[Macpartners] Re: iMovie and iPhoto files

[Marshall Vale]

Hi Bronwen,

>What if iPhoto disappears or is replaced by something else? How can 
>he archive them so that they will be re-usable?  Is there an easy 
>way to do this?

iPhoto advertises an archive to CD or DVD feature. See: 
<http://www.apple.com/iphoto/organize.html>. iPhoto always keeps a 
copy of the original picture import around, even after making changes 
to the picture in iPhoto, but I don't know what it burns to the CD or 
DVD.

>Second:  He is a surgeon who films surgeries, resulting in very 
>large files that
>he edits and  views with iMovie.  However, these too he would like to archive.
>Should he save his original film clips?  Writing the movies to DVD 
>is one option
>for storage except that once it written to DVD you can't copy portions of the
>movies back to disk for editing or other purposes.

He should archive the original DV clips if he is interested in 
editing them in the future. He is correct that once converted to 
MPEG-2 for burning with iDVD, you can't easily edit them as MPEG-2 is 
not designed for that purpose.

However, he can burn the original DV clips to a DVD data disc. 
Instead of using iDVD, you put the blank DVD-R into the machine and 
use the Finder to treat it like a big CD-R. The DVD clips are in the 
iMovie project directory somewhere and I believe are mostly clipped 
to fit a blank DVD-R.

Marshall