Section 15.6. Phase 4: Design the Menu Screen | iMovie 6 & iDVD: 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 (Figure 15-5). 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.

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 or press -B.

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 Projects icon, turn off "Enable background encoding," and then close the Projects 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. (And triple-toed dire sloths can be very, very ravenous indeed.)

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 background music. iDVD 6 offers 10 new eye-catching new theme families that include a host of stunning effects. Each theme family contains a main menu screen, a chapter navigation screen and an "extras" screen for all those bonus DVD features you can build with iDVD.

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

Background image or video . Whatever art appears in the background, whether 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 does not affect the finished DVD, however.)
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 to 12 buttons, depending on the theme you've chosen . Themes are preset to place their buttons in certain favored positions.

Figure 15-7. iDVD Themes can create strikingly different menu screens for similar projects.
Top: The Pass Through theme (shown in the traditional 4:3, squarish shape here) uses a cut-out based on the project name to fly a video clip over a blurred background image.
Bottom: The Shelves Theme (shown in its widescreen , 16:9 shape) offers a simple and elegant theme. Its three drop zones let you insert your own photos (or videos ) into the little picture frames .
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.

Advanced dynamic drop zones can even move across the screen, 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, for example, provide 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 15-7 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 Travel theme. A wide range of canned themes awaits your inspection.

From the pop-up menu at the top of the Themes palette, choose a theme set . iDVD offers four built-in sets, each named for the version of iDVD that first included them: 6.0 Themes, 5.0 Themes, 4.0 Themes, and Old Themes (from iDVD 3).

Within each theme, you can often click the flippy triangle (Figure 15-6) to reveal variations of that themea complementary menu design for the scene-selection screen, for your DVD extras page, and so on. In all, you have 69 menu designs to choose from, which ought to keep you busy for awhile.

Tip: Many of the new iDVD 6 themes are designed to match the iMovie 6 themes described in Section 5.9.4. The idea is that both the DVD menu screens and the movie itself can now appear as a matched set.

If you've bought additional themes online, 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.

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.

Note: At first, clicking a different theme thumbnail may produce the baffling error message shown in Figure 15-9. For now, click Keepand then read the discussion in Section 15.6.4.

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.

In that case, when you click a theme thumbnail, iDVD asks if you want to apply the Theme Family to the entire project, so that the main menu and the Scene Selection menus match; almost always, this is what you want. Figure 15-8 shows how.

Note: You can also apply a theme to all the menus of a project later by choosing Advanced

Apply Theme to Project. Or you can apply a theme only to the submenusnot the main screenby choosing Advanced

Apply Theme to Submenus.)

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.

Tip: You can buy additional themes, or download free samples, from other companies (such as iDVDThemePAK.com ). 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.

15.6.3. The Inevitable Paragraphs About Aspect Ratio

As you probably know, there are two popular aspect ratios screen shapesfor television these days. There's the traditional shape, also known as squarish or 4:3 (that's the width-to-height ratio). And now there's widescreen, also known as 16:9. With every passing year, more people are switching to widescreen sets, because that's the shape of high-definition TV, and that's the future of television.

iDVD 6, as it turns out, can create DVDs in either format (see Figure 15-7).

Unfortunately, even if you have no intention of using different aspect ratios at different times, this issue is going to rear its ugly head in your everyday work.

You'll notice, for example, that when you're clicking various menu themes to see what they look like, you'll frequently be interrupted by the warning shown in Figure 15-9, asking if you want to change your Project Aspect Ratio. Almost always, you'll want to click Keep; why would you want to change your movie's shape just because you're changing menu themes?

Figure 15-9. You'll see this message whenever you select an iDVD theme that, behind the scenes, has been flagged with an aspect ratio that doesn't match your movie. Click Keep to keep the current settings.

Unfortunately, that little dialog box will keep popping upand don't think that turning on the "Do not ask me again" checkbox will solve the problem. It won't. That checkbox doesn't mean "Always keep the aspect ratio I've already got. "In fact, it means, "Always change the aspect ratio to the preferred format for the theme I've just clicked," which is probably not what you want. (Each iDVD 6 theme has a "preferred" setting, either standard or widescreen, that it tries to switch to at every opportunity.)

So how do you keep all of this straight without going insane? Here are two ways to deal with the frequent appearance of that Change Aspect Ratio box:

Each time the Change Aspect Ratio box appears, click Keep.
Turn on "Do not ask me again" checkbox, so the message never again appears. Each time you select a theme, iDVD may still attempt to switch your project's aspect ratiobut you can just use the Switch to Widescreen (or Switch to Standard) commands in the Project menu to correct the problem ( -Option-A).

