Section 15.6. Phase 4: Design the Menu Screen | iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual

15.6. Phase 4: Design the Menu Screen

On the main menu screen now before you, you'll find two buttons :

Play. On the finished DVD, this button means, "Play the movie from the beginning."
Scene Selection. On the finished DVD, this button will take your audience to a second screen, which is filled with individual buttons for the chapters you created.(In fact, this second screen may well have arrows that lead to third and fourth screens, since iDVD menus vary in the number of buttons that fit per screen. Travel Cards holds six buttons per scene-selection menu.)

If you'd like to have a look at this scene-selection screen, double-click the words Scene Selection. To return to the main menu, click the left-pointing arrow on the scene-selection screen.

Tip: If iDVD seems sluggish when you change screens, it's because the program is busily processing video in the background. To make it work faster, choose iDVD

Preferences, click the General icon, and turn off "Enable background encoding." (Finally, close the General window.)Creating your DVD at the end of the process will take longer now, because the video hasnt been preprocessed. But at least you'll be able to work in the program without feeling like you're walking through quicksand.If things are still slow, your Mac may need more memory. iDVD consumes RAM like the ravenous triple-toed dire sloth of the Northern Antipodes consumes white-tailed wombats. (Dire sloths can be very, very ravenous indeed.)

Figure 15-7. iDVD provides a What-You-See-Is-Pretty-Much-What-You-Get layout of your final DVD. Here, you add, edit, and manipulate the buttons, pictures, movies, and titles that will make up the menus for your DVD. "Travel Cards" (shown here) is iDVD's factory-setting theme.

15.6.1. All about Themes

The moving drop zones, any music that's playing, and the font for your buttons are all part of a theme: a unified design scheme that governs how the menus look and behave, complete with attractive backgrounds, coordinated typography, and back-ground music.iDVD 5 comes with 15 eye-catching new themes that include a host of visually stunning effects.

It takes a lot of individual design decisions to make a theme. For example:

Figure 15-8. iDVD Themes can create strikingly different menu screens for similar projects. Top: The Scrapbook theme uses a script font based on handwritten text and a series of drop zones that fly across an animated background video.
Bottom: The Lines theme features a row of drop zones(the series of pictures that, if this weren't a frozen picture on a book page, would be scrolling to the left), a plain black background, and text buttons in an informal font.

Back ground image or video. Whatever art appears in the background, still images, or video clips, is part of the theme. The movement of the desert in the Anime Pop theme is one example of video in action.

Tip: If the repetitive looping of a theme's motion drives you crazy, click the round Motion button below the menu-design screen. The Motion button turns the looping motion on and off while you're working on a DVD. (It also affects the finished DVD, so check its status before you burn the disc.)
Button type. The buttons in iDVD Project can be either little graphics or text phrases that your audience will "click" with the remote control.
Button look. The look of your buttons can vary. Text buttons may have simple backgrounds; graphic buttons may have borders.
Button positions . Each menu can accommodate up to12 buttons, depending on the theme you've chosen . Themes are preset to place their buttons in certain favored positions.
Drop zones. Drop zones are areas into which you can drag a favorite video clip (sometimes more than one) that plays continuously as a background for the main menu screen. If you've ever seen a commercial Hollywood DVD movie, you've seen this effect. One key scene from the movie plays over and over, looping until you choose one of the buttons on the menu screenor go quietly insane.

In iDVD 5, advanced dynamic drop zones can now move across the screen, even passing in front of each other, providing amazing visual effects.
Text boxes. Text boxes let you freely add text blocks to your menu screens so you can provide, for example, instructions to your viewers , copyright notices, or details about what they're about to see.
Font selections. Themes also specify the color , font size , and typeface for menu titles and buttons.

Figure 15-8 illustrates two very different looks for the same project. The difference lies only in the chosen theme.

