In this chapter, we’ll delve into constructing a DVD—from adding content to customizing the look of the menus. You’ll also learn some tips and tricks for getting started with a project. Let’s start there—at the beginning!
To begin, we start a new project in iDVD, adjust a few settings, and generally get things off the ground. There are no particular rules about what you have to do first, but it’s a good idea to save your project frequently. As you work on your project, you can get in the habit of choosing File, Save at regular intervals so that you don’t lose your work if lightning happens to strike or your Mac freezes up for some reason.
To prepare for this project, we get a few things in order to set the stage for importing video into the DVD project:
Launch iDVD and create a new project. You will be prompted to name and save your project automatically.
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The name you give your project is the name that will be automatically applied to the DVD disc when you burn your completed project. However, you can change the original project name to a different one by choosing Project, Project Info from the menu at the top of your screen. Then, in the window that opens, simply type a new Disc Name and click OK.
Choose iDVD, Preferences to bring up the Preferences dialog box (see Figure 31.1).
In the Preferences dialog box, click to uncheck the Show Apple Logo Watermark option. This removes the Apple logo from the lower-right corner of the DVD production. Of course, you can leave it in if you want.
In the main iDVD window, click the Customize button in the lower-left corner, click the Themes tab if necessary, and click to select a theme (see Figure 31.2). (Using the pop-up menu in the Themes tab, you can choose subsets of themes or all available themes. You can also view a subset of themes you’ve customized and saved as Favorites.)
To customize the title in your theme, click the text so that it’s selected (as shown in Figure 31.3), and you can start typing.
You learned in Chapter 29, “Exporting iMovies,” that you can create an iDVD project directly from iMovie if you want. That would open your iMovie directly into iDVD, including any chapter markers you’ve added to make it easier for viewers to skip to specific scenes.
If you wanted to add clips rather than your entire iMovie, there are three methods for importing video:
Select File, Import, Video.
Open the Media pane in the Customize tray window and select Movies from the pop-up menu to see movie files saved in your Movies folder.
Drag the file directly into the DVD from a Finder window.
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Remember that video clips imported with iMovie have automatically been encoded in the appropriate format for them to be compatible with iDVD. iDVD supports only QuickTime movies with linear video tracks. Other formats, such as QuickTime VR, MPEG, Flash, streaming or encrypted movies, or QuickTime spanned movies, cannot be added to your iDVD project.
If you try to import a file that is not compatible with iDVD, a message saying “Unsupported File Type” appears.
The integration between iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie is apparent in the Media pane, which links directly to the folders on your hard drive that contain your iTunes library, your iPhoto library, and the default location for storing iMovie projects. The Media pane gives you direct access to these elements so that you can incorporate them into your DVD projects.
For these sections to function, however, you need to make sure that you are using compatible versions of each of these applications. See Chapter 21, “Introducing iLife,” for more information.
To use the Audio and Photos sections, you also need to have opened iTunes and iPhoto at least once after they’ve been updated to compatible versions so that your media libraries can be cataloged in a format that iDVD understands.
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Although iPhoto and iTunes make it more difficult to move the location of your media, iMovie lets you store your movie files anywhere you want. To solve the problem of the Movies browser not knowing where to locate your movie files, you can add paths to them in the Movies section of the iDVD preferences.
When you choose a theme for your DVD in iDVD, the DVD buttons consist of either small images or text buttons that represent the video you’ve imported.
Open the folder containing your video clips and drag one directly from the Finder into the iDVD window (see Figure 31.4).
Continue dragging the clips into the project, until you end up with something like Figure 31.5.
At this point, you could click the Preview button in the main iDVD window to preview the project, which is always a good way of seeing whether things turned out the way you wanted them to.
As you add files to your project, it’s wise to keep an eye on the size of your files. (DVDs hold a lot of information, but video takes up a lot of space!) You can monitor the size of your project in the Status pane, as shown in Figure 31.6.
Remember, you may need to click the Customize button to get to the Status tab.
In general, DVD menus consist of a background and a series of buttons that lead to other parts of the DVD—such as video clips, which you just learned to add. In iDVD, the first thing you do is choose your background from the list of available themes.
