Too Stupid for iDVD... how do I get from movie-file to DVD?

Factual Questions
1

I scored a Canopus card nice & cheap on eBay, inserted an HFS tape into the VCR and hooked the cables up, and within moments had a little sample QuickTime movie file sitting on my desktop. So far, so good.

Now suppose I want to burn the sucker as a DVD, such that it will play back on a standard DVD player, etc? I have Toast (5.2.1), which burns DVDs if one has a VIDEO_TS folder containing whatever-the-freaking-hell a VIDEO_TS folder oughta contain, but the help files for Toast don’t explain what one puts in one’s VIDEO_TS folder.

I also have iDVD, insofar as it came with the OS (OS X 10.4.4), and as with most of those Apple i-Apps, it’s touted as simple and easy to use and so on. Uh huh. I open it and it has its own movie of these strips of film with “Drop Box” written on each one. Wiht a bit of futzing, I discover I can drag the movie file onto the screen and one of those Drop Boxes now shows a frame from the movie file I dragged. There’s a button that says “Preview” so I hit that, expecting to see what would play back on the potential DVD, and instead that weird movie of the film strips with “Drop Box” on it comes slithering across my screen again.

iDVD seems really focused on… umm, it’s like it’s got PowerPoint envy? All these freaking “themes” and stuff, a title “Travel Cards” (??) and text that scrolls and all kinds of stuff like that…

OK, I found something called the “Map” and it had a pane that said “drag stuff you want to auto-start on DVD insertion into here” or some such thing. That sounds promising. I close project without saving changes, reopen, and this time drag my movie file onto that space after clicking “Map”.

So if I had a blank DVD-R handy, I could insert it and hut the burn button…am I going to end up with a DVD that plays the movie, or am I going to end up with a movie of scrolling panes that say “Drop Box 1” and a title that says “Travel Cards” or something?

::wanders off to find a Staples selling blank DVD-R disks::

2

The “Drop Box” you’re seeing is a live button area on the menu screen for the theme you’ve chosen. When you drop a clip onto a drop box and burn the disk, the viewer will need to highlight that box with their DVD controller to play that clip. (You can also highlight the clip and drag a slider bar to advance the preview frame to something different, if you want.)

The Preview function basically shows you how the DVD will work once you’ve burned it; once you’re in Preview mode, you navigate the menus with the on-screen remote just as you would IRL.

Playing a clip on auto-start means the clip will play before the menu appears and that the viewer cannot use the controls to skip past it. It’s basically for putting copyright notices or production logos.

If you’re really not sure how a disk will come out, save it to a disk image instead of burning it to DVD media. Then, double-click the disk image to mount it in the Finder; the DVD Player app should take it from there.

Hope this isn’t too vague; it can be tricky knowing how to advise someone without standing over their shoulder, or at least it is for me.

3

Not to worry by the way, DVD authoring, even at lighter levels (iDVD) can be kind of complex. iDvd is pretty easy to use, once you get a handle on what everything in the interface means (along with how you can customize the “themes”, etc.). Luckily you are at least starting with quicktime source files, otherwise you’d have to convert the video and possibly audio, which in my opinion, can be problematic. At any rate, good luck with the authoring and don’t give up if your dvd doesn’t turn out perfectly at first.