First, assemble your materials. I just right-clicked and saved-as on the Internet Vets site because they had Quicktime versions of most of their clips. You'll want Quicktime files wherever possible because you'll have trouble trying to import other format files into iDVD.
Some of the other stuff I wanted to include, such as the video footage of a helicopter blowing up cars and people, was in MPEG format. As I understand it, Quicktime can deal with MPEG-1 out of the box. It's for MPEG-2 (such as you get when you rip a movie from a DVD), that you must buy Quicktime Pro. Fortunately, the helicopter was in MPEG-1. So I loaded the MPEG into Quicktime Pro, then chose File>Export. "Movie to Quicktime Movie", then choose Options and hit "Settings ..." and choose Best. The result is a Quicktime movie that iDVD can import.
Then it's off to iDVD to make the actual DVD. iDVD took some getting used to, but now I think I have the hang of it. You want to make a new project, and select a theme by hitting the Customize button at the bottom to get the drawer, then hitting the Themes tab. There are a lot of themes, most of them totally inappropriate for my purposes. Fortunately, on the 3.0 Themes list, I found "Lightbox", which had just the elegant air I wanted. Choose that.
At the top of the main window is the title ("Lightbox" by default). Double-click that to change the title to something you want. Then add assets. I dragged all my clips into the white space under the title, which creates links to the movies. In the final DVD you'll be able to navigate those links, and selecting a link plays the movie. The text of the link is the filename, by default, but you'll want to click that twice (slowly, don't double click or you'll preview the movie) to give it a more human-friendly name.
Now's a good time to talk about asset management. I kept all my movies in a directory for that project. We're about to make still images from the movies, and we'll store those in the directory too. iDVD needs all these media files to burn the DVD. It'll re-encode them to DVD format video and audio, but so long as you plan to edit the DVD layout, you'll need the originals around because it seems to want to re-encode at the drop of a hat. If you want to backup your project so you can work on it later, to get a self-contained DVD project, use the File>Archive option in iDVD. Until then, don't rename or move anything you've added to your iDVD project unless you want to have to spend time telling iDVD where all those media files went. Trust me, this gets tedious after only a short time.
The "Drag Photos or Movies Here" on the right hand side is for stills (or clips) from your movies. I just created stills in Quicktime Pro: open the .mov file, move the playhead to the frame you want to use as a still, and then click on the picture and drag it to the desktop. This makes a .mov containing only a single image. Drag that to the "Drag Photos or Movies Here" box.
I quickly ran out of room on the front menu--I had about twenty clips but the front page only has room for seven or so. So I created new menus. To do this, click on the "Folder" button at the bottom of the main iDVD screen. This creates a new option on your menu called "My Folder", which you can rename. Double-click on the option to go to that menu. So I ended up with several menu links on the front screen: "Jon Stewart", "John Kerry", "In Their Own Words", and "Final Thoughts". All the content hung off those second-level menus. If you get lost, the "Map" button at the bottom of the main screen shows you the layout of your menus.
Finally it's time to burn baby burn. Put in a blank DVD, and hit Burn. Then go to sleep, because it'll take several hours to convert your video into DVD format. Once it's all converted, though, you can burn and burn and burn without having to re-encode. Just keep feeding those blanks in and it'll keep burning them.
So there you have it, go to whoa. It took me much less than a day of fiddling to create a gorgeous DVD to give to my neighbours in the hopes that they would be better informed on election day. May you have more luck with your DVD project ;-)
--Nat
Nat Torkington is conference planner for the Open Source Convention, OSCON Europe, and other O'Reilly conferences. He was project manager for Perl 6, is on the board of The Perl Foundation, and is a frequent speaker on open source topics. He cowrote the bestselling Perl Cookbook.
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