- iDVD at a Glance
- Choosing and Customizing Themes
- Working with Drop Zones
- Adding Movies to Your DVD
- Creating DVD Slide Shows
- Refining a Slide Show
- Making a Magic iDVD
- Planning and Creating Menus
- Customizing Menus
- More Design Tips
- Navigating and Authoring with Map View
- Adding DVD-ROM Content
- Burning Your DVD
- Burning Tips
- iDVD Tips
- More iDVD Tips
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Making a Magic iDVD
When you want to create a DVD in a hurry, use the Magic iDVD feature.
Magic iDVD presents you with a single window containing a list of menu themes, a set of drop boxes for holding movies and photos, and a media browser for accessing your audio, photos, and movies.
Choose a theme, then drag movies into the drop boxes. To create DVD slide shows, drag photos to the drop boxes. Drag an entire event or album from iPhoto or build a slide show one photo at a time by dragging individual photos into the same box. Want a music soundtrack for a slide show? Drag an audio track into the slide show’s drop box.
When you’re done, preview your work by clicking the Preview button and using iDVD’s standard preview features (page 255). Then click the Burn or Create Project buttons, and iDVD builds your project for you, even creating chapter submenus for movies containing DVD chapters (page 259).
Magic iDVD may be all you need for many projects. And if you need to customize or enhance the DVD it creates, you can bring the rest of iDVD’s authoring features to bear. Indeed, Magic iDVD is a great way to rough out a project that you plan to refine later.
Here’s how to make DVD magic.
Magic iDVD versus OneStep DVD
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 267 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.
To Make a Magic iDVD
- Step 1. Choose File > Magic iDVD.
- Step 2 (optional). Edit the DVD title.
- Step 3. Choose a theme for the DVD by clicking one of the theme thumbnails. (To access additional themes, use the pop-up menu above the row of thumbnails.)
Step 4. To add video to the DVD, click the Movies button in the Media pane, then drag one or more movies into the drop boxes.
Need to add multiple movies? Simply Shift-click or
-click on each one to select the movies, then drag them as a group, as shown on the opposite page. When you release the mouse button, each movie appears in its own drop box.Step 5. To add a slide show to the DVD, drag photos into the photos drop boxes. Each box represents a different slide show.
And just as you can add multiple movies at once, you can create multiple slide shows at once. Shift-click or
-click on each event or album in the Photos media browser, then drag the items as a group. Each item becomes its own slide show.Step 6 (optional). To add music to a slide show, drag an audio file from the Audio media browser (or elsewhere on your hard drive) to the slide show.
A speaker icon appears on the slide show’s thumbnail to indicate that it has a soundtrack.
Step 7. Preview or finish up.
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 276–279.)
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.
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