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The Mac is easily one of the best choices you can make if you want to edit and store home videos. It was practically built to consume media, and movies are no exception. But what if you want your videos to have easily accessible chapter markers like scenes in DVDs? It’s not really that hard, and you have a couple choices, though the built in way is not obvious. Heck, who would have thought to use Garageband enhance a video?

Macworld has a great article detailing the process of adding chapter markers to any videos you may have. It works great if you have your own podcast, recorded television or even if you just want to have a record of those funny things that happen at family events. I mean really, it never gets old watching people fall down. They made an entire show out of it…America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Back to the point. Adding these markers is really simple. Just edit your video in iMovie or other program if necessary, and export the finished product. Just make sure that wherever your video comes from, that it’s finished. Open Garageband, and drag the video into a new music project.

Select that movie track in the timeline and a chapters area appears below. Move the playhead to a place where you’d like to add a chapter, click the Add Marker button at the bottom of the window, and in the Chapter column enter a name for the chapter: Opening, Pie Fight, or Rude Bit, for example. Don’t bother entering a URL title or URL.

Then, after you are done adding chapter markers to your heart’s content, just click Share in the menu and Send to iTunes. You’ll get some choices for quality level, and then click Share to complete the process. The movie is automatically added to your iTunes library, which is great if that’s final destination. Now your video has chapter markers, and feels that much more professional!

It should also be noted that you can also add chapter markers with a program called HandBrake, which, if you are into editing videos, you probably already have. In HandBrake, under the Output Settings, go to the Chapters tab. Just remember that you only want to add chapters to a final video. If you edit it again with iMovie, it does something really dumb; it erases them. Someday, Apple will fix this, I’m sure, and probably add the chapters functionality into iMovie where it belongs. But until that day, at least you have a couple options.

Via [Macworld]