15.6.2. Choosing a Theme

Goodness knows , you don't have to be satisfied with the tropically inspired Travel Cards theme. A wide range of canned themes awaits your inspection:

Click Customize to open the Customize drawer , if it isn't already open.

The Customize button shows or hides the drawer shown in Figure 15-9. (You can also close the drawer by dragging its outside edge inward.)
From the pop-up menu at the top of the drawer, choose a theme set.

iDVD offers three built-in theme sets: 5.0Themes (15 new themes in this version), 4.0 Themes (20 designs from iDVD4), and Old Themes (24 themes inherited from iDVD 3, including the excellent Book and Projector offerings). If you've bought additional themes online (Figure15-10), this pop-up menu may offer other choices. In any case, you can use this pop-up menu to switch between them, or just choose All to see all installed themes in a single scrolling list.

You'll notice that some of the themes seem to appear twice: "Wedding Theme Bronze One" and "Wedding Theme Bronze Two," for example. That represents another iDVD feature: predesigned screens for submenu screens, like the Scene Selection screens you'd find on a commercial DVD. The "Two" designs are intended for these second-level screens full of buttons.

Scroll through the list of themes, clicking each one to see what it looks like in the main work area, or just rely on the little thumbnail icons to get a sense of the theme's overall flavor.

Select a theme by clicking its thumbnail.

Figure 15-9. The Customize button reveals iDVD's Customize drawer. You'll be spending a lot of your time here, so mastering its layout is important. For example, when you click one of the buttons at the top, the pane changes to show its contents. Themes lets you choose a design scheme. Settings lets you choose motion menu duration, background video and audio, title fonts, and the look and placement of buttons. The Media panes reveal the contents of your iTunes and iPhoto collections.

If your DVD menu system consists of only a single screenthe main menu you've been looking at the whole timeit takes on your chosen theme instantly.

A movie you've exported from iMovie, however, probably has chapter markers in it, and therefore your movie probably has at least one additional menu screen: your scene-selection screen.

It turns out that clicking a theme choice in the Customize drawer affects the current menu screen only. If you click, say, the Techno B&W theme on the main menu, your scene-selection screen remains unaffected; it still shows the yellow and brown Travel Cards theme. Therefore, follow up like this:

Choose Advanced Apply Theme to Project.

This command applies the same theme to every screen. Now all of your menu screens look alike.

Tip: If you want all of your menu screens to have the same look except for the main menu, first use the Apply Theme to Project command described here. Then return to the main menu screen and click the theme thumbnail you want for it only.For example, you might apply Travel 2 to your entire project, and then choose Travel 1 for your main screen.

Figure 15-10. You can buy additional themes, or download free samples, from other companies (such as iDVDThemePAK.com or iDVD-themetastic.com). You install them by creating a folder called Favorites in your Library iDVD folder (the Library folder in the main hard drive window, not in your Home folder), and then putting them inside.

When you're happy with the way the new theme looks, you're ready to proceed with your iDVD design work. Fortunately, you don't have to commit to a theme at this moment; you can swap in a different theme at any time until you actually burn the DVD.

15.6.3. Editing Menus

If you like the way everything looks when you click a desired theme, terrific . You're good to go. Skip ahead to "Phase 5: Burn Your DVD."

Note, however, that a great deal of flexibility and control await in the meantime. You don't have to accept every element of the theme as it appears when you first select it. You can move your buttons around, change the labels on them, and so on.

Chapter 17 offers the full scoop on these procedures, but here are a few of the most common redesign tasks .

15.6.4. Editing Titles and Buttons

iDVD usually adds a title to your menu screens, often near the top of the page, and usually in a larger font than any other text. You can edit it just as you would a Finder icon name : Click inside it to open up an editing box, type your changes, and then press Enter or Return.

Editing button names works almost the same way, except that you single-click the button first, and then click the text itself to open the editing box.

