I burned my first video DVD last night using Apple’s iDVD software. For a test run, I was quite pleased with how it turned out. iDVD created chapter selection screens automatically, based on the chapter markers I’d set up in iMovie. All of the transition and photo pans that stuttered and balked when trying to play on the fly were buttery smooth once crammed together into a continuous video stream. The predefined themes make it pretty easy to create something that looks good, even for one with as little graphic design skill as me. It seems that this will be a superb way to distribute family movies to the parts of the family that are far away.

A couple sticking points: video production takes a lot of time. I’ve spent several hours on the video from our beach trip, and am still not completely done with it. Also, because our video at the beach was shot under overcast conditions, I’ve become acutely aware of the challenge of color correction. iMovie would benefit enormously from a one-button “Enhance” feature, which does one-click color/brightness/contrast correction, as iPhoto now has. Finally, burning DVD’s takes a lot of time. There may be some facility for saving an image of a disc so that you can reproduce it more quickly, but if so, I haven’t yet discovered it.