Last week, I was working on what I thought was a simple project but projects always have some challenges. The project was a simple edit of about two hours of video that included lecture and demonstration interviews. So I thought I would try out the new iMovie to do a quick edit and export to iDVD for the final product. The editing went fairly smooth once some time was spent digesting the new interface. Now an export to iDVD to build the menu and burn the DVD. But I realized that I needed to include some chapters in the project so that three interviews at the end of the program could be located easily. Well, iDVD will only do time based chapters in equal increments and that wouldn’t work at all. But if the video has chapters embedded in it then iDVD will automatically add the chapter menus to the video. After some review, there was no sign of this function in iMovie but that was OK because QuickTime Pro can add chapters marker to video.
To create the chapters you just need a carefully formatted text file that contains the chapter timings which is then imported into QT and converted to a movie. This text only movie is then overlaid onto the video project, then magically you have a movie with navigational chapters. Now all that is needed is to import the video back into iDVD, but alas once there it is still missing the chapters. iDVD does not respect QT chapters. Now the frustration sets in and results in a trip to the Internet for some help from my anonymous support system.
After a not so quick search, I came across a little utility named Metadata Hootenanny that could solve my issue. I could have created the chapters in this application easier than the text file method but they were already done. So, all that was required as a quick save and and reimport into iDVD. Once imported the chapter menu appeared just as I had expected earlier in this process. Render and burn, I was done. This is a great little utility and worth checking out for anyone that works with QuickTime, plus it has a interesting logo.