TMO Quick Tip - Duplicate Your iDVD Projects

by , 7:30 AM EDT, June 30th, 2006

iDVD makes it amazingly easy to burn your movies to DVD. If you burn one disk, and then later on decide you want to make a couple more, however, you don't have to spend time waiting for iDVD to re-encode your movie. You can save a bunch of time by using Disk Utility instead.

• Launch Disk Utility. It's in Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
• Put the DVD with your movie on it into your Mac.
• Choose your DVD from the list of disks in Disk Utility.

Choose your DVD in Disk Utility.

• Choose File > New > Disk Image From (name of your disk).
• Give your disk image a name, and then choose DVD/CD master from the Image Format pop-up menu.
• Click the Save button.

Select the disk you want to make an image from.

Once you have a disk image of your DVD, you can burn as many copies as you want without waiting for iDVD to re-encode your movie - a process that can potentially take an hour or more, depending on the speed of your Mac.

Here's how to burn the image back to a DVD with Disk Utility:

• Choose Images > Burn.

The Burn option is under the Images menu.

• Navigate to the location on your hard drive where you saved your disk image.
• Select your disk image.
• Click the Burn button.

Be sure to select DVD/CD master.

Keep in mind this works only with DVDs that don't have any copy protection in place.

If you know how many copies of the DVD you need when you first burn your movie in iDVD, you can set the total number of disks before the encoding process begins. But if you aren't sure how many copies you need, or if you plan on burning more disks later, Disk Utility makes the whole process much faster.

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