Sam Soffes

iDVD 6 (well iLife ‘06 in general) is really awesome. I love all of the new themes and features. All of the menus are cleaner. It’s just awesome. The first thing I noticed besides the cleaner interface was that it supported my LaCie DVD burner even thought I don’t have a SuperDrive (Apple DVD Burner). That is so nice. Before I’d export a disk image and burn it in Disk Utility. I smiled anyway. I also really like the added flexibility you have when changing templates and making our own, especially the map view.

I thought I’d take the time to help all of you out who use iDVD 6 with this issue I found. When you click on burn (or if you go to save disk image, same thing applies) it encodes all of your video. You can press command-I whenever you are in iDVD and see all of your project options and stats, etc. I change the encode type to quality from performance because I like stuff I make to look good, just a thought. Anyway you can see that it encodes your video in the background while you are designing the menus and stuff for your DVD (which is awesome). If you wait long enough it will say ‘done’ next to your video in the Info window (command-I to get it).

Back to what I was saying, if you burn it after it has encoded your entire project or before it will check it and encode what’s left. Once it’s done it says ‘Encoding Audio’. At this point it says iDVD is not responding. I was like what the crap and restarted the entire DVD process. After the third time of restarting it after it ‘locked up’ (to mac haters: this never happens normally, that’s why I was so confused. on windows you just expect it to crash when you’re doing something big.) I thought I’d search the Internet. So I googled my issue and after a few minutes I found a forum that was discussing it.

Solution: wait… a really long time. I started burning it at midnight-ish and went to bed because I was tired. I woke up at 3am because I was worried about it (nothing like waiting til the last minute) and checked on it. It was done. So the moral is… If you are using iDVD and it locks up, have no fear… just wait.