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As you learned earlier from importing video, every element you import appears on the menu as either a button or text label. How they appear depends on the theme you’ve selected.
Throughout this section, we take a look at some individual tasks that you end up doing as you work on your DVD menus.
iDVD makes it easy to choose a background theme for your DVD project. You could simply scroll through the list of options in the Themes tab.
There are three basic categories of themes:
Static background themes display a regular, nonvideo image. An example is Chalkboard.
Motion themes display short video repeats. An example is Global.
Drop Zone themes include areas where you can add your own slideshows, movies, or still images. An example of a Drop Zone theme is Theater, which you saw earlier, where the stage curtain opens and closes over a space in which you can add your own scene.
Different types of themes suit different purposes, but switching between them isn’t difficult. You can always click on a different theme when you’re working on your project—iDVD enables you to play and experiment as much as you want. All the elements in your DVD and the titles you’ve given them will carry over between themes.
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Notice that some of the themes include music. We’ll talk about setting background audio later in this chapter.
After you’ve started a new project:
Click the Customize button in the lower-left corner of the main iDVD window to display the Themes list. If the Themes list doesn’t appear, you might need to click the Themes button.
Click a desired theme in the Themes list, and it automatically appears in the main iDVD window.
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If you choose a theme that has background sound or motion (indicated by a small circular walking man symbol) or displays previews of the project clips as video buttons, you might want to temporarily disable the sound or motion if it becomes distracting or seems to slow your computer’s reaction time.
You can do so by clicking the Motion button, displaying an icon of a walking person, at the bottom of the main iDVD window.
If you want to apply a new theme to menus across your entire project, or to all the menus inside a given part of your project, choose Advanced, Apply Theme to Project or Advanced, Apply Theme to Folder from the menu.
Some themes include Drop Zones, or areas that you can customize by adding slideshows, movies, and still images. To add a movie or image to themes containing a Drop Zone, select the media file and drag it on top of the Drop Zone, as shown in Figure 31.7.
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If you are using a Drop Zone theme and you want to add a movie as content to your project, drag it to an area of the screen that is not a Drop Zone. It becomes a text button. If you want, you can change it to a picture button in the Settings pane of the Customize window. We’ll talk more about customizing buttons shortly.
When your file is added, it fits inside the Drop Zone, as shown in Figure 31.8.
The aspect ratio of the image you insert will be preserved, with the image scaled to fit against either the top and bottom or left and right edges of the region. If the best part of the image doesn’t fall in the center of the space, you can reposition it to choose which portion of the image is visible in the Drop Zone.
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When you drag a movie to a Drop Zone in a DVD menu, the movie you added plays over and over again when the menu is onscreen. You can set the duration of the movies using the Motion Duration slider in the Settings pane of the Customize tray window. You can choose the number of seconds you want the movies to loop, up to 30 seconds.
To remove files from the Drop Zone, drag the image out of the Drop Zone.
The Title area of the Settings tab enables you to change various settings to customize the title text that appears on your DVD screens. iDVD automatically chooses a certain size for title text when you make your DVD, and the size is usually a good match for many DVD projects—large enough to read on the TV, but small enough so that you can type a reasonable number of letters. You’ll probably want to change text at some point; the following list corresponds to the options in the Title section of the Settings Tab, shown in Figure 31.9.
You can customize your title using the following settings:
Position—. Enables you to choose a preset position or Free Position
Font—. Enables you to choose a different style of text
Color—. Enables you to choose a color for your title text
Size—. Enables you to make the text bigger or smaller
In iDVD, you can have two different kinds of buttons, depending on the theme that you choose. In some themes, there are text buttons, which contain only letters (refer to Figure 31.8).
The process of making a text button is as simple as choosing a theme that supports text buttons, choosing a clip, and adding a video clip. The text button is automatically named according to the filename of the clip that’s imported, but you can always click on the text in the button to change it if you want.
In other themes there are video buttons, which include letters and a preview of the video clip or slideshow you’re linking to (see Figure 31.10).
