Section 22.1. Designing Your Own Themes

22.1. Designing Your Own Themes

Some of Apple's iDVD themes offer great backgrounds but weak audio. Others provide terrific sounds but terrible text. Some create a nearly perfect package, while others seem broken beyond repair. Fortunately, in the end it doesn't matter, because iDVD lets you adapt themes to your taste and save them as new Favorites .

Favorites let you move beyond built-in themes and presets to create truly customized DVD menu systems. You can change font, adjust the length of the looping background video, move buttons around and change their styles, change the fonts and colors for button and menu titles, move text around the screen, substitute new background art or background patterns, replace or remove the audio loop that plays when the main menu is onscreen, and much more. Let the following pages be your guide.

22.1.1. The Themes Pane

All three collections5.0 Themes, 4.0 Themes and Old Themesappear in the Themes pane in the Customize drawer. (To view the Themes pane, click Customize to open the Customize drawer , then click the Themes button at the top of the pane.)

As you study the scrolling list of themes, you'll notice that:

• Favorites appear together . When you choose Favorites from the Theme Set pop-up menu at the top of the pane, all Favorites (themes that you've created) appear together in the same list. This list is empty when you start out using iDVD.

• Most non-Apple themes appear separately . Themes you've bought from other companies (like www.idvdthemetastic.com or www.idvdthemepak.com) are listed separately in the pane's pop-up menu.

• View several sets at once . iDVD 5 lets you view a single set of themes, or all themes at once. To view just one set, select its name from the Theme Set pop-up menu. To view all themes, choose All from that same menu.

• The walking-man icon means sound or audio . When you see a small, round, walking-man logo in the lower-right corner of the theme thumbnail, that's your signal that the theme uses a motion background or audio loop.

• The ribbon means favorite . A gray prize ribbon appears in the lower-left corner of certain themes. This icon lets you know that the theme is a Favoritea theme that you created yourself. You'll find out how to create Favorites later in this chapter.