Now, it's worth noting that permitting iDVD to switch your project to the widescreen format may not be the worst thing in the world. It turns out that all of the iDVD 6 themes have been cleverly designed to look great on both standard and widescreen TV sets. Figure 15-10 explains all.

So if the menu screens will always look good, regardless of TV shape, why not just choose widescreen format for every DVD you make?

Because the video in your DVD isn't so accommodating ! If it's been shot widescreen, and it's played back on a standard set, you'll probably wind up with letterbox bars (Section 9.1.3) above and below. And if it's been shot in standard 4:3 format, then playing it on a widescreen set will result in black bars on the sides.

The bottom line: Choose the aspect ratio for your DVD according to the aspect ratio of the video that's in it.

15.6.4. 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 .

15.6.4.1. 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.

Figure 15-10. Each of the new "widescreenable" themes comes in two versions: a standard 4:3 version (top) and a widescreen version (bottom). The question is, what happens if you create a widescreen DVDand then play it on a 4:3 standard television?
If you'd like to find out, choose View Show Standard Crop Area. iDVD responds by dimming the outer right and left edges of the picture, showing you which portions will not appear on a 4:3 traditional television. What youll discover is that Apple has cleverly designed the widescreen themes so that all the important stuffdrop zones, buttons, titles, and so onare close enough to the center that they won't be chopped off on a standard TV. In fact, in most cases, there's very little difference between the 4:3 version of a theme (top) and the not-chopped-off portion of a widescreen theme (bottom).
The bottom line: Choosing widescreen format for a DVD generally means that it will play beautifully on both standard and widescreen TV sets. But the video in the DVD is another matter.

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. Just press Return to start a new line; unlike previous versions of iDVD, iDVD 6 doesn't close the editing box when you press Return.

15.6.4.2. 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. There's no grid to guide you, so the new button positions might not look especially professional.

For example, when you play your finished 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 to drag buttons around into new positions, open the Buttons palette. In the lower part of the pane, turn on Free Positioning. Now the buttons are liberated from their grid. (You may want to choose View 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 buttons to grid" on the Buttons pane. It's kind of cool to watch, actually.

15.6.4.3. Reordering buttons

Apple may not want you to drag buttons randomly around the screen, but reordering them is a different story. Dragging one button on top of another generally swaps the two positions, but only if they're adjacent. Otherwise, if you drag the first button into the fourth position, the sequence becomes #2, #3, #4, #1 (instead of just swapping #1 and #4).

In other words, 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 doesn't jump around confusingly.

15.6.4.4. 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 you're removing a button in order to move it to a different menu screen, you can use the Cut and Paste commands in the Edit menu. (See Section 16.4.1 for details on navigating screens.)

15.6.4.5. Setting button images: Moving previews

In some themesincluding all of the new iDVD 6 main-menu screensthe buttons on your menu screen are just bits of text.

But in some of the older themes, and in the sub-menu chapter screens of some newer ones, buttons can actually be icons, pictures, or tiny movie clips that preview what's in store. In those situations, here's how you specify what that image is.

For example, 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 15-11.
Turn on Motion, if necessary .

If motion isn't already turned on, click the running-man buttonthe Motion buttonat the bottom of the iDVD window, or press -J. (The button turns blue when it's on.) All the little movie buttons come to life, all playing simultaneously .
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?
Click Menu. Drag the Loop Duration slider to specify how many seconds of video you want your buttons to play in each loop .

This slider affects the loop times of all the menu buttons, and the looping time of the background video (see "Drop Zones" on the facing page). Keep in mind that all your motion menu times added together can't exceed 15 minutes for your entire projecthalf that in widescreen projectsor 3 minutes for any single menu.
Click anywhere on the background to hide the slider and the Movie checkbox .

If Motion is turned on, the video begins 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 blue.

Figure 15-11. Turn on "Movie" to create a video button. Use the slider above the button to specify where you want the tiny movie to begin looping.

15.6.4.6. Setting button images: Still frames

Instead of a looping video, your button's face can display a still 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 15-11.

Note, though, that 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 . Click the Media button (lower right of iDVD) and then click Photos (upper right). 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.

15.6.5. Drop Zones

Drop zones let you use video, slideshows, or stills as the backgrounds of your menu screens. They're purely decorative , designed to entertain your audience as they study their choices on the menu. (You install these videos or pictures by dropping them into the designated zones in the menu designhence the name.) If you've worked with the new drop zones in iMovie (Section 5.11), then you already understand the concept.