Making a video button is as easy as making a text button. In fact, a video button is basically a text button that also includes video, except you must choose a theme that supports video buttons.
iDVD gives you a number of ways to make simple adjustments to a video button right in the main iDVD window. The automatic setting is for the button to start playing the movie from the beginning, but you can change where the video displayed on the button starts or simply have a picture appear instead of the video.
Click a video button to get the adjustment controls, as shown in Figure 31.11.
Click the slider and drag it to the desired position within the mini-movie to change where the mini-movie starts.
If you don’t want the video button to be in motion, uncheck the Movie option and use the slider to choose the nonmoving image from the mini-movie.
When you’re finished adjusting, click on the video button again, and you’ll see the customized video button.
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When working with video buttons, remember that they are in motion as you’re working on them only if you have motion in iDVD turned on. If the Motion button at the bottom of the main iDVD window is green, motion is activated. Similarly, unless you specifically uncheck the Movie option as described earlier, your video buttons will move.
The Button area of the Settings tab gives you the ability to choose from a variety of different options to add a nice touch to the way buttons look in your DVD project. It also enables you to adjust things if the automatic settings don’t suit your taste. Refer to Figure 31.9.
The adjustments you can make include the following:
From Theme—. Enables you to choose a different button shape and enables you to choose between text-only and video buttons.
Snap to Grid/Free Position—. Determines whether buttons on the screen start out being automatically aligned to each other (Snap to Grid) or not aligned (Free Position).
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If you choose to use Free Position for your buttons, be careful not to position them in ways that your viewers will find difficult to use! You may even want to turn on the TV Safe Area feature under the Advanced menu. This puts a border around the region of your menu that is most likely to be visible across different models of televisions. (In case you are wondering, the preset button positions used with Snap to Grid already fall safely inside the TV Safe Area.)
Earlier you learned that iDVD allows you to add up to 12 menu items per screen. But sooner or later, you’ll probably want to add more than 12 items to your DVD. To do this, you’ll need to add additional screens, or submenus, to your DVD project. Each submenu can contain an additional 12 items, up until you hit the limit of 99 movies or slideshows or no more than 15 minutes’ worth of motion menus.
iDVD represents submenus with the metaphor of folders. Think of DVD folders just like you have folders on your hard drive. You can put multiple items in a folder, and to get to the contents, you click on the folder. Similarly, in iDVD, the folder provides the audience a way to get to another set of options.
When you add a DVD folder, you always add the first folder to the main menu, and then you can add additional folders to the main menu or within other folders.
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As you learned in Chapter 29, chapter markers can be set in iMovie for export to iDVD. When you import a movie with chapter markers, iDVD creates a button with the title of the movie, so the viewer can play the entire movie, and a Scene Selection button that links to a scene submenu, so the viewer can select which scenes to watch and in what order. If you want, however, you can set your iDVD preferences so that scene submenus are never created or so that iDVD asks what you want on each imported movie.
You can add a folder to a theme that includes text buttons or video buttons.
Did you Know?
You can change the type of buttons in any theme, so it doesn’t matter whether the theme is preset to use text or video buttons.
Follow these steps to get a sense of how things work:
Import a video clip as you learned earlier in this chapter.
Click the Folder button in the main iDVD window to add a folder. If you are using a theme that supports video buttons, iDVD adds a button that displays an icon that looks like a folder (see Figure 31.12). (If your theme supports text buttons, your folder is added as a button labeled “My Folder.”)
Double-click the new folder button in your menu to get to the new folder screen you have just added (see Figure 31.13).
Drag additional files into the new screen. If you want, customize the buttons using the techniques you learned earlier. Then click on the small arrow in the lower-left corner of your folder screen, as shown in Figure 31.13, to get back to the main screen.
Single-click on the folder button in the main screen to activate the button controls.
Drag the slider to the far right side to have the button display the background of the main menu for the folder.
Use the slider in the button controls to choose which button from your submenu you want to feature. (The changes that you made to the video buttons on your submenu are carried over to this preview.)
When you’re finished, you will have a video button on your main menu that leads to a submenu.
Although Drop Zones add a lot of opportunity to make a theme your own, customizing a menu by adding your own overall background or theme music is something you might want to do.
You can drag elements into two wells in the Background section of the Settings area in iDVD (see Figure 31.14).
