How to make DVDs as holiday gifts
Apple has almost entirely abandoned DVDs—remember, those shiny discs that no longer fit into many modern Macs? But despite the shift to online photo and video services, not everyone is capable of streaming media over the Internet. A DVD (and increasingly, a high-definition Blu-ray disc) is still a near-universal way to share the photos and videos as a holiday gift. Besides, friends and family members can’t unwrap a pipeline of bits and bytes.
When I wrote about this subject four years ago, iDVD did most of the heavy lifting—an app that let you build slideshows, assemble video, and burn a disc. However, Apple’s interest in iDVD fizzled along with its interest in DVDs as a whole—and Blu-ray media never even got a foot in Apple’s door. Unless you already own a copy of iDVD from the purchase of an older Mac or iLife, the only way to get it is by buying a boxed version of iLife from a third-party reseller; Apple doesn’t sell iDVD at all. Fortunately, you have other options.
Content is everything. The first step in creating a holiday DVD is the fun part: assembling your content. Start pulling together photos and video snippets from your cameras (whether from stand-alone cameras or camcorders, or mobile devices such as the iPhone or iPod touch) on your Mac. Photo applications such as iPhoto ’11 ($15), Aperture 3 ($80), Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 ($149), and Photoshop Elements 11 ($100) import both types of media, giving you a central location for organizing your project’s assets. I suggest making a new album or collection, or a folder in the Finder, to hold the pieces you want to use.
Before you start, take a moment to think about the project’s structure and how your viewers will interact with it. Will they watch just one movie? If so, you probably want to build that in a video editor such as iMovie ’11 ($15) or Premiere Elements 11 ($100), which gives you a lot of control over the movie’s presentation.
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