I can’t remember how long it was since I last burned a DVD, Most movies are shared now via the internet, or on a thumbdrive, but I was recently doing a  course and they required me to submit a recording of myself on DVD!  Here is how to record a video on your iPhone and then burn it to a DVD.

 1. Record then find the movie you want to burn.

If you record a video on your iPhone using the built-in camera app, and then sync your iPhone to iTunes,  the movie will appear in your ‘Photos’ app.  To find it,  open your  “Photos” App  and then click on ‘Videos’.

When you click on videos, you will be able to see all the videos that you have recorded.  For some reason you cannot drag them directly out of photos app into another application so you must copy the movie to your desktop first.  To do this just click on the movie, keep your mouse button down, and drag it onto your desktop. A little green plus sign will appear, let go of the mouse button and it will copy the movie onto your desktop.

2. Download an app called ‘Burn’.

There are lots of apps for burning DVDs on the Apple store but not many of them are free and some of them are pretty complicated.  One of the best  apps that I have found is simply called ‘Burn’  and it is free and you can download it from here:

http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/Pages/English/home.html

When you run it  you might get a warning that it was not purchased from the Apple store,  in which case you need to go into ‘System Preferences’,  then ‘Security and Privacy’, then ‘General’, then  click the lock at the bottom left of the window, and then click ‘Allow apps downloaded from: Anywhere.’

2.  Decide what kind of DVD you want

Open Burn, then choose  what kind of DVD  you want to burn.

A DVD that plays on a DVD player is a different to a DVD that you put in your computer to copy the movie file onto your computer.  So you will need to decide whether you want to watch this on a normal DVD player,  or whether you are trying to copy this movie to another computer.  Now it’s actually a little more complicated than this,  because you can watch a normal DVD on your computer (but it is more complicated to copy the movie),  and you can watch a video of a data DVD on some DVD players ( but not all DVD players can do this).  So it is worth deciding whether your primary target is a DVD player or a computer.

‘Normal DVD’

If you want to burn a DVD that can play on a normal DVD player, go to the video tab and select DVD.

‘Data DVD’

If you want to burn a video to a DVD that you can copy over to another computer and play from that computer, select ‘Data’ then ‘DVD’.

Now you can drag  the movie file from your desktop across to the burn window and drop it there.

3. Burn the DVD.

Once you have put the movie file in, and if you  have a DVD burner connected, you can select the burn button and it will copy the movie to the DVD.

You will be asked what speed you want to burn the DVD at. Generally,  the slower the speed you burn it, the better the quality of the burn so that it is more likely to play on a DVD player or computer that is not very good.  For this reason I always tend to burn a DVD at the slowest possible speed.