To add a new background image to a DVD project, you must have an image prepared that you want to drag in. It could be a digital picture you have taken or an image that you’ve prepared in a graphics program that is saved in TIFF format. Apple suggests you make sure that your image is sized to 640×480 to fit the screen exactly.
To import a new background image
Open a Finder window containing the file that you want to be the new background and position it next to iDVD.
Click and drag the file into the Image/Movie well in the Background section.
The new background file becomes the new image you see in your DVD screen (see Figure 31.15).
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If you like the changes that you’ve made in customizing your DVD project, you can save this customized theme in the Favorites list of iDVD. Simply click the Save as Favorites button at the bottom of the Settings tab and give your creation a name in the dialog box that appears. When you want to choose your special theme, you can access it in the same Themes list where you normally choose a built-in theme by clicking the pop-up menu and selecting Favorites. The main value of this Favorites option is that it saves you from having to manually adjust things on every screen in a custom DVD project.
If you want to add a sound to your DVD menu, you can drag it into the Audio well in the Background area of the Settings pane.
Open your iDVD project. In the main iDVD window, click the Customize button to see the tray window.
Click the Settings tab in the drawer.
Drag a sound file into the Audio well in the Background section of the Settings tab (see Figure 31.16).
The icon in the Audio well changes to reflect the type of file that you’re dragging in. For example, compare the new icon in Figure 31.14 with the icon of the file that’s being added in Figure 31.16.
Notice the Motion Duration slider near the top of Figure 31.16. The automatic setting is for 30 seconds, which is the time that the sound/music plays before repeating. This also holds true for the video portion of a motion menu.
If you decide that you no longer want the sound that you’ve added to a project, drag the sound file icon from the audio well to anywhere outside the iDVD window. When no audio file is set as the menu’s background, the audio well appears as in Figure 31.17.
In this section, we examine how to work with DVD slideshows in iDVD. DVD slideshows are a nice way to enhance a DVD production; they enable you to add digital pictures to a DVD project that also has video in it. Or, you could make a DVD project that’s nothing more than a slideshow.
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You may recall from Chapter 23, “Using iPhoto,” that you can export a slideshow created in iPhoto directly to iDVD—including the slide duration and background music. However, slideshows exported from iPhoto need to be added to the top level of the DVD project, so if you want to add a slideshow to a submenu you may have to create the slideshow in iDVD. (But don’t worry—that’s not difficult!)
Using iDVD to create a slideshow is as simple as using other parts of the program; it’s a simple matter of dragging your files directly into the iDVD window. After adding your pictures to the slideshow in your DVD project, you can make a number of adjustments if you want.
Before you can create a slideshow, you must open a new iDVD project or reopen a DVD project that you’ve been working on that you want to add a slideshow to.
Open your DVD project.
Click the Slideshow button at the bottom of the main iDVD window to create a slideshow.
To get into the slideshow editing window, double-click on the My Slideshow button that appears on your main DVD screen.
When you double-click the My Slideshow icon, the slideshow editing window opens. From there, you can add slides and make adjustments to your slideshow (see Figure 31.18).
Adding slides to an iDVD slideshow is as easy as dragging and dropping the files into the iDVD window. You can drag files in from the desktop, or you can drag images from your iPhoto library using the Photo section of the Media pane. (Remember, to open the Media pane, you need to click the Customize button at the bottom of the iDVD main window.) You can also use the File, Import, Image option.
Open your iDVD project and click on the Slideshow button in the main iDVD window to reveal the Slideshow editing window shown previously in Figure 31.18.
If you are importing photos from your iPhoto library, open the Media pane and choose Photos from the pop-up menu. If you are importing photos from somewhere else on your hard drive, position a Finder window with the picture files you want to import to the left of the iDVD window.
Click on one of the desired image files and, while holding down the mouse button, drag the file into the slideshow editing window (see Figure 31.19).
You can also drag multiple files at once into the slideshow editing window. To accomplish this, place the mouse pointer near one of the image thumbnails, click and hold down the mouse button, and drag upward and over all the images you want to add. Then click directly on one of the selected thumbnails, and you can drag them all over at once.
