Section 16.6. DVD Slideshows
16.6. DVD SlideshowsThe DVD may be the world's best delivery mechanism for digital photos. Your friends and family sit there on the couchin the comfort of their own living room, as the saying goes. They click the remote control to walk through your photos (or, if you choose, they relax and let the slideshow advance automatically). Instead of passing around a tiny pile of fragile 4 x 6 prints, your audience gets to watch the photos at TV-screen sizeaccompanied by a musical soundtrack of your choice. If you've installed movies into an iDVD menu screen, installing photos will seem like a piece of cake. Once again, you can do so using several different methods , each with its own advantages:
Tip: A DVD slideshow ( any DVD, not just those produced by iDVD) can contain at most 99 slides, and one DVD can contain at most 99 slideshows. The designers of the DVD format obviously recognized that there's a limit to the patience of home slideshow audiences. 16.6.1. iPhoto AlbumsYou can use either of two approaches to create iDVD slideshows from your iPhoto album collection. One way begins in iPhoto; the other begins in iDVD. 16.6.1.1 Starting in iPhoto As part of the much-heralded integration of iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, and iDVD, iPhoto 5 offers a menu choice that exports albums and slideshows to iDVD. In the iPhoto Source list, click the album or slideshow you want to export, choose Share Tip: If you do a lot of this, you can add a Send to iDVD button to your iPhoto toolbar (at the bottom of the window). Just choose Share  Show in Toolbar Send to iDVD. slideshowa collection of pictures that your DVD audience can peruse, one at a time, using the arrow buttons on their remote controls. The rest of this discussion applies to these DVD slideshows. In iDVD, a slideshow looks like a submenu button that bears the name of the album you exported. Double-click it to view the list of pictures inside, change their sequence, and make other adjustments, as described on page 405. Tip: If you make changes to your iPhoto albumby adding photos or rearranging them, for exampleclick iPhoto's iDVD button again. Instead of adding a second copy to your DVD project, iDVD is smart enough to update the existing slideshow. Thanks to this smart feature, you can update your albums as often as you like without any adverse affects on your iDVD project.Note, however, that you don't enjoy this luxury when you use the Photos pane within iDVD. Dragging an album out of the Photos pane onto a menu a second time gives you a second copy.
16.6.1.2 Starting in iDVDIf you haven't already been working in iPhoto, there's an even easier way to turn iPhoto albums into living slideshows. Just open the Customize drawer, click the Media tab, choose Photos from the pop-up menu, and voil : You're presented with the tiny thumbnails of every digital photo in your collection. You even get to see the list of albums, exactly as they appear in iPhoto (Figure 16-11). 16.6.2. Drag Photo Folders from the FinderSuppose you don't keep all of your pictures in iPhoto. (Hey, it could happen.) In that case, you may prefer to drag a folder of photos out of the Finder and onto an iDVD menu screen. (Make sure that the folder contains nothing but pictures. If it contains any other kind of document, or even other folders, iDVD may complain that it can't handle the "Unsupported File Type: Unknown Format.") In any case, the folder shows up on the menu screen as a new slideshow button. You're ready to edit your slideshow, as described below. 16.6.3. Add a Slideshow, Worry about the Pictures LaterIf all of your photographic masterpieces aren't already together in iPhoto or even in a Finder folder, you can also bring them into iDVD individually. To do that, start by creating a new slideshow folder: Click the Slideshow button near the bottom-left of the iDVD window (or choose Project 16.6.4. Editing SlideshowsNo matter how you got your slideshow folder button into iDVD, you edit it the same way: by double-clicking it to open iDVD's Slideshow Editor. See Figure 16-12 for a quick tour. 16.6.4.1 Adding or omitting slidesIf you want to add new pictures to the slideshow, use any of the following techniques:
Tip: Before clicking Open, you can highlight several photos to bring them all in at once. If the ones you want appear consecutively in the list, click the first one, and then Shift-click the last one, to highlight all of them. If not,  click each photo file that you want to import.Either way, click Open to bring them all into iDVD simultaneously . To remove a picture from the list, just click it and then press the Delete key. You can also remove a whole bunch of pictures simultaneously by first Shift-clicking them or 16.6.4.2 Reordering SlidesChanging the sequence of slides involves little more than dragging them to their new position. Yet again, you can select multiple slides at once (see the preceding Tip) and then drag them en masse. 16.6.5. Slideshow OptionsiDVD offers some useful options at the bottom of the Slideshow Editor window:
