Creating a DVD with iDVD involves creating a new project document, choosing and customizing a menu design theme, and adding content. Here’s how to get started.

iDVD provides several ways to add items to drop zones. Here’s the technique you’re likely to use most often. For details on more drop zone techniques, see the following pages.

Step 2

In the photo or movie media browser, select the item or items you want to add. You can select multiple photos or an entire album. If you add multiple photos to a drop zone, iDVD displays them successively as the menu is displayed. You can add up to 99 items to a drop zone.

Previewing and Testing Your Work

As you work on a DVD, you’ll be anxious to see how the final product will look. To find out, use iDVD’s preview mode. Click the Preview button, and iDVD turns itself into a DVD player and starts playing your DVD.

In preview mode, an on-screen remote control lets you navigate—choose menu buttons, jump to chapters, and watch the movies and slide shows you’ve added to your DVD.

Preview mode plays back whatever is displayed in iDVD’s window. If your main menu is visible, that’s what plays back. If you’re working on a slide show, the slide show begins playing.

Using iDVD’s preview mode is a great way to check your work, but you shouldn’t rely on it as your only testing tool. As you near the end of your project, create a disc image and use Mac OS X’s DVD Player program to test it (see page 316). Then burn a disc and test it in your DVD player.

It’s important to understand the difference between drop zones and buttons. A drop zone is merely an area of imagery within a DVD menu—it isn’t a clickable button that your viewers can use to watch your DVD. A drop zone is a piece of eye candy; a button is a navigation control that plays a movie or slide show, or jumps to another menu.

How to tell the difference. As you drag items into the menu area, how can you tell whether you’re dragging into a drop zone or creating a button? Easy: When you’re dragging into a drop zone, a dotted-line pattern appears around the edges of the drop zone, as shown on the previous page.

If you don’t see this pattern, you aren’t in the drop zone, and you’ll end up creating a button or changing your DVD’s background image. If that happens, head for the Edit menu and choose the Undo command.

In most themes, drop zones are dynamic—they move around on the screen or they appear and disappear as a motion menu plays.

How do you add items to a drop zone that’s behind another drop zone or not even visible?

(If you don’t see the motion playhead, choose Show Motion Playhead from the View menu.)

movies to drop zones by dragging them into the editor.

You can also display the drop zone editor by choosing Edit Drop Zones from the Project menu.

Autofill. Want quick results? Let iDVD do the work. Choose Project > Autofill Drop Zones, and iDVD fills all drop zones with images from the media in your DVD. You can fine-tune the results if you like.

Older themes. Both the motion playhead and drop zone editor also work with iDVD’s older themes.

Many iDVD themes provide introductory animations. For example, in the Vintage Vinyl theme, the stack of album sleeves slides into position before the menu buttons become visible.

These animations are cute, but you might not always want to use them. They’re fine on a DVD’s main menu, but on a submenu (such as a scene selection menu for a movie), they slow down your DVD’s users, who must wait for the animation to finish before they can access the menu’s buttons.

Solution: Turn off the introductory animations when you don’t want them. Just click the little check box at the left edge of the motion playhead. Or, display the Menu Info window and uncheck the Intro or Outro boxes.

You can also add items to a drop zone by dragging them from the Finder: simply drag the items’ icons into the drop zone or drop zone editor. And you can drag photos from iPhoto and other programs directly into a drop zone.

Another way to add items is from the shortcut menu: Control-click within a drop zone, and choose the Import command; or, choose Fill with Content to grab media used elsewhere in the project.

To remove the contents of a drop zone, drag the item out of the drop zone. When you release the mouse button, the item disappears in a puff of smoke. As an alternative to dragging, you can also Control-click within the drop zone and choose Clear Drop Zone Contents from the shortcut menu.

You can also use the drop zone photos editor to rearrange the order in which items in a drop zone are displayed: just drag the items around. And you can add items to a drop zone by dragging them into its editor.

In the Media pane, click the Movies tab and select an iMovie project that’s been shared to the media browser. Drag the shared movie into a drop zone.

What if you want to use just part of a video clip in a drop zone? You can’t use iMovie’s cropping or trimming features to indicate which portion you want to keep. That’s because these features don’t actually delete any video; they simply tell iMovie which parts you want to use. If you drag a cropped clip into an iDVD drop zone, the entire clip plays in the drop zone.

