iDVD vs iMovie

iMovie is for editing uncompressed video files.

iDVD is for creating DVDs from iMovie projects, or slide shows from iTunes, that will play on any DVD player.

iMovie 9 tutorials:

http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#imovie

A good guide to iDVD 7 can be found here:

http://www.kenstone.net/fcphomepage/idvd_07stone.html

Hi,

Klaus is correct, but another way to look at it is iMovie is used for creating videos (including slideshows with music) which can be imported into iDVD to make a DVD (disk) or exported into other video formats. iDVD's main purpose is to create DVD disks, but it also can create slideshows for those disks.

If you're creating a DVD for a group to watch, and you'd like to mix video clips and a slideshow, my personal choice would be iMovie (although others have different preferences). My rationale is that iMovie allows more precise control of audio elements which can be difficult to control when mixing video clips with background music.
John

Hi there,

You could do a slideshow in iPhoto and import into iMovie, but I'd recommend using iMovie for everything -- import the stills and video clips into iMovie; organize the sequences; add the background audio; and test it. If it looks fine, import to iDVD for burning the whole production to DVD.

iMovie can export to various video formats, but can't instruct your computer to burn videos to disk. iDVD lets you create menus (like on a commercial DVD) and encodes videos into the correct format/codec (mpeg-2 video) for playback on standard DVD players, and burns everything onto a DVD. Apple's software is integrated, so it can seem a little blurry between iDVD and iMovie and iPhoto.
John

Thanks!

I'm not sure what options Handbrake has, but if you convert the VOB files to DV Stream (.dv format), iMovie will import that just fine.

Video extracted from a DVD will suffer some quality loss during the decompression (from mpeg-2) and recompression process (back to a new DVD) but typically it's pretty reasonable quality.

John