The slides appear and can be repositioned and adjusted according to your taste, as you’ll see later in chapter.
The slideshow editing window has a variety of options that you can use to adjust both the order of slides and how the slides behave.
If you want your slideshow to play over and over again automatically, check the Loop Slideshow option.
The Display Arrows During Slideshow option causes arrows to be displayed on your slideshow screens, as shown in Figure 31.20, that are a reminder that there are previous or remaining slides.
When you add a slideshow to your DVD project, the images are encoded as part of the DVD. If someone wanted to work with one of the images as a file to print or send in an email, she wouldn’t be able to do this. However, the Add to DVDROM option enables you to add the individual slides to your DVD as graphics files—a nice option for enabling people to watch the slideshow on television, as well as being able to put the DVD in their computer to have the pictures files available.
When you burn your final DVD with this option checked, the slides in your slideshow are converted into a series of individual files. They’re saved on the DVD disc along with the normal DVD project and are accessible by any computer with a DVD-ROM drive. We’ll talk more about DVD-ROM content in the section, “DVD-ROM Content—Including Computer Files on a DVD.”
The Slide Duration option enables you to set the time that a slide displays on a screen (see Figure 31.21).
The Manual setting basically means that the user presses the right or left arrow on her DVD remote control to advance to the next slide or go back to a previous slide. But if you want a slideshow to run on its own, you can adjust the duration. To adjust the duration of a slide, simply click the Slide Duration pop-up menu and choose a duration.
The Transition settings determine the way iDVD transitions between slides in the slideshow.
You can choose no transition, or you can choose from a range of transitions including dissolve, where one photo fades out as another fades in; cube, where the images appear as if they’re the sides of a rotating cube; and mosaic, where square pieces of each slide flip to reveal new pieces of the next slide.
To the right of the Transition pop-up is a direction selector that becomes active if you’ve chosen a transition that can be activated starting from the left, right, top, or bottom. Click the corresponding arrow in the direction selector to choose one.
One of the most common tasks you’ll undertake when working with slideshows is rearranging slides so that they appear in a different order. It’s really easy to do this and can be fun to play around with as you develop your slideshow. Remember, at any time, you can click on the Preview button at the bottom of the iDVD window to preview your slideshow. Just remember that to get back out of the preview mode, you have to either close the miniature remote control by clicking Enter or click the Preview button to return to editing mode.
Rearranging slides is as simple as clicking and dragging:
Click on a slide, and while holding down the mouse button, begin to move the slide toward the position you want it to be in (see Figure 31.22). As you move the slide, the other images move aside to show where the slide will land if you release the mouse button.
Put your slide into position and let go of the mouse button.
The slide snaps into position, and you can continue to make adjustments to your slideshow or add new slides.
One nice thing about the way that iDVD enables you to customize DVD menus is apparent when you’re working with slideshows in a theme that supports video buttons. After you’ve added slides to your slideshow, the image on the button that leads to your slideshow can be changed to display one of the slides.
After adding slides to your slideshow, come back to the menu containing the button that leads to your slideshow and click it once (see Figure 31.23).
Move the slider to choose the picture you want to appear on the DVD button (see Figure 31.24).
Click somewhere on the menu screen outside the button you have selected to deselect it.
Remember, iDVD also allows you to customize buttons representing folders, or submenus, in a similar way.
DVD is a flexible medium for creating and sharing interactive presentations, but the possibilities aren’t limited to what you can view on a television. Thanks to the nature of the DVD disc, you can also include files on a DVD that people can access using their computers. This feature is known as DVD-ROM.
DVD-ROM is essentially the equivalent of CD-ROM. ROM stands for read-only memory, which means that you can put data on the disc that can be read by a person with the appropriate drive in his computer. With DVD-ROM capabilities, you can have a DVD with special features available only when looking at the disc through the computer. This could include things such as the opportunity to look at the screenplay of the movie, or games and other programs that aren’t possible to view on a DVD player (see Figure 31.25).
Figure 31.25. Example of DVD-ROM content, from the DVD that comes with the Macworld DVD Studio Pro Bible. The disc features the VIDEO_TS folder that contains the standard encoded video for a DVD player, as well as the DVD-ROM content, a series of folders including tutorial files, a PDF version of the book, and so on.