If you have a drop zone that contains multiple items, you can quickly scan through the drop zone’s contents without having to open up the drop zone editor. Click on a drop zone, and a small slider pops up; to scan through the drop zone’s items, drag the slider back and forth. If, while browsing, you decide to rearrange the drop zone’s contents, click the Edit Order button below the slider.

When you’ve added movies or high-resolution photos to a menu’s drop zones, you may see and hear some problems when you preview the menu: the drop zones’ motion may appear jerky, and the menu’s background audio may break up as it plays.

Not to worry—these problems won’t occur on your final DVD. Indeed, the problems often go away once the menu has had a chance to play through once.

You can also add a movie by dragging its icon from the Finder into the iDVD window, or by choosing File > Import > Video. These techniques are convenient if you store your movies on an external hard drive and you don’t feel like adding the drive to the movie browser using the Preferences command.

You can also use the media browser to add video clips from your iTunes or iPhoto libraries (although you can’t burn your video purchases from the iTunes store). For more details on using digital camera movies in iDVD projects, see page 318.

You can send photos to iDVD from within iPhoto, and with a couple of different options.

Saved slide show. If you’ve created a saved (cinematic) slide show, you can add it to iDVD and retain its custom Ken Burns moves and other goodies. In iPhoto, select the saved slide show in your Slideshows list. Then, choose Send to iDVD from the Share menu. iPhoto creates a video version of the slide show and ships it off to iDVD.

If you need to revise the slide show, first delete it from your iDVD project. (Select its button and press Delete.) Then, return to iPhoto, make your changes, and choose Send to iDVD again.

If you create a 16:9 (widescreen) slide show in iPhoto, iDVD displays it in widescreen format.

Basic slide show. Here’s the technique to use if you don’t need Ken Burns moves and you’d prefer the advantages of a DVD slide show (for example, more efficient use of disc space and the ability to easily include original images on your disc). In iPhoto, select an album or a series of photos. Then, choose Send to iDVD from the Share menu.

You can revise this type of slide show directly within iDVD using the techniques on the following pages.

You can also create a blank slide show and then manually add photos to it. You might use this technique to add photos that aren’t stored in your iPhoto library.

Step 1

Choose Add Slideshow from the pop-up menu or choose Project > Add Slideshow (-L).

iDVD adds a button named My Slideshow to the currently displayed menu. Rename this button as desired.

Step 2

Double-click on the button that iDVD just created. The slide show editor appears.

You can add a music track to a slide show. One way to add music is by using the iTunes browser in iDVD. Click the Media button, then click the Audio button. Locate the song you want (use the search box if need be), then drag it to the Audio well. To add an entire playlist, drag it to the Audio well.

You can also drag a song directly from the iTunes window or, for that matter, from any folder on your hard drive. And you don’t even have to drag an audio file: if you drag a QuickTime movie to the Audio well, iDVD will assign its audio to your slide show.

If you create a slide show by dragging an iPhoto album into the iDVD window (or by choosing Send to iDVD while an album is selected in iPhoto), the slide show will retain whatever song was assigned to it in iPhoto. (For details on assigning songs to albums, see page 182.)

Music and timing. How iDVD matches your soundtrack to your slides depends on the option you choose from the Slide Duration pop-up menu. If you choose a specific duration, such as five seconds per slide, iDVD repeats your soundtrack if its duration is shorter than the slide show’s total length. If the soundtrack is longer than the slide show, iDVD simply stops playing the soundtrack after the last slide displays. (To have the music fade at the end of the slideshow, use the Slideshow portion of the Preferences dialog box.) And if you choose the Fit to Audio option, iDVD times the interval between image changes to match the soundtrack’s duration.

To remove a slide show’s background music, drag the icon out of the Audio well. When you release the mouse button, the icon vanishes in a puff of smoke.

iDVD provides two ways to go from zero to DVD with very few steps. Which method should you use, and when?

When to go OneStep. Use OneStep DVD when you want to burn just one movie to a DVD and you don’t need navigation menus. When you use OneStep DVD, you don’t have the opportunity to customize menu designs—there aren’t any. As page 305 describes, OneStep DVD creates an autoplay, or kiosk-mode, DVD: the disc begins playback as soon as you insert it into a computer or DVD player.