In Cube, your slides rotate as though they're on the sides of a 3-D virtual picture cube. (If you're familiar with Apple's Keynote program, or if you've used Mac OS X's Fast User Switching feature, you've seen this animation before.) Use the arrows in the circle next to the pop-up menu to select the direction for the rotation. Dissolve produces a standard (but gorgeous) crossfade effect, dissolving from one image to the next. In Droplet , a water-like wave allows each photo to progress to the next one. Fade Through Black brings back the look of an old carousel slide projector, as each slide fades in and out from black. Each of the Flip options rotates an image from back to front to back again, updating to a new image each time it turns. Choose a direction for your flip. To use Mosaic Flip Large and Mosaic Flip Small, choose a direction as well. Segments of your slide flip over, as though on a mosaic with loose tiles, to reveal a new image. Page Flip looks like an animated page turn. You choose the direction that each image is "paged" off the screen. Wipe is similar, except that here, one slide "wipes" across the previous one in the direction you specify. When using Push, choose a direction. Your slides will "scroll" in that direction, with each new picture pushing the previous one out of the way. Reveal look like a stack of photos, as each picture sequentially slides away in the direction you pick. If you're sure your audience will have a strong stomach, Twirl does exactly what the name suggests. It rotates away each picture before rotating in the next. If you don't want any transition animation, choose None. iDVD will simply cut from one slide to the next. Tip: iDVD can put crossfades and transitions between menus , too. That way, when your audience clicks a button on the main menu screen, the screen doesn't just jump cut to the selected move or slideshow; it crossfades, wipes, rotates on the face of a cube, or whatever.To specify which transition you'd like, open the Customize drawer and click the Settings button at the top. Select one or more menu buttons and then use the Transition pop-up menu to specify the effect you want. (In iDVD 5, you can use a different transition for each button.) 16.6.5.1 Slideshow AudioMusic has a profound impact on the effect of a photo slideshow. You can't appreciate how dramatic the difference is until you watch the same slideshow with and without music playing. iDVD starts out with whatever music you've selected in iPhoto, but if "Minuet in G" isn't your thing, fear not. You can use any music you like. The easiest way to add music to your slideshow is to open the Customize drawer, click the Media button at the top, and select Audio from the pop-up. Conveniently enough, iDVD shows your entire iTunes music collection, complete with any playlists you've assembled (Figure 16-13).
Tip: This list also in DVD slideshows includes any music you've created yourself using GarageBand (and exported to iTunes). Such songs make great slideshow soundtracks , because you've tailored them to the mood and the length of the show. When you find suitable musical accompaniment, drag its name out of the iTunes list and onto the rounded rectanglethe well, as Apple calls itlabeled Audio (also shown in Figure 16-13). You can even drag an entire playlist into the well; the DVD will play one song after another according to the playlist, so that the music won't die ignominiously in the middle of the slide show. You can also drag a sound file from any Finder window or the desktopand directly onto this Audio well. Tip: When it's empty, the Audio well looks like a small speaker. When it's occupied, its icon identifies the kind of audio file you've installed; the little icon will say, for example, AIFF, AU, or MP3. The icon used when you add a playlist rather than a single song varies, usually showing the first audio file type used in the playlist. To try out a different piece of background music, drag a new song or audio file into the Audio well. And if you decide that you don't want music at all, drag the file icon directly out of the Audio well and onto any other part of the screen. You see an animated puff of smoke confirm your decision. Tip: If you can play a sound file in iTunes, you can include it in an iDVD project. If not, use a converter program to bring it into a usable format. For example, iTunes can't import MIDI files, but GarageBand canand GarageBand can export to AIFF, a format that iTunes understands.Curiously enough, iTunes can play back soundtracks from iMovie projects. Just drag your iMovie HD project into iTunes and then import them into iDVD from your media pane. You can also drag a QuickTime movie directly onto the Audio well and drop it in. iDVD uses the first audio track. 16.6.6. Leaving the Slideshow EditorTo return to iDVD's menu editor, click the Return button at the bottom right of the Slideshow Editor. 16.6.7. Burning Your SlideshowOnce you've designed a slideshow DVD, previewing it and burning it onto a blank DVD works exactly as described beginning on page 375. Since most people have never thrilled to the experience of viewing a digital-camera slideshow on their TV sets, a few notes are in order:
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