{“On Tuesday’s Call for Help program on TechTV, I completed my look at iLife ’04 with a peek at iDVD 4. In the “,”, I mentioned that it was possible to create an iDVD project on a Mac without a SuperDrive, archive that project with iDVD’s Archive Project command (found in the File menu), and then copy the archive to a Mac with a SuperDrive for burning.
Reader Jim O’Connell wonders if you can follow this procedure and, using a third-party DVD burner, burn the archive to a DVD with a program other than iDVD.
The Good News: Yes, you can… sort of.
The Bad News: The program you must use to perform the job is DVD Studio Pro 2.0.
One of the great boons of DVD Studio Pro is that, unlike iDVD, it works with third-party DVD burners. DVD Studio Pro can also open iDVD 4 projects. Regrettably, it doesn’t always do so flawlessly. For example, with my test archive the background music included in one of the montage themes wasn’t imported.
You can certainly create DVDs with Roxio’s Toast — and dragging one of these archives into Toast will plunk your movie files (but not slideshows) into the program — but you lose iDVD’s themes, background music, motion menus, etc. “}