12.1. The iDVD Slideshow You don't actually need iPhoto to create a slideshow in iDVD. By itself, iDVD has all the tools you need to create interactive DVDs that include movies and soundtracks as well as slideshows. But using iPhoto can save you a lot of time and trouble. You can use iPhoto to preview, edit, and organize all your photos into albums. Then, once your photos are arranged into neatly organized albums, one click hands them off to iDVD, which converts them into a DVD-readable format. iDVD also hooks up all the navigational links and menus needed to present the show. 12.1.1. Creating an iDVD Slideshow Creating a DVD of your own photos entails choosing the photos that you've organized in iPhoto, selecting a theme, building menus, and configuring the settings that determine how your slideshow will look and operate . Finally, you can preview the entire DVD (without actually burning a disc) to test navigation, pacing, and other settings. When the whole thing looks right, you burn the final disc. You can begin in either of two ways: from iPhoto or from iDVD. The following pages walk you through both methods . 12.1.1.1 Starting in iPhoto By beginning your odyssey in iPhoto, you can save a few steps. -
Select the photos you want to turn into a slideshow. You can select a freely chosen batch of individual photos (see the selection tricks on page 109) or you can click almost anything in the Source list ”like an album, smart album, Last 12 Months icon, or whatever. If you select a slideshow icon, you'll commit the entire slideshow, complete with transition effects and music (Chapter 7), to DVD. (Once it's in iDVD, however, you won't be able to make changes to the slides or music.) You can even select multiple albums in the Source list at once. If you want to include your entire Photo Library in the slideshow, click the Photo Library icon. Either way, you can't have more than 99 photos in a slideshow.
-
Choose Share  Send to iDVD (Figure 12-1). This is the big hand-off. iDVD opens up a default presentation window (see Figure 12-2). See how the names of your selected albums are already listed as menu items that can be "clicked" with the DVD's remote control? If you included your whole photo collection when exporting to iDVD, the sole menu item is called Photo Library. If you chose only a subset of the pictures in one album, the menu item is named for that album. Technically, at this point, your slideshow is ready to meet its public. If you're looking for some instant gratification, click Preview on the bottom of the window to flip iDVD into presentation mode. Then click the name of your album as it appears on the DVD menu page to begin the show. Use the iDVD remote control shown in Figure 12-7 to stop, pause, or rewind the show in progress. To really make the finished show your own, though, you'll want to spend a few minutes adding some custom touches. See "Customizing theShow" on page 307.  | Figure 12-2. Here's what you see when iDVD first opens. The name of each iPhoto album you exported appears on the main menu page of the DVD. Click a name once to select it, and (after a pause) click again to edit and change it. Double-click a menu title quickly to open a window where you can view thumbnails of the included pictures and change their order.
By the way, the design scheme here is iDVD's factory setting. If your DVD is not going to be about travel, read on to find out how to change this starter design and fill in those Drop Zones. | |
12.1.1.2 Starting in iDVD You can also begin building the show right in iDVD. To see how, click the Customize button (shown in lower left of Figure 12-2). The slide-out Customize"drawer"opens. Click the Media tab, and from the pop-up menu, choose Photos (see Figure 12-3); if you don't see this drawer , click the Customize button. You now see a tiny iPhoto window, right there in iDVD, complete with thumbnails of your photos (and even movie clips), your Source list, and even a Search box. Each album you drag out of the list and onto the main iDVD stage area becomes another menu name that your audience will be able to click with their remotes. (If the album won't "stick" and bounces back to the Source list, it's because either that album or that menu screen is too full. iDVD doesn't like albums that hold more than 99 photos, or menu screens with more than 12 buttons .)
Tip: You can also drag photos, or folders full of them, right off your Finder desktop and onto the main menu screen to install them there as slideshows.
 | Figure 12-3. Look familiar? Yep, it's your Source list from iPhoto.
All the hard work you've done in iPhoto titling your photos and organizing them into albums pays off now, when you're designing your DVD. You can even use the Search box to find photos by name or comments.