When to go Magic iDVD. Use Magic iDVD when you want navigation menus and more than one piece of content on your DVD—for example, a couple of movies and some slide shows.

Check your work. To preview the DVD, click the Preview button. When you exit preview mode, you return to the Magic iDVD window.

Ready to bake. If you’re happy with the job Magic iDVD has done, click the Burn button. iDVD creates a project containing your content, then immediately switches into burn mode. (For burning details, see pages 314–317.)

Further refinement. If you want to refine the project—for example, to customize some menus or refine your slide shows—click the Create Project button. iDVD creates a project that you can customize using the techniques described throughout this chapter.

If your DVD will be presenting a large number of movies or slide shows, you need to plan how you will make that content available to the DVD’s user. How many menus will you need? How will you categorize the content in each menu? This process is often called information design, and it involves mapping out the way you want to categorize and present your content.

A good way to map out a DVD’s flow is to create a tree diagram depicting the organization of menus—much as a company’s organizational chart depicts the pecking order of its management.

The chart shown here depicts the flow of a DVD a company might create to promote its new Gizmo product line. A main menu contains three buttons: two lead to other submenus, while the third plays a promotional movie about the company.

The submenu “The Gizmo Family” leads to two additional submenus, one for each Gizmo model. The “Other Products” submenu leads to two movies that promote other fine products.

To create a submenu, choose Add Submenu from the pop-up menu or choose Project > Add Submenu.

Normally, iDVD positions buttons on a fixed grid. This keeps them lined up nicely, but you can also manually specify a button’s location—perhaps to line it up with a custom background image.

When you drag a button or other object, iDVD displays positioning guides to help you align items. (You’re free to ignore these guides.) If you want to return to the fixed grid, click the Inspector button, then, in the Menu Info window, click the Snap to Grid.

You like a particular motion menu but you don’t want to use all of it. Maybe you don’t need all eight drop zones in the Reflections themes. Just shorten the menu’s duration. Go to the Menu Info window, then drag the Loop Duration slider until the menu is the desired length.

This technique works best with themes that don’t have background music, so either choose a theme that lacks music or delete the music (see page 308).

To add descriptive text, captions, or instructions to a menu, choose Add Text from the Project menu (-K). A text area appears; drag it to the desired location, then click within that text area, and type. To start another line, press Return.

To format the text, choose a font and size from the pop-up menus that appear below it, or use the Inspector window; see the opposite page.

iDVD displays the Apple logo watermark on each menu screen. To get rid of it, choose Preferences from the iDVD menu, click the General button, and then uncheck the Show Apple Logo Watermark box.

TV sets omit the outer edges of a video frame—a phenomenon called overscan. To make sure buttons and other menu elements will be visible on TV sets, choose the Show TV Safe Area command in the View menu, and avoid putting buttons or other elements in the shaded area.

Get links to more iDVD menu themes. www.macilife.com/idvd

To change the background image of an iDVD menu, simply drag an image into the menu area. For the best results, be sure to use a photo with proportions that match your project’s aspect ratio: 4:3 for standard television or 16:9 for widescreen or HD television. You can ensure these proportions when cropping in iPhoto: from the Constrain pop-up menu, choose 4 x 3 (DVD) or 16 x 9 (HD).

If you replace the background on a theme that has a drop zone, the drop zone remains. To remove drop zones after replacing a background, go to the Menu Info window and uncheck the Show Drop Zones and Related Graphics box.

Want a plain white background? You can download one from www.macilife.com/idvd. You can also make your own patterned or solid-colored backgrounds in a program like Photoshop Elements. Create a graphic with dimensions that are 640 by 480 pixels (854 by 480 pixels for widescreen), save it as a JPEG image, and then drag it into iDVD.

If your project contains several menus, you can apply one menu’s custom design to other menus in the project; see page 309.

And, if you decide you’d rather just have the theme’s original background, simply drag the custom background’s image thumbnail out of the Background well (above the Loop Duration slider) in the Menu Info window.

To change a button’s shape, select it and display the Buttons pane.

You can also control the size of the buttons by dragging the Size slider.