Keep these points in mind when working with iDVD text:

Be succinct. DVD screens are small, so there's not much room for long and involved text.
Be contained. Don't let one text box overlap another.
Spell check. Nothing speaks worse of your attention to detail than a lovingly crafted masterpiece called "For Mouther's Day."

Tip: If your buttons' text labels are crashing into each other, try making the text wrap into a narrow column, so that it's several lines long. Simply press Return to start a new line; unlike previous versions of iDVD, pressing Return doesn't close the editing box.

15.6.5. Moving Buttons Around

Each theme comes with predetermined locations for your buttons. In fact, internally, each theme stores separate layout maps: one that specifies the button positions if you have three buttons, another for four buttons, and so on.

iDVD lets you move your buttons around into new positions, but it's not as easy as just dragging them with your mouse. There's no grid to guide you, so the new button positions might not look especially professional. For example, when you play your iDVD disc on a standard DVD player, your menu buttons will sprout glowing rectangles to indicate which button is highlighted. If you've positioned the buttons too closely together, this highlighting might overlap other buttonswith ugly results.

If you're absolutely , positively sure that you want the freedom to drag buttons around into new positions, open the Customize drawer. Click the Settings button at the top, and then in the lower third of the pane, turn on Free Position. Now the buttons are liberated from their grid. (You may want to choose Advanced Show TV Safe Area so that you dont wind up dragging the buttons off the TV screen.)

Apple disavows all responsibility for the cosmetic quality of the results.

Tip: At any time, you can make your buttons snap back to their original positions by choosing Snap to Grid from the Settings pane.

15.6.6. Reordering Buttons

Apple may not want you to drag buttons randomly around the screen, but reordering them is a different story. See Figure 15-11.

Figure 15-11. Dragging one button on top of another generally swaps the two positions only if they're adjacent. More often, if you drag the first button into the fourth position, the sequence becomes #2, #3, #4, #1 (instead of just swapping #1 and #4). iDVD attempts to maintain as much of the original sequence as possible, so that when your audience uses the remote control's arrow button on the resulting DVDs, the highlighting won't jump around confusingly.

15.6.7. Removing Buttons

To remove a button from a menu screen, click it and then press the Delete key.

Tip: You can also click the first button, and then Shift-click another button, to highlight all of the buttons in between. Or

-click individual buttons to highlight only those.

Of course, if your purpose in removing a button is to move it to a different menu screen, you can use the Cut and Paste commands in the Edit menu. (See page 393 for details on navigating screens.)

15.6.8. Setting Button Images

In some themesincluding all of the iDVD 5 designsthe buttons on your menu screen are just bits of text.

In some older themes, though, the buttons can actually be icons, pictures, or tiny movie clips that preview what's in store if viewers click it. In those situations, here's how you specify what that image is.

15.6.8.1 Moving previews

Suppose you have a button that, when clicked, plays a movie you've created. Here's where you can make iDVD display up to 30 seconds of that movie right there on the button.

Tip: A button can display video only if that button actually links to a videonot to a folder or a slideshow, as described in the next chapter.

Select the button.

When you click a button, a slider and a Movie checkbox appear above it, as shown in Figure 15-12.

Figure 15-12. Turn on Movie to create a video button. Use the slider to specify where you want the tiny button movie to begin looping.
Turn on Motion, if necessary.

If motion isn't already turned on, click the round Motion button at the bottom of the iDVD window. (The button turns green when it's on, gray when it's not.) All the little movie buttons come to life, all playing simultaneously .

Note: If your movie clips don't start playing, don't worry. Some menus, including Kids Theater Two, come with their button loop times set to zero.To make your video buttons come alive , you have to adjust their timing manually, as described below.
Make sure the Movie checkbox is turned on. Drag the slider to the spot where you want playback to begin.

The slider is a map of your entire movie, from start to end. Pinpoint where you want the button's video playback to begin. You've just set what Apple calls the poster frame for the linked movie.

