Section 21.3. Adding Movies | iLife 05: The Missing Manual

21.3. Adding Movies

When you get right down to it, all iDVD really does is add window dressingmenus, buttons , and so onto movies, music, and photos created in other programs.

Take movies, for example. You already know that you can transfer an iMovie project into iDVD by clicking iMovie's Make iDVD Project button (that's what Chapter 20's all about). But that's just the beginning of the ways you can add movies to your iDVD projects. You can also:

Figure 21-2. To use the Import command, start on the menu screen you wish to update. When you choose File Import Video, the Open File dialog box appears, so that you can navigate to a movie and select it. (You cant select more than one movie to import at a time.) When you click Open , iDVD loads the movie and adds it to the current menu screen.

Use the File Import command.
Drag movies into the iDVD window from the desktop.
Choose movies from the Media pane of the Customize drawer .
Drag clips or entire movies directly in from iMoviea first in iLife history.

The following pages take you through these additional methods ..

21.3.1. The Import Command

iDVD's File Import command lets you install video, audio, pictures, and background movies into your project; see Figure 21-2.

21.3.2. The Finder

Another great way to install a movie into an iDVD menu screen is to drag it there, either right off the desktop or from an open folder window. Figure 21-3 tells all.

Figure 21-3. Here's a very quick way to install a movie into one of your menu screens: In the Finder, position the window that contains the movie so that you can see it and the iDVD menu screen at the same time. Then just drag the movies onto the displayed menu and drop them there. (Note, however, that you can't drag iMovie project icons, like the ones with the star icons shown hereonly finished QuickTime movies.)

21.3.3. The Movies Media Pane

Dragging files in from the Finder is great, but it assumes that you know where your movies are. Fortunately, if you're a little fuzzy on where you've stored all your movie files, iDVD can help.

Open the Customize drawer (click the Customize button at the bottom of the screen if it isn't already open). Then click the Media button at the top of the drawer and, from the pop-up menu, choose Movies (see Figure 21-4).

The Movies pane opens, showing a list of folders at the top of the pane. At the outset, this list contains only one folder, the Movies folder (which is actually in your Home folder). Click its name to see every digital movie and iMovie project that iDVD can find in that folder (although not in folders in that folder.) See the box on the next page for some tips on navigating it. (If you have movies somewhere else on your hard drive, see "Listing more movies," below).

Figure 21-4. At the top of the pane, you see a list of all the QuickTime movies and iMovie HD project icons in your Home - Movies folder, or other folders youve told iDVD to search. When you click one of these folders, you see its contents in the pane, exhibited as thumbnail images. Drag your selection into the menu screen to make it part of your DVD-in-waiting.

21.3.3.1. Listing more movie folders

iDVD starts out displaying only the contents of your Home Movies folder. This arrangement spares you from looking at a list of the 50,000 individual clips that make up all of your various iMovie projects. The bad news is that it doesnt show you any other folders you have that might contain movies.

Figure 21-5. On the Movies preferences panel, click the Add button. Navigate to the folder you need iDVD to search. Click it, and then click Open. iDVD adds the new folder to the list. To remove a file from the list, select it and click Remove. That's the only way you can remove folders from the list (short of trashing your iDVD preference file).

GEM IN THE ROUGH
Useful Pane Tricks

The following tricks and tips may help when using any of the panes (Movies, Audio, or Photos) in the Customize drawer.

Adjust your list panes . Drag the resize bar (the horizontal bar with the small dot that appears between the two panes) to reapportion vertical space between the upper and lower sections of the pane.

Play it . If you double-click a movie or sound, it plays. (You can also click it once and then click the triangular Play button at the bottom of the pane.) Click once anywhere to stop the playback. Use as needed to jog your memory.

Search . If you've got a seething mass of movies to root through, click in the Search box below the list and type a few letters of the name of the movie, picture, or song you want. As you type, iDVD hides all entries except those whose names match. Capitalization doesn't matter, but you can search through only one folder, album, or playlist at a time. (Restore the entire list by clicking the little X at the right end of the Search box.)