Not every theme offers drop zones, but most of the iDVD 5 and 6 themes do. As if you couldn't guess, the words "Drop Zone" (see Figure 15-12) indicate where the drop zones are.

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 .)

GEM IN THE ROUGH
Secrets of the Theme Scrubber

iDVD 6's scrubber bar (the thin white scroll bar beneath the menu screen) lets you preview the animation for a certain theme. You can let it play automatically (click the Motion running-man button) or you can drag the scroll handle to zip through it, watching how the theme changes over time. Or press the arrow keys to step one frame at a 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). Some themes also have a crosshatched area at the end, a "play-out" portion that helps link back to the beginning of the loop.

At times, you might want to turn off that introductory animationfor example, 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 menuscreen 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 (running-man) 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.) Once Motion is turned off, you can drag the scrubber.

Choose View Hide Motion Playhead to tuck the scrubber bar out of sight and View Show Motion Playhead to bring it back.

Note, by the way, that not all drop zones may be on screen at once; the drop zones in several themes take their time in parading onto the screen, or rotating through it. To give yourself a quick tour of all the drop zones in your chosen theme, drag the handle of the thin white scroll bar at the bottom of the menu window to cycle through the entire presentation; see the box in Section 15.6.5 for details.

iDVD offers three different ways to fill these empty gray spaces with videos and pictures:

Drag directly into the full-size rectangle . This technique is shown in the top two examples in Figure 15-12. Most of the time, you'll be dragging videos or pictures from the Media pane. (Click the Media button at the lower-right corner of iDVD, and then click either Photos or Movies at the top.)

Figure 15-12. Double-click any drop zone to bring up the interactive Drop Zone palette shown here. Note that drop zones aren't always perfect rectangles or squares, so your video or photo may get clipped around the edges. You can fill a drop zone with individual photos, bunches of photos (for a slideshow effect), or movies.
Drag into the Drop Zone palette . The Drop Zone palette is a dark gray, transparent window that you can resize or drag around the screen, much like the Photo Settings palette in iMovie (also shown in Figure 15-12). To make it appear, double-click any full-size drop zone rectangle in the main monitor window. (You can also choose Project Edit Drop Zones.)

What's nice about the Editor is that it shows small thumbnail representations of all of the theme's drop zones at once, so you don't have to wait for them to cycle into view in the main display window.

Note: The drop-zone wells are also navigational bookmarks; if you click one, the monitor window displays that moment in the menu animation.
Drag into the Drop Zone list . This list appears when you click the Menu button (see Figure 15-13). Its primary feature is the Autofill button, which loads photos or moviesof iDVD's choosing, not yours automatically into the drop zones of the theme.

Figure 15-13. The Drop Zone list in the Menu pane offers a subset of the drop zone palette's features. Once again, you can drag items onto the drop-zone wells, or drag them away to delete them. Click Autofill to fill all drop zones with iDVDselected movies or pictures. It doesn't always work well, however, particularly in single-movie projects. In that case, it may add the same item to every drop zone.

No matter which view of the drop zones you're using, here's how they 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.

Tip: Albums in drop zones can display 99 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.
Editing a drop-zone slideshow or movie . If you've created a movie or slideshow drop zone, you have some additional editing powers available to youlike deciding what order the photos appear in the slideshow, or which part of the movie loops within the zone. Figure 15-14 tells all.

Figure 15-14. Top: To edit a drop-zone slideshow, double-click the thumbnail that represents it, whether in the Drop Zone palette (Figure 15-12) or menu list (Figure 15-13). The slideshow editor appears, identical to the one described in Section 16.6.4.1. Drag the pictures to specify their order, or click one and then press Delete to eliminate it. Click Return to go back to the menu screen.
Bottom: If you've dragged a movie into a drop zone, double-click it to produce this slider. Drag its endpoints inward to set the beginning and end points of its looping behavior. (Note, however, that no movie will loop longer than the limit established on the Menu pane.)
Add sounds . Drop zones have no sound, although you can import audio into the menu screen that contains the drop zone. See Section 17.5.
Turning on Motion . If you've installed video into a drop zone and it doesn't seem to be playing, click the running-man Motion button at the bottom of the iDVD window, or press -J. If it still doesn't seem to be playing, the menu duration may be set to 0 (Section 15.6.4.6).

Turning off Motion also turns off any background audio track and brings motion menus and motion buttons to a standstill.

Note: The status of the Motion button has no effect on the final DVD, which always shows the animations and plays the music. This is a change from iDVD 5.
Changing the duration . Use the Menu pane 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.

15.6.6. 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.