iDVD 6 and iMovie HD:

Video Storytelling
on a Less-than-Indie
Budget

The Challenge 

A couple of months ago, a fellow artist asked me if I could help him produce a digital portfolio of his art that he could send out to galleries and museums

I had recently replaced my G4 Desktop with a Power Mac G5 Dual 2.3GHz beefed up with 4.5GB RAM, so my computer was up to the job. As I got into the project, I soon realized that, instead of merely burning a DVD of static images, I could give my friend a full-blown multimedia movie, including a soundtrack.

Fortunately, I already had the software, iDVD and iMovie, (preinstalled as part of the iLife suite on my hard drive). And my G5 had the necessary processing muscle, including a graphics card that was up to the task for video production. It seemed like a doable option.

Well. I did it, and I’m here to report that iDVD and iMovie are terrific, and not difficult to use. Although iDVD is a complex program, it works effectively and transparently behind the scenes. But keep in mind that the quality of the content—images, movies, music, good taste, skill and editorial judgment on your part—is what ultimately determines the quality of the DVD viewing experience. Good stuff in, good stuff out. Film editors need good material to work with for a memorable product. Whatever a DVD contains—movies, video clips, photographs and other still images, documents or any other files that can be copied onto a computer—quality input is essential.

Anatomy of a DVD

To appreciate the power of iDVD, consider all the decisions that had to be made in producing this DVD:

• Will the viewer have to play a sequence from beginning to end, or be able to select any scene or chapter, at any point?
  
• Can the image be viewed at a 4:6 ratio? 9:16? Both?
  
• Will the images be shown as an unadorned series of frames, or be tied together in a visually thematic way?
  
• What kind of transitions? Jump-cuts? Fade outs? Cross-disolves? Or something even fancier?
• Will there be any special effects? Are they within the competence of the film-editor?
  
• How about music? Voiceovers? Live, recorded conversation?
  
• and that's only the beginning.

iDVD puts all of these possibilities at your fingertips, to use or not, as you please, and to edit and tweak the final product until it suits you. Here are some particulars:

Menus. The first thing you see on your television or computer screen when you insert a DVD into an optical drive or DVD player is the main menu. When you create your own DVD, that menu is the first thing you build. For my project, it was a list of exhibitions.

The menu can be a simple black screen with the contents of the DVD listed, or it can have still or moving background images with clickable text or graphic buttons.

Navigation.  When you click a button on a DVD menu, something happens: a movie or song starts to play, a slideshow appears, or you see another menu (called a submenu). A submenu is simply another way to lead your viewers to more content. You can have many submenus on your DVD.

When you design your own menus, you add buttons that take the viewer wherever he wants to go.

Themes. You  could  present the content  of your DVD as a simple succession of images, titles  and text frames, but that might be dull. Would you prefer to show your vacation pictures, for example, as if you were flying over them, then zooming in for a close-up? Complex special effects like this are simple with iDVD, which offers a set of templates  called themes—professionally designed scenarios and special effects that, with some constraints, you can modify and personalize. Below, for example is how I used iDVD’s “Reflection Black” theme to display my friend’s art.

iDVD Main Menu & Media Pane: The main menu window of my iDVD project (left) shows the Reflection Black theme, with myy submenu button links listed on the exhibitions panel (far left). I dragged the artwork images from the Media pane (right) into the available drop zones (number 3 is left open for clarity), which are special containers where you can add photos, QT movies and even slideshows that become integrated with the template menu art. The integrated Media pane (right) provides access to files in iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie. Cool, isn't it?

Drop Zones. Reflection Black has eight drop zones, which crawl across the screen in a loop. If you add more than one photo to a drop zone, multiple images will be displayed, one at a time in rotation, for added interest.

In short,  iDVD enables you to present content in an engaging manner that the user can easily navigate.

Overview: What’s New in iDVD 6

Here are some of the things you can do with v.6 that you couldn’t do before:

—Shoot material using the latest HDV (high-definition video) and widescreen DV cameras, and produce widescreen, high definition DVD’s that can fill every inch of the newest widescreen TVs.

—Design your presentation using any of ten new Apple-designed menu themes in both widescreen (16:9) and standard (4:3) formats.. Each new theme family includes a coordinating main menu, chapter or scene selection menus, and extras.

—Customize these themes via the new autofill drop zones.

—Burn, using compatible third-party DVD burners. (Apple has lifted its former restriction.You are no longer limited to a built-in SuperDrive).

—Or, forget about all the foregoing and use new Magic iDVD, the easiest way ever to make a DVD. Just choose a theme and select your movies and photos; iDVD creates a complete DVD project for you. Magic iDVD projects include a main menu with buttons for your movies, slide shows and scene-selection menus for movies with chapters. Drop zones are filled automatically with your content. You can then burn the DVD or continue editing it like any other iDVD project.

 (Note: HDV is also able to use MiniDV tapes, which have over four times greater resolution than standard MiniDV. But, although you can import and edit HDV in iMovie, your final DVD when burned from iDVD will— because of compression limitations— have the same resolution as if you had used a standard MiniDV camcorder. )

—Go widescreen all the way. Create DVD’s with widescreen themes, menus, movies, and slideshows. With its new, resizable window, iDVD makes it easier for you to work in the 16:9 aspect ratio.

—Flexibly edit the menu and buttons. Design DVD menus and buttons exactly the way you want. Adjust the volume of the background audio and make it fade in and out. Choose from more button styles, customize the button highlight color, and set the in- and out-points  for motion buttons. You can even mix button styles on a menu if you like.

—Produce quality slideshows. They can include titles and comments, and one slideshow can hold thousands of slides. You can create slideshows from iPhoto books and import Keynote slides to make a professional presentation DVD.

—Manage huge projects, via enhanced map view editing. With this new feature, you can reorganize even the largest DVD project by dragging and dropping DVD menu icons in map view to move elements from one menu to another. You can delete a section of the DVD project and the menus will reconnect automatically. Map view also alerts and identifies potential problems with your DVD before you burn it to a disc.

—Use any DVD burner. Previous versions forced users to burn an iDVD project to a built-in SuperDrive. You now have the option of using whatever drive you have.

Here are several links that will help you get up to speed on what iDVD 6 can do. Apple’s Discussion Group is a gold mine of information for resolving issues.

Ken Stone’s Website

Apple iDVD 6 Multimedia Tutorial

Apple iDVD Discussion Group

My iDVD Art Project

To make sure my iDVD project files were all in the right format, I worked with photos from within the iPhoto library, music files that were in iTunes, and movies created in iMovie HD.

After choosing the standard aspect ratio of 4:3 (widescreen 16:9 is also an option) for the DVD, I selected my theme (Reflection Black), various preferences (best performance also enables background encoding, and fade volume out at end of menu loop and slideshow. (Note that certain settings in preferences apply only to new projects). I then went to work on the main template menus, submenus, and developing the slideshows. I had nine different slideshows plus nine movies planned. All my media files (photos, music, movies) were readily available from within the Media pane in iDVD.

Aural Dimension

The primary benefit of presenting art in a slideshow is that