When you choose a button shape, your buttons consist of text labels and little thumbnail images or movies. In the Button Info window, you can change where a button’s text labels appear in relation to the button’s thumbnail image.

To add a soft shadow to some text, select the button or label and click the Shadow box.

Each button style has its own style of highlight, which appears when a user selects the button. To change the highlight color, click the Highlight Color well.

You can also change the font, font color, and type size for button text and for the menu’s title and any text you’ve added. If you don’t like the results, choose the Undo command as many times as needed to get back to where you started.

To return the buttons to the theme’s style, select them and choose Advanced > Reset Object to Theme Settings.

You can have a transition between menus. For example, when your DVD’s viewers choose a button to go to a movie, you can have the menu appear to peel away to reveal the movie.

You can choose from a dozen different transition styles. For menu transitions, I’m partial to cube, page flip, or wipe—each conveys the notion of moving from one area to another.

You create menu transitions by assigning them to buttons. You can assign a different transition to every button in a menu, but in the interest of good taste, it’s better to stick with just one or two different transition styles. For example, you might choose the cube transition for buttons that go from one menu to another, and the fade through black transition for buttons that lead directly to movies and slide shows.

To assign a transition to a button, select the button and then choose the desired transition from the Transition pop-up menu in the Button Info window. Some transitions, such as cube, also allow you to specify a direction—set this by choosing from the second Transition pop-up menu.

Varying the direction of transitions can be a nice way to add variety without resorting to using a lot of different transition styles. For example, when a viewer chooses a button to go to a slide show, you might have a cube that rotates to the left. For a different button that leads to another menu, you might have a cube transition that rotates downward.

To move a button from one menu to another, select the button and choose Cut. Next, move to a different menu (use map view to get there in a hurry), then paste.

You can also copy a button instead of pasting it. You might do this to provide access to a piece of content from several different menus.

For example, say you’ve created a series of online help screens in the form of a slide show. To make the online help available from every menu in your DVD, copy its button and then paste it into each menu.

After adding numerous items to a DVD, you realize that a particular menu has too many buttons. The solution: move some of those buttons to a new menu. But don’t wear out your wrists cutting and pasting. Just select the buttons you want to move (Shift-click on them), then sprint up to the Project menu and choose New Menu from Selection. iDVD removes the selected buttons and stashes them in a new menu.

You might like the look of a motion menu, but maybe you don’t want any music or sound effects to play. To silence a motion menu, go to the Menu Info window and drag the Menu Volume slider to its leftmost position. If you change your mind, raise the volume level. To silence the menu for good, drag the icon out of the Audio well, and it disappears in an animated puff of smoke.

Conversely, maybe you would like some background audio to play, but you don’t want motion in your menus. First, choose a theme that lacks motion, or replace an existing motion theme’s background with a static image. Next, drag an audio file, iTunes playlist, or QuickTime movie into the Menu pane’s Audio well. To hear the audio, click the Motion button. A menu can play for up to 15 minutes before it loops.

In many themes and button styles, iDVD also applies motion to your movie buttons: small, thumbnail versions of the movies play back when the menu is displayed.

You can even specify which portion of the movie plays: just drag the slider that appears above the movie or in the Button Info window.

There are times when you might not want a movie’s button to be a thumbnail movie. Maybe the movie thumbnail distracts from the motion menu’s background. In any case, simply enable the Still Image checkbox. Now use the slider to choose a static thumbnail image for the movie.

If you’re using a theme that has text-only buttons, you can add motion or thumbnail buttons by choosing a different button style in the Buttons pane.

Your project contains several menus and you’ve customized one of them. Now you decide you’d like to apply your design to all the menus in your project. Easy: choose Apply Theme to Submenus from the Advanced menu.

Conversely, if you’ve customized a submenu and want to apply that design to the project’s other menus, choose Apply Theme to Project.

You’ve changed a button’s text and color, and would like to apply that formatting to other buttons. Easy: select the formatted button and choose Edit > Copy Style. Then select one or more other buttons and choose Edit > Paste Style.

Happy with the results of a menu-design session? Save your customized theme as a “favorite,” and you can apply it to future projects with one mouse click.

