More iDVD Tips

Painless Pane Switching

You want to drag a movie, audio file, or image into the Menu pane, but the Media pane is currently visible. How do you get your media from here to there? Easy: just drag the media's icon over the Menu button and pause there for a momentiDVD switches to the Menu pane. Now continue dragging into the Background or Audio well.

Browsing Other Folders

You can use the Preferences command to tell iDVD to search other folders and hard drives when displaying its movie browser (page 290). You can expand your browsing options for audio and photos, too. Just drag a folder from the Finder into the appropriate media browser.

This also works for the movie browserand it's a handy alternative to the Preferences dialog box.

Hacking iDVD Themes

Previous versions of iDVD stored the themes within the application itself, but for iDVD 6, Apple moved them to a more sensible location: Computer > Library > Application Support > iDVD > Themes.

Each theme (which ends with the text .theme) is also a packageto explore it, Control-click on its icon and choose Show Package Contents from the shortcut menu. Double-click the Contents folder and then the Resources folder, and you'll find background movies and audio loops. To extract an itemfor example, to grab the background audio from the Drive In One themepress Option while dragging the item's icon out to the desktop. This makes a duplicate of the item, leaving the original theme unchanged.

Take care to not throw away or alter any resources whose purpose you don't understand, lest you have to reinstall the iDVD application.

From PDF to DVD

An iDVD slide show isn't restricted to the JPEG image format. A slide show can display numerous graphics formats, including PDF.

iDVD's PDF support means that you can display just about any document in a slide show. Want to put a Microsoft Word document or a Web page in a slide show? Create a PDF version of the document: choose Print from the File menu, then click the Save as PDF button. Drag the PDF into the iDVD slide show editor, and iDVD creates a slide containing the contents of the PDF's first page. (If you have a multi-page document, save each page as a separate PDF or use the Preview application to extract specific pages, as described in the following tip.)

Before making a PDF of a document, you might want to choose the Page Setup command and click the landscape-orientation button. That way, your PDF will have the same horizontal orientation as a slide. If you make the PDF in portrait orientation, your slide will have black borders on either side of the page.

Think twice about using a PDF that contains lots of text, especially in font sizes below 14 point. Small text looks fuzzy on a TV screen.

From iPhoto Book to Slide Show

On page 193, I discussed a method for saving an iPhoto book as a PDF and then extracting pages for printing. Here's a variation of that technique that lets you include iPhoto book pages in iDVD slide shows.

After saving your book as a PDF, open the PDF in Mac OS X's Preview program. Next, open Preview's drawer (choose Drawer from the View menu). In the drawer, locate the page that you want to turn into a slide. Select the page and choose Copy from the Edit menu.

Next, choose the New from Clipboard command from the File menu. The Preview program creates a new document and pastes the page you copied into it.

Now add that page to your slide show. Position the iDVD and Preview windows so you can see them both. Then, drag the thumbnail from the new Preview document you created into the iDVD window.

You don't have to save the Preview documentsyou're simply using Preview as a tool for extracting individual pages from your book's PDF.

Get links to background animations and other iDVD add-ons. www.macilife.com/iDVD

By the way, if you've tried the technique on page 193, you may be wondering why you can't use Preview to extract a PDF for poster printing. The reason is that Preview generates a low-resolution (72 dots per inch) PDF. That's too low for good-quality printing but fine for a TV-bound slide show.

Making Custom Motion Menus

You aren't limited to the motion menus that accompany iDVD. You can make any QuickTime movie a motion menu background: just drag the movie to the Background well in the Menu pane.

If your motion menu movie is smaller than full-screen, iDVD enlarges it to fit. For the best video quality, use a movie whose dimensions are 640 by 480 pixels or 720 by 480 pixels.

As for what to put in your own custom menu, that's up to you. If the star of your DVD is an iMovie production, you might use a two- or three-minute excerpt of your movie. (Select a few clips in the timeline, then click the Share Selected Clips Only option in iMovie's Share dialog box.) Open a new iMovie project, bring that footage in, then use iMovie's Brightness & Contrast effect to make the footage appear faint. That way, buttons and text labels will still be easy to read. Save your work, then drag the movie to the Background well in iDVD's Menu pane.

Smooth looping. A motion menu loops until a user chooses a menu option. To avoid a visually jarring loop point, try this: In iMovie, create a still frame of the very first frame of your menu movie. Add this still frame to the very end of the movie, and put a fairly lengthy (say, two-second) dissolve between the end of the movie and the still frame. Finally, use direct trimming to make the remainder of the still frame as short as possible. (Drag its right edge to the left until it's right next to the dissolve in the timeline.) Now, when your movie loops, its last frame will appear to gradually dissolve into its first frame.

If you're after something more abstract, you can buy royalty-free libraries of animated backgrounds that you can use as motion menus. Two sources are ArtBeats (www.artbeats.com) and Digital Juice (www.digitaljuice.com). If you have Final Cut Pro, you can use its LiveType program to create rich animated textures.

A motion menu in iDVD can be up to 15 minutes long. But keep in mind that menu video uses disc space just like any other video clip.

Automating iDVD

iDVD provides thorough support for AppleScript, the automation technology that's built into Mac OS X. iDVD's AppleScript support enables you to create scripts that automate the creation and layout of DVDs.

The ultimate example of iDVD's autopilot features is a free utility that Apple has created called iDVD Companion. iDVD Companion is a program that runs alongside iDVD, adding a window containing three tabs that let you nudge buttons in single-pixel increments, align multiple buttons, and specify the exact pixel location of a menu's titleall things that iDVD alone can't do.

To download iDVD Companion and other iDVD scripts, visit www.apple.com/applescript/iDVD. At this writing, the scripts hadn't been updated since iDVD 2.1 came out in 2002. Test the scripts before running them while working on a critical project. Or just use them as a source of iDVD automation ideas.

Back to the Top

If you have a DVD containing several levels of submenus, you might want to offer your viewers a button that lets them get back to the uppermost, or title, menu. To do so, choose Project > Add Title Menu Button.