Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iLife, Multimedia
iDVD - black sheep of the iLife suite
For me, iDVD has always been the redheaded stepchild of the iLife suite. While I've used Garageband to make songs, iPhoto to manage photos (until I got Aperture), iWeb to make websites, and iMovie to make movies, until recently I'd never once tried to use iDVD to put together a DVD project. I've spent the past week trying to put together a DVD of our first year in New Zealand to share with our family back in the States, and while the movie's turned out great, getting there has definitely not been half the fun.Creating the movie itself was somewhat of a chore. Because I haven't yet upgraded to iLife '09, I'm stuck with the much-maligned tinker-toy interface introduced in iMovie '08. I couldn't use iMovie HD instead, because it's not compatible with my hard disk-based camcorder. After several days of wrestling with iMovie '08 to get it to do what I wanted it to do, I finally had a 95-minute project ready.
At "professional quality" in iDVD, that 95-minute project left me with almost a third of the DVD unused, so I decided to add more content, including a slideshow with 300+ pictures and two more short movies in an "extras" menu.
This turned out to be my downfall. Suddenly, iDVD no longer wanted to co-operate with me.
iLife '08 buyers have spoken, and Apple has listened: the new iMovie '08 is a major disappointment in some key areas. So much so that Apple decided to 
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