Choose Save Theme as Favorite from the File menu. If you have multiple user accounts on your computer, you can make the custom theme available to all users: check the Shared For All Users box.

The new theme appears in the Themes pane. To see it, choose Favorites or All from the themes pop-up menu. On your hard drive, saved themes are stored in your home directory in the following path: Library > Application Support > iDVD > Favorites. Shared themes are stored in the same path at the root level of the drive.

To have a menu’s audio fade out at the end of the menu loop, enable that feature in the General portion of the Preferences dialog box.

Want to go beyond the themes that are built into iDVD? Try out some of the themes from DVDThemePak (www.DVDthemepak.com). The company offers more than a dozen theme and button collections. They look great and are inexpensive.

When you’re on the road, sometimes you need the big picture and sometimes you need street-by-street details. Map view provides this flexibility, and then some.

A DVD can hold more than video and slide shows; it can also hold “computer files”—Microsoft Word documents, PDF files, JPEG images, and so on. You might take advantage of this to distribute files that are related to your DVD’s content.

If you’ve created an in-house training DVD for new employees, you might want to include a PDF of the employee handbook. If you’ve created a DVD containing a couple of rough edits of a TV commercial, you might also include some PDFs that show the print versions of your ad campaign. If you’ve created a DVD promoting your band, you might include some audio files of your tunes.

When a DVD-Video disc also contains files intended to be used by a computer, it’s said to have a DVD-ROM portion. If users play the DVD in a living-room DVD player, those files are invisible. However, if they use that same DVD with a personal computer, they can access the files.

As described on page 300, when creating DVDs containing slide shows, you can have iDVD copy the original images to the DVD-ROM portion. In the slide show editor, click Settings, then check the box labeled Add Image Files to DVD-ROM.

This option is ideal for photographers who want to distribute high-resolution versions of their images along with slide shows. You might also find it a useful way to back up a set of digital photos. The slide shows serve as a handy way of viewing the images, while the original, high-resolution files are archived in the DVD-ROM portion of the disc.

To add other types of files to your DVD, choose Edit DVD-ROM Contents from the Advanced menu. Use the DVD-ROM Contents window to manage and organize the contents of the DVD-ROM folder.

MPEG: Compressing Space and Time

One of the jobs iDVD performs is to compress your movies into MPEG format, the standard method of storing video on DVD-Video discs. Like image and audio compression, MPEG is a lossy format: the final product lacks some of the quality of the original. But as with image and audio compression, the amount of quality loss depends on the degree to which the original material is compressed.

Like JPEG, MPEG performs spatial compression that reduces the storage requirements of individual images. But video adds the dimension of time, and MPEG takes this into account by also performing temporal compression.

The key to temporal compression is to describe only those details that have changed since the previous video frame. In an MPEG video stream, some video frames contain the entire image; these are called I-frames. There are usually two I-frames per second.

An I-frame describes an entire scene: “There’s a basketball on a concrete driveway.”

Sandwiched between those I-frames are much smaller frames that don’t contain the entire image, but rather only those pixels that have changed since the previous frame.

“It’s rolling toward the street.”

To perform temporal compression, the video frame is divided into a grid of blocks, and each square is examined to see if anything has changed. Areas that haven’t changed—such as the stationary background in this example—are simply repeated in the next frame.

This is why video with relatively little motion often tends to look better than video that contains a great deal of motion. When little changes from one frame to the next, the quality of each frame can be higher.

Before you insert that pricey blank DVD, preview your work by clicking iDVD’s Preview button. Use the iDVD remote control to step through your menus and spot-check your video, slide shows, and any menu transitions you’ve added. And don’t forget to proofread your menu titles and button text.

Before you burn, consider creating a disc image, a kind of virtual disk that can be extremely useful for testing and burning. You’ll find full details on working with disc images on page 316.

If your DVD has a lot of menus, transitions, and content, consider creating a disc image and using Mac OS X’s DVD Player program to test it. And if you have a slower Mac—or just seem to have trouble burning reliably—creating and burning a disc image can be a great way to increase your success rate.

When burning a DVD, avoid running complex programs that put a lot of demands on your system. Recording a track in GarageBand while also burning a DVD is not a good idea, for example. Also, consider turning off file sharing and quitting any disk-intensive programs.

