preview your DVD.

Once it's ready, click the Burn button next to the Play button. Insert your DVD-R DVD and get out something to read because THIS WILL TAKE A LONG TIME (20-30 minutes maybe more!). Then voila! You have a DVD. Burning subsequent DVDs takes a lot less time, so make duplicates NOW.

7. Make as many of these DVDs as you need. They burn much more quickly after the first one.

Video tutorial:


PDF tutorial (you don't need chapter markers, so start from page 6):
http://nobetty.net/4d/resources/iDVD_tutorial.pdf -from http://www.bgsu.edu

Ken Stone is also an excellent resource for all things FCP and iDVD related.

Detailed iDVD tutorial from Ken Stone's web site:
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/idvd_6_stone.html

iDVD 7
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/idvd_07_stone.html

**There are some options for burning Blu-Ray material onto a standard DVD in a format that Blu-Ray players will recognize in FCP, see this earlier post: http://introto4df11.blogspot.com/2011/10/burning-mastered-dvd-directly-from-fcp.html. Only do this if you have a Blu-Ray DVD player, it will not play on your Mac!