iMovie: The Missing Manual

Chapter 16. Share to the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple TV, and iDVD

In case you haven’t noticed, Apple thinks that one of the classic destinations for your home movies—DVDs—is ancient history. What Apple really wants you to do with your videos is post them to the Web (see Chapter 15) or transfer them to another Apple device, like an iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, or Apple TV.

The bulk of this chapter covers those latter options: sending your finished masterpiece to another fine piece of Apple merchandise.

But if you’re a DVD holdout—and you have iDVD on your Mac from an earlier version of iMovie (see iDVD)—you’ll learn how to save your movies old school, out of iMovie, into iDVD, and, finally, onto DVD.

Sharing Basics

To share a video in iMovie, click the Share icon in iMovie’s toolbar, or choose File→Share. iMovie displays a list of destinations (iMovie Theater, Email, iTunes, and so on). When you select one, iMovie gets to work sewing up your film in a format suited to its eventual home. The details of sharing for each destination are in the following sections.

iMovie Theater

Until this version of iMovie, sharing your project to an iDevice required a trip to iTunes, which added an extra and cumbersome step to the whole sharing process. In recent years, however, Apple has replaced iTunes as the interim medium with one that’s much more convenient—iCloud, Apple’s online storage locker. You can wirelessly tap into files saved “in the cloud” from any Apple gadget. For example, with an iCloud ...