Several types of writable DVD media exist: DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, and DVD+RW. Previous versions of iDVD could handle the DVD-R format only, but iDVD is now much more versatile. It can burn any of the aforementioned formats, assuming your DVD burner supports them. Most of the SuperDrives in today’s Macs can; older SuperDrives support the DVD-R and DVD-RW formats only.

The differences between the “minus” and “plus” camps are technical ones and don’t have much bearing on your burning endeavors. The more important difference deals with R and RW: an RW disc can be erased and reused roughly 1,000 times. If you insert an RW disc that already contains data, iDVD even offers to erase it for you.

RW discs are great for testing, although as the following page describes, you’re more likely to encounter playback problems on some DVD players. Also, RW discs are more sensitive to damage and aging than write-once discs.

If you’re interested in the technical details between the minus and plus formats, read Jim Taylor’s superb DVD FAQ at www.DVDdemystified.com.

Many of today’s Macs include SuperDrives capable of burning on dual-layer DVD+R media. With a dual-layer drive, you can burn nearly 8GB, or about four hours’ worth of video.

To see if your Mac is capable of dual-layer burning, choose Project > Project Info, and click on the DVD Type pop-up menu. If you have a dual-layer drive, you’ll have the option of specifying dual-layer media.

Incidentally, if you have a single-layer SuperDrive but would like to double your pleasure, you can buy external dual-layer burners that work just fine with iDVD. But note that more is not always better. Dual-layer burned discs often do not play in standalone DVD players, and may lack the longevity of single-layer discs.

You’ve burned a disc and are ready to show it off to your boss. You pop the disc into the conference room DVD player and proudly press the play button—and nothing happens.

Welcome to The Incompatibility Zone. The sad fact is, some DVD players and personal computer DVD drives are unable to read burned DVD media. Generally, older DVD players and drives are most likely to have this problem, but you may encounter it in newer players, too.

Roughly 85 percent of DVD players can read DVD-R and DVD+R discs, and about 80 percent can read DVD-RW and DVD+RW discs. Those are good numbers, although they won’t be of much solace if your player—or your boss’s—is in the minority.

The picture is much more bleak when it comes to dual-layer DVD burning: a large percentage of DVD players have trouble playing dual-layer burned DVDs. If you’re shopping for a new DVD player, be sure to verify compatibility with the type of media you plan to burn. And diplomatically inform your friends, family, and colleagues that if they have problems playing your DVD, the fault probably lies with their players.

You can burn multiple copies of a DVD using iDVD, but you might find the job easier with Roxio’s Toast or Popcorn software, both of which provide copying features. Or, make a disc image and use Mac OS X’s Disk Utility program to burn multiple copies (see page 316).

If you need to have more than a few copies of a disc—for example, 2,000 training DVDs for a large company—you’ll want to work with a replicator. Most replicators will accept a burned DVD as a master.

One excellent source for low-volume replication is CreateSpace (www.createspace.com), which also provides e-commerce and shipping services.

Archiving Projects for Burning Elsewhere

iDVD provides an archiving feature that saves a project and all of its assets in one self-contained file.

Archiving enables you to author on one Mac, then burn on another. Move projects between home, school, or work. Start a project on a cross-country flight, then archive and transfer your project when you land.

To archive a project, choose Archive Project from the File menu.

If you created customized themes for the DVD—or if you want to be certain that your themes will be available in a future version of iDVD—check the Include Themes box. If you’re using standard themes and aren’t obsessed about future compatibility, you can uncheck this box and your archive file will be a bit smaller.

If iDVD has already encoded the DVD’s content, you can include those encoded files in the archive by checking the Include Encoded Files box. Doing so will make your archive file quite a bit larger, however.

After you specify archive settings and click Save, iDVD goes to work, copying everything in your project into a file. You can transfer this file to another Mac using a fast network, a FireWire hard drive, or the Fire Wire disk mode that laptop Macs provide.

Burned discs don’t last forever. To improve their reliability and longevity, don’t use peel-and-stick labels. If a label isn’t perfectly centered, the DVD will be off-balance when it spins, and that could cause playback problems. If you want to label your DVDs, use an inkjet printer that can print on DVD media.

