Toast 7 Titanium by Roxio automatically encodes all data for DVD and includes
a Button Menu at the beginning. Old video tapes can also be converted to DVD,
as well as musical selections. Past Meetings
April 22, 2006 - 2pm
Six people braved the spring rains to attend this month's H'port MUG meeting in the undercroft of St. James' Episcopal church. Present were Tom B, Bill N, Bob S, John R, Bob G and Joan R.. Cookies and coffee kicked off the meeting which focused on the topic of BURNING (as related to CDs and DVDs rather than eternity).
A short PowerPoint presentation was shown of 20 Great Moments in Apple History, including the famous 1984 ad that introduced the world to the first Macintosh, as well as the less successful 'Hibachi' PowerBook 5300 that frequently burst into flames while the battery recharged. And finally the 20th moment entitled 'Hell Freezes Over' showing the merger of Apple and Intel Chips.
Tom demonstrated the ease of making a DVD from beginning to end by first shooting a short 15 second video clip of the group with his digital point-and-shoot camera. (Most people don't even realize that their cameras have this feature). Then the resulting QuickTime clip was off loaded to a laptop computer where it was dropped into Toast 7 application window and burned to an external DVD writer. The resulting DVD could be viewed immediately via TV or LCD projection in our meeting.
Toast 7 Titanium by Roxio automatically encodes all data for DVD and includes
a Button Menu at the beginning. Old video tapes can also be converted to DVD,
as well as musical selections.
A burn-once DVD-R disk cost about 58¢ when purchased in quantities of 50
and will hold a whopping 4.7GB of data. (see
grammar note regarding proper use and spelling of disk and
disc.)
OWC currently sells
a great DVD-RW
burner package for $129 which includes both Firewire and USB cables, instruction
booklet, DragonBurn and Retrospect software, a spindle of 25 blank CD-Rs and
5 DVD-Rs with cases and sleeves).
Several short sample DVDs were viewed showing some of the different quality levels and variations available with Toast 7, as well as Apple's iDVD application and Disk Utility burn features.
Apple provides some helpful hints to install iDVD3 and 4 on a computer with no SuperDrive here. Once iDVD is installed, it is possible to burn DVDs on an external burner by using a small enabling patch called PatchBurn. Some additional helpful hints to enable iDVD to burn are here.
PatchBurn.(free
download) adds a couple files (called Hurz
and Pfurz). For more info, see the ReadMe
file that comes with PatchBurn4. The advantage of all this is that you can
make full use of Apple's wonderful iMovie and iDVD to edit, organize and arrange
assorted video clips and text, as well as very well-crafted extra features.
The latest versions of iDVD 5 & 6 are suppose to work with external DVD
burners without using any patches or tricks.
Although Disk Utility (previously Disk Copy) has been a long-time standard of the Mac OS, many are not familiar with its potential. A 'Disk Image' can be made from
A great use for a blank disk image protected by an AES-128 encrypted password might be for safe storage of important documents, numbers and sensitive data that you could later burn to a CD.
One other thing that was briefly mentioned was inexpensive Domain Name and Web Hosting sites.
Dotser - Domain Name Registration $14.95 per year
Itsamac - Web Site Hosting $4.12 per month
To conclude the meeting, a CD was
burned for each which contained all the info, links and images pertaining to
the discussions, including the 15 second video of the group.
Next meeting tentatively planned for Tuesday, May 30, at 12 noon.
To view more highlights of Past Meetings, link to H'PORTMUG homepage .
[Note: To bookmark or print a specific page on this website, click on the NonFrames link on Homepage or go directly to the NonFrames version here - then navigate to the page you wish to bookmark or print.]