It's worth noting, too, that your iPhoto movie clips even appear here. That's handy, because you can use movie clips in iDVD in so many ways ”as filler for a drop zone, as a menu background, or as even as a standalone movie on the DVD. | |
If you've selected some music to accompany the slideshow of that album in iPhoto, then iDVD remembers, and plays it automatically when you play the DVD slideshow. (Unlike iDVD 4, iDVD 5 remembers either a single song or whatever playlist of music you'd chosen.) To assign different music, choose Audio from the pop-up menu at the top of the Customize drawer and survey your iTunes collection. When you find a song or playlist that seems right, double-click the name of your slideshow to reveal the Slideshow Editor window shown in Figure 12-4. Drag the playlist or song onto the little square Audio "well,"also shown in Figure 12-4. (Click the Return button to return to the menu-design page.)  | Figure 12-4. In the Media panel of the Customize drawer, choose Audio. You see your entire list of iTunes music ”in fact, you even see your playlists here. To avoid the music ending-too-soon syndrome, drag an entire playlist into the little Audio well beneath the slide display. Your DVD will play one song after another according to the playlist. | |
12.1.2. Customizing the Show iDVD provides an impressive number of options for customizing the look, feel, and sound of the slideshows you create, including its overall design scheme. That's merciful, because otherwise , every DVD you create would look like a Travel album. -
Choose a Theme. With the Customize drawer open as shown in Figure 12-5, click the Themes button at the top to reveal the list of ready-to-use visual themes that you can apply to your slideshow. Click a theme to apply it to your DVD's main-menu screen. -
Add your own background graphics, if you like. All themes let you drop in a background photo. (Click Settings in the Customize drawer, and drag the picture into the Background well.) Some let you drop a photo into more interesting, animated regions of the background called drop zones, as described in Figure 12-5. -
Add, remove, and reorder your pictures. When you bring albums into iDVD directly from iPhoto, your photos arrive in the same sequence as they appeared within their iPhoto albums. Once you're in iDVD, however, you can change the order of these photos, remove them from the show, or add others. To edit a slideshow in this way, double-click its title on the DVD menu page ("The New Baby" in Figure 12-5, for example).  | Figure 12-5. In this animated main-menu screen (the theme called Baby Mobile), the mobile actually rotates as music plays. As for the photos in the frames : They're "drop zones," which are areas that you can fill with photos or movies of your choosing. (Click the Media button at top, choose Photos or Movies, and drag the pictures or movies you want directly into the drop zones. And if they're moving too fast, click Motion to freeze them in place.) | | The slideshow editing window shown in Figure 12-6 appears. In this window, you can also set up other options, like switching between automatic and manual advancing of photos, selecting a different soundtrack, and adding navigation buttons to a slideshow. You can rearrange the slides by dragging them (the other slides scoot aside to make room), delete selected slides by pressing the Delete key, or add more pictures to them by dragging new photos from the Customize drawer or the Finder. Then, of course, there are the controls at the bottom of the window. They offer a great deal of control over the show. For example: Loop slideshow makes the slideshow repeat endlessly. Display navigation adds Previous and Next navigation arrows to the screen as your slideshow plays. Your audience can click these buttons with their remote controls to move back and forth in your slideshow. The arrows aren't technically necessary, of course. If you set your slides to advance automatically (read on), you won't need navigation arrows. And even if you set up the slideshow for manual advance, your audience can always press the arrow buttons on their DVD remote to advance the slides. But if you think they need a visual crutch, this option is here. Add files to DVD-ROM is an interesting one. When iDVD creates a slideshow, it scales all of your photos to 640 by 480 pixels. That's ideal for a standard television screen, which can't display any resolution higher than that. But if you intend to distribute your DVD to somebody who's computer savvy, you may want to give them the original, full-resolution photos. They won't see these photos when they insert the disc into a DVD player. But when they insert your DVD into their computers, they'll see a folder filled with the original, high-res photos, suitable for printing, using as Desktop wallpaper, paying you for, and so on. (In other words, you've created a disc that's both a DVD-video disc and a DVD-ROM.) Slide Duration lets you specify how much time each slide spends on the screen before the next one appears: 1, 3, 5, 10 seconds, or Manual. Manual means that your audience will have to press the Next button on the remote control to change pictures. Then there's the Fit to Audio option, which appears in the pop-up menu only after you've added a sound file to your slideshow. In this case, iDVD determines the timing of your slides automatically ”by dividing the length of the soundtrack by the number of slides in your show. For example, if the song is 60 seconds long and the show has 20 slides, each slide will sit on the screen for three seconds.  | Figure 12-6. Changing the sequence of slides involves little more than dragging them up or down in the list. As in iPhoto, you can select multiple slides at once and then drag them en masse.