Label discs with a Sharpie or other permanent marker. Write small and be brief—the solvents in permanent ink can damage a DVD’s substrate over time.

Keep burned DVDs in jewel cases, and store them in a cool, dark place. Be careful to never flex the disc—a DVD is comprised of several different layers, and flexing a disc can cause the layers to separate. To remove a disc from a jewel case, press the center button of the case, then lift the disc out—don’t simply pull the disc by its edges. (This advice applies to all optical media, by the way.)

You can include digital camera movies in an iDVD project—just drag them into the iDVD window. If the movies are in your iPhoto library, you can use iDVD’s photo or movies browsers to access them.

Indeed, you can burn nearly any kind of QuickTime movie onto a DVD, including movies you’ve downloaded from the Web or copied from an old CD-ROM.

If a movie is smaller than the DVD standard of 720 by 480 pixels, iDVD enlarges it to fill the screen. This results in a loss of sharpness, but enlarged movies can still look good when viewed on a TV. It’s better to have shared a blurry movie than never to have shared at all.

You can’t use movies stored in MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 formats. Sony digital cameras use the MPEG format for their movies, and many of the movies that have been posted on file-sharing networks are in MPEG format.

There are free or cheap utilities that enable you to convert MPEG movies into a format that iDVD (and iMovie) can use. I’ve written up instructions on my site; see www.macilife.com/imovie. You can also use Toast Titanium’s Export Video command, as described at right.

Incidentally, this MPEG prohibition does not apply to MPEG-4 movies created by digital cameras or to iMovie projects created in MPEG-4 format. Those movies work just fine in iDVD.

You’ve made some modifications that you don’t like. Many programs, including GarageBand, have a Revert command that lets you get back to the last version you saved. iDVD lacks a Revert command, but you can simulate one: just reopen the project by choosing its name from the Open Recent submenu in the File menu. Click Don’t Save when iDVD asks you if you want to save changes before reopening the project.

You burned some cherished video to a DVD, then lost the original tape—and now you want to edit it in iMovie.

You can extract video from a DVD and convert it into DV format, but you will lose some quality in the process. If you have Toast Titanium, click its Video button and drag your DVD’s VIDEO_TS folder into the Toast window. Locate the clip you want to extract, select it, and click the Export button.

You can also extract video using any of several free or cheap utilities. Video guru Matti Haveri has published a fine tutorial on his Web site; I’ve linked to it at www.macilife.com/iDVD.

Get more iDVD tips. www.macilife.com/idvd

When you add a movie or set of images to iDVD, the program doesn’t actually add those files to your project file. Rather, iDVD simply links to the existing files on your hard drive.

If you need to move a project from one Mac to another, create an archive of the project using the Archive Project command in the File menu. As described on page 315, this command copies all of the project’s assets into one file.

When you open a project containing broken links, iDVD displays an error message.

If you’ve assembled a great set of photos for a drop zone and you’d like to use that same set elsewhere in the project, it’s easy to duplicate it. Control-click the drop zone and choose Copy Drop Zone Contents from the shortcut menu. Then, go to the destination drop zone and choose Paste Drop Zone Contents from the shortcut menu.

You can use the Preferences command to tell iDVD to search other folders and hard drives when displaying its movie browser (page 296). 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 browser—and it’s a handy alternative to the Preferences dialog box.

Previous versions of iDVD stored the themes within the application itself, but starting with 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 package—to 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 item—for example, to grab the background audio from the Revolution-Main theme—press 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.

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.

On page 213, 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 sidebar (choose Sidebar from the View menu). In the sidebar, 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. Save the page as a new PDF file.

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

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. Copy and paste a few clips from your movie into a new iMovie project. Then, use iMovie’s Video Adjustments tools to increase the brightness and make the footage appear faint. That way, buttons and text labels will still be easy to read. Share the movie to the Media Browser, return to iDVD, and drag the movie from the Media pane to the Background well in the Menu Info window.

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, trim the clip to make the remainder of the still frame as short as possible. (In the trimmer, 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 or Final Cut Express, 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.

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.

In Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), you can use the Automator program to build workflows that put iDVD on autopilot. For example, you could create a workflow that prompts a user for a movie and some photos, then builds a DVD containing the results.

To learn more about Automator, visit www.automator.us.

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.