So how do you specify where you want the buttons' looping video to end?
Make sure the Customize drawer is open. Click the Settings icon at the top, and then drag the Menu Duration slider to specify how many seconds of video you want your buttons to loop.

The maximum loop time varies by theme and project. For some themes, you can specify a loop of up to 30, which should be plenty of time for your audience member to make a selection from the menu screen. In other themes, the loops can last as long as your movies. That's a very long time, menu-wise.

Note, however, that changing this duration affects the loop times of all the menu buttons, and the looping time of the background video (see "Drop Zones" on the facing page). Also keep in mind that all your motion menu times added together cannot exceed 15 minutes for your entire project.
Click anywhere on the background to hide the slider and the Movie checkbox.

If Motion is turned on, you'll see the video begin playing on the button immediately.

Tip: If your video buttons don't seem to be moving, remember to set their loop lengths to more than 0 seconds, as described in step 4. Also confirm that you've turned on the Motion button at the bottom of the screen, so that it's green.

15.6.8.2 A still frame from the movie

Instead of a looping video, your button's face can display a still image that comes from a particular frame of the movie. This is a typical style in Hollywood DVD movies, where a still image represents the scene that lies behind each button.

The steps are exactly the same as described in the previous sectionexcept that you turn off the Movie checkbox shown in Figure 15-12.

15.6.8.3 Drop a picture or movie

The picture on a button doesn't have to be a scene from the movie. It can be any graphic you want. Just drag any graphics file right onto the button itself; you'll see the button image change instantly.

This graphic can come from just about anywhere. For example:

The Finder. Drag any graphics file out of a folder window or from the desktop.
iPhoto. In the Customize drawer, click the Media button and choose Photos from the pop-up menu. You now see a list of all of the albums in your Mac's iPhoto collection. You can drag any photo onto a button to install it as the new button face.

15.6.9. Drop Zones

Drop zones let you use video, slideshows, and graphics as the backgrounds of your menu screens. Not every theme offers drop zones, but nearly all of the new 5.0 themes do: Travel Cards, Sliding Panes, Anime Pop, Baby Mobile, and so forth. As if you couldn't guess, the words "Drop Zone" (see Figure 15-13) indicate where the drop zones are.

GEM IN THE ROUGH
Secrets of the Theme Scrubber

iDVD 5's new scrubber bar (the thin white scroll bar beneath the menu screen) lets you preview an entire theme at once. Just drag the scroll bar handle to view how the theme and its drop zones change over time.

Many themes, including the one shown here, include a "play once" introductiona preliminary animation that plays before your menu buttons even appear. It's represented in iDVD by a crosshatched area of the scrubber bar, to the left of the main section (which represents the looping portion of your menu animation).

At times, you might want to turn off that introductory animation, especially when you're designing secondary menu screens (like the Scene Selection screen). If you turn off the checkbox to the left of the scrubber, you hide the crosshatched section of the scrubber bar. You also eliminate the introductory portion, both as it plays in iDVD and on the final, burned DVD. Now only the main, looping portion of the menu-screen animation will play. (You can always restore the intro by turning the checkbox back on again.)

Speaking of scrubber-bar secrets: If you turn off the Motion button at the bottom of the iDVD screen, you bring the menu's animation to a halt. (The menu will be frozen on the finished DVD, too.)

But once Motion is turned off, you can drag the thumb on the scrubber bar to find the most attractive moment in the preprogrammed background animation. Whatever frame you bring into view this way remains the permanent still background for your menu screen. (Permanent, at least, until you adjust the scrubber bar again or turn Motion back on.)

Tip: If you don't see the telltale phrase "Drop Zone" followed by a number, choose iDVD

Preferences. Click the General icon, and then turn on Show Drop Zones. (This checkbox just hides the words "Drop Zone," not the drop zones themselves .)