Don't miss the tiny icon at the top-right corner of the window. It switches to a list view that reveals the names of the photos ”and still lets you drag them up or down to rearrange them.
Click Return to go back to your main-menu design screen. | | Transition lets you specify any of several graceful transition effects ”Dissolve, Cube, and so on ”to govern how one slide morphs into the next. Whatever transition you specify here affects all slides in the show. -
Add more menu pages and slideshows, if you like. The "home page"(main menu) for your DVD can show no more than 12buttons. If you have more than 11 slideshows to store, you can create a secondary menu page to hold the overflow. In that case, you'll use one of the 12 buttons as a "More Shows " button that takes your viewers to that page. If you're making a "Family Photos 2005" DVD, for instance, you might create a separate menu page called Holidays with its own theme. On that page, you can add slideshows like Halloween, Labor Day Weekend, and so on. To add a new menu page in iDVD, click the Folder button in the main iDVD window; a corresponding menu button called My Folder appears on the main "home page." Double-click "My Folder" to open your secondary, empty menu page. Then add slideshows to it by dragging albums onto it from the mini-iPhoto browser shown in Figure 12-3. At any time, you can return to the main menu by clicking the Back button (a left-pointing arrow). Once you're there, don't forget to rename the My Folder menu button to say, for example, "More Shows." -
Click the Return button to go back to the menu-design screen. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Crazy-Fast Slideshows | | I turned a photo album into a slideshow in iDVD and it came out perfect ”except that when I preview the slideshow, iDVD acts like it's on amphetamines and races frantically through the photos, flashing each one so briefly that you can hardly see it. What's going on? Meet the Fit to Audio feature. You turn it on using the Slide Duration pop-up menu shown in Figure 12-6. This option is designed help you make your photos and your music end tidily together. It essentially divides the song length by the number of photos you've selected. For example, if you've selected a one-minute soundtrack and you have 99 photos in your album, iDVD will try to flash one photo every six-tenths of a second to make the pictures "fit" the soundtrack! You could end up having the same problem if you've chosen a more reasonable number of slides but a very short soundtrack. You can solve the problem when editing a slideshow in iDVD by changing the Slide Duration setting from Fit to Audio to a specific interval, like 3 Seconds or 5 Seconds. |
12.1.2.1 Previewing the DVD Your last step before burning a disc is to test your DVD presentation to check navigation, timing, photo sequences, and so on. -
Click the Preview button. iDVD switches into Preview mode, which simulates how your disc will behave when inserted into a DVD player. This is a great chance to put your DVD-in-waiting through its paces before wasting an expensive blank disc. -
Use the iDVD remote control to click your menu buttons, stop, pause, or rewind the show in progress (Figure 12-7).  | Figure 12-7. When you put iDVD in Preview mode (by clicking the Preview button) a small remote control panel appears next to the main window. It works just like your real DVD player's remote control. You can pause, rewind, or fast-forward slideshows. Clicking the Menu button takes you out of a slideshow and back to the main menu page of the DVD, where you can select other slideshows or movies to view. | | Incidentally, if it occurs to you that iDVD is adding an awfully big margin of blackness around every photo, it's not your imagination .It's a long story, but a good one: In its early days, the little cathode -ray guns inside the TV worked by painting one line of the TV picture, then turning around and heading back in the opposite direction. To make sure that the screen was painted edge to edge, these early TVs were programmed to overshoot the edges of the screen. To use the technical term , they overscanned the screen. TV technology is much better now, but even modern TVs exhibit some overscanning. The amount varies, but you may be missing as much as 10 percent of the picture beyond the edges of the glass. The overscanning effect means that when you show your slides on a TV, you'll lose anything that's very close to the edges of the frame. To help you avoid this problem, iDVD automatically shrinks your photos to within that 10 percent margin. See Figure 12-8 for details. -
Click the Exit button on the "remote" when you're finished. When everything in the DVD looks good, you're ready to master your disc. Insert a blank disc in your SuperDrive and click the Burn button.
|