Select more than one . You can highlight more than one movie, picture, or song at a time, and therefore save time by dragging them all onto the screen at once. Exactly as in the Finder, you can click the first entry, then Shift-click the last to select an entire group . Or you can -click random thumbnails to select a nonadjacent set.

Fortunately, you can teach iDVD to list the contents of additional movie folders. To do so, drag new folders from the Finder to the list in the Movies pane, or choose iDVD Preferences ( -comma), click the Movies button, and follow the steps in Figure 21-5. Repeat for as many folders as you want to add.

21.3.4. Clips and Movies from iMovie

If you click the Create iDVD Project button in iMovie, as described in the previous chapter, iMovie creates a brand-new iDVD project. iMovie offers no obvious way to install a second or third movie into an existing iDVD project.

That's a shame, because most homemade DVDs are not, in fact, 90-minute opuses, complete with character development and a satisfying narrative arc. (In fact, an hour and a half of anybody's home movies is about 80 minutes too long.) Most of the time, people want to fill a DVD with several of their finished iMovie projects. They want each button on the DVD's main menu to represent a complete movie .

Figure 21-6. After saving your iMovie project (right), you can drag the entire movie onto an iDVD menu screen (left) by using the project icon in the title bar as a handle. The trick is to hold down the mouse button on that icon momentarily until it darkens before you begin to drag.
Alternatively, you can drag individual clips from iMovie (either the Movie Track or the Clips pane) into iDVD, as shown here at bottom.

Fortunately, it's easy enough to create this effect. In iLife '05, you can drag either an iMovie clip or an entire iMovie project into iDVDif you know what to drag. Figure 21-6 shows all.

Note: The drag-the-title-bar-icon trick illustrated in Figure 21-6 works only for iMovie projects that have been saved in the new, single-icon iMovie HD project format (Section 32.9.1). If your project is still represented on your hard drive as a project folder, you can't drag its title-bar icon.

Whichever way you pick, whatever you just dragged turns into a new button on the menu page.

21.3.5. Movies with Chapters

You already know from the previous chapter that if you export a movie directly from iMovie, any chapter markers you've added automatically turn into buttons in iDVD.

But what happens if you drag an iMovie movie, itself containing chapter markers, into iDVD as described above?

Unless you've changed the iMovie settings, iDVD automatically turns those chapter markers into buttons, just as though you'd exported the movie from iMovie. They wind up on a menu screen of their owna submenu .

Unfortunately, you've now created a fairly complex menu structure. To jump to a certain scene in your dragged-in iMovie, your audience has to navigate through three different pages of buttons.

For that reason, you might not always want iMovie to turn your chapter markers into buttonsat least not without asking your permission.

Choose iDVD Preferences. On the General tab, you have three choices under "When importing movies:

"Automatically create chapter marker submenu ." This is the factory setting. When you drag an iMovie project into iDVD, it turns into a folder-icon button. Your audience must "click" that button with the remote control to get to a second screen, where they can either play the movie or access its scene-selection menu. (See the following section for more on navigating "folder" menus in iDVD.)
"Never create chapter marker submenu ." If you choose this option, dragging an iMovie movie into a menu screen creates a movie button, not a folder button. "Clicking" that button with the remote control makes the movie play immediately.

Your audience no longer has the option of navigating your movie by viewing a page full of scene markers.

Tip: Even though your viewers won't see individual icons for these scenes, they can still jump to them using the Next Chapter or Previous Chapter buttons on their remote controls.
"Ask each time ." When you drag a chapter-filled movie onto a menu screen, iMovie says: "Do you want to add chapter markers for this movie?" Click Yes (if you want to create the nested-menus effect described three paragraphs ago), or No (if you want the invisible chapter-markers effect described two paragraphs ago).