Figure 15-13. Top: The words "Drop Zone" show you where each drop zone is. In some themes, a preliminary animation appears before your main-menu buttons do; that interval is represented by the notched area on the scroll bar.
Bottom: Drop zones aren't always perfect rectangles or squares, so your video may get clipped around the edges. On the other hand, you can drag the picture or movie around within the drop zone outline so that the most important part shows up. In this theme, the animated fish actually swims around in front of whatever's in the drop zone!

Here's how drop zones work:

Adding to a drop zone. Drag any video, photo album, image, or collection of images right into a drop zone outline to install it there. You can drag icons out of the Finder, or directly out of the Media pane in the Customize drawer.

Tip: Albums in drop zones can display 30 images at most. What you'll get is a mini-slideshow, right there within the drop zone. (More on dragging out of the Photos pane in Chapter 16.)
Replacing items in a drop zone. To replace what you've installed in a drop zone, just drag something new into it.

Removing items from a drop zone. To delete an item in the drop zone, drag it away from the spot, just as you'd drag something off the Mac OS X Dock or the Sidebar. You get a cute little puff of smoke to indicate the movie or picture's disappearance. (If you drag it onto a menu button in the process of removing it from the drop zone, it becomes a video menu button.)

Figure 15-14. Top: When you click the drop zone itself, a transparent control panel appears just above it. Use the slider to specify which photo appears on the button, or click the Edit Order button to open the Drop Zone editor.
Bottom: In the Drop Zone slideshow editor window, a thumbnail display lets you drag the photos around. (The two buttons in the lower-left corner of the editor switch between this column view and an icon-based view.) Reorder the slides until your aesthetic sensibilities are satisfied, and then click Return twiceonce to return to the Drop Zone Editor screen (Figure 15-15), and again to go back to the menu editor screen.

Editing a drop zone slideshow. If you've decided to create a mini-slideshow within the drop zone, you may wonder how you're supposed to adjust the order of the photos. Figure 15-14 tells all.

Tip: Instead of clicking the drop zone and then clicking Edit Order, you can just double-click the drop zone. You go straight to the Drop Zone Editor window.
Add sounds. Drop zones have no sound, although you can import audio into the menu screen that contains the drop zone. See page 425.
Turning on Motion. If you've installed video into a drop zone and it doesn't seem to be playing, click the round Motion button at the bottom of the iDVD window. (When it's turned on, the button is green; when it's turned off, it's gray.) If it still doesn't seem to be playing, the menu duration may be set to 0 (page 370).

Turning off Motion also turns off any background audio track and brings motion menus and motion buttons to a standstill. (Caution: The status of this button affects both your onscreen project and the final DVD.)

Locating a drop zone. As noted above, drop zones in several iDVD 5 themes appear only one at a time. To see them all (so that you can fill them with pictures or movies), drag the thin white scroll bar at the bottom of the menu screen until the zone you want flies into view.

Alternately, you can visit the Drop Zone Editor window, which appears when you either double-click a drop zone or choose Project Edit Drop Zones. Figure 15-15 shows how to use this new iDVD 5 feature. (Click Return when youre done.)

Figure 15-15. The Drop Zone Editor screen lets you view (and modify) all of a menu's drop zones at once. Drag and drop pictures, movies, or photo albums from the Customize drawer into the broad dropzone rows, as shown here. To clear a drop zone, drag from the well clear out of the window. You can also double-click a thumbnail to open the corresponding editor (to rearrange a slideshow, for example).

Changing the duration. Use the Settings pane in the Customize drawer to adjust the loop duration for your menus (how long a movie clip plays before starting over). Whatever time you specify here controls the loop length of movies in menu backgrounds, video buttons, and drop zones.

Note: If you drag a movie into a drop zone, you can't control where the movie begins as you can with button movies. In a drop zone, a movie always begins at the beginning. Startling, huh?

15.6.10. Redesigning the Theme

You can change every tiny aspect of your themethe music, the background, the colors, the fonts, and so onif you have the time and patience. If you're so inclined, turn to Chapter 17 for a full discussion of theme creation.