For example, when you make your DVD, you start by creating an iMovie. Then, in iDVD, you can also use the slideshow feature to add pictures that can be viewed on the television. But let’s say that you want to pass a number of digital pictures along as files so that your colleagues can use the pictures on their Web pages. With the DVD-ROM feature in iDVD, you can put the pictures right on the disc.
DVD-ROM content isn’t anything that you have to do—it’s just a great thing to have the flexibility to add computer files to your DVD. However, there are two things to consider when deciding whether to add DVD-ROM content:
Consideration Number One—. Does the person have a DVD-ROM drive? Many computers these days have DVD-ROM drives, but not all of them. If the person you want to share files with doesn’t have a DVD-ROM drive, you might be better off using your SuperDrive to burn that person a CD.
Consideration Number Two—. Is the person on Mac or Windows? If you’re burning files to a DVD and you want a person on Windows to be able to use them, be sure to include the appropriate file extensions on your files.
Did you Know?
Microsoft Windows relies on the file extension in order to recognize which application is needed to open a file. For example, JPEG files need a .jpg at the end for a Windows machine to launch a program capable of displaying JPEGs. These days many Mac programs automatically put on a file extension, but you’ll want to be sure to use them if sending your DVD to Windows users.
You can easily add computer files to your DVD using iDVD.
Launch iDVD and open your project.
Choose Advanced, Edit DVD-ROM Contents from the File menu.
This will open the DVD-ROM Contents window, as shown in Figure 31.26.
Drag files and folders into the DVD-ROM Contents area. iDVD also may add a file called
.DS_Store, which you can ignore.
Watch Out!
As you drag large media files in as DVD-ROM content, remember to keep an eye on the size of your project. (This information appears at the top of the Status pane.)
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Technically speaking, the .DS Store file is created by the Finder. Per Apple: “Each directory in the filesystem can contain a hidden object, ‘.DS_Store’ containing data which includes a list of files stored there. This object is created when a local user views a given directory using the Finder.” The .DS_Store file isn’t necessary for burning and might not be visible on your Mac.
Watch Out!
iDVD doesn’t move the files you add as DVD-ROM content, or make duplicates of them. Instead, it creates a reference to the file on your system. If you delete a file or move a file after you’ve added it to the DVD-ROM list, its name appears in red to tell you something’s wrong. If you try to burn the disc anyway, a “File not found” error message appears.
To add files from your hard drive and connected drives, you can also click the Add Files button at the bottom of the window. This brings up an Open sheet window in which you can navigate to the file, as shown in Figure 31.27.
As you add files, you might want to organize them with folders. To add a folder, simply click the New Folder button and give the fresh folder a name.
To delete a file from the DVD-ROM Contents list, select it and press Delete.
When you’re finished creating your DVD project, you can either write it to DVD from the computer you’ve been working at, if it has an Apple SuperDrive, or you can archive your project so you can move it to another computer that has an Apple SuperDrive to write your DVD. (Remember, to burn a project from iDVD, you must have access to a computer with an Apple SuperDrive; external DVD writers will not work.)
To archive your project, choose File, Archive Project from the menu. A sheet similar to a Save sheet will appear, as shown in Figure 31.28, where you can name your project and choose where to save it.
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Some people have found that archived projects don’t open as expected because of problems with the file permissions. If you experience trouble, select the archived project and open an Info window by choosing File, Get Info from the menu. Then, open the Ownership & Permissions section and be sure you can both read and write to the item.
You can also choose whether to save themes and encoded files with your project. You may choose not to include either of these things if you want to minimize the size of the archived project. If you don’t include encoded files, the copy of iDVD to which you transport your archived files can reencode your files. If you don’t include themes, the computer to which you are transferring the files will supply them if it has the ones you chose available.
In this chapter, you learned how to design a DVD, including adding content and creating and customizing menus. We examined how DVD menus are put together, using a combination of backgrounds and buttons (and don’t forget the movie clips, slideshows, and computer files!). As you’ve seen, your projects can look just fine without adjusting any additional settings, but if you want to, there are ways to customize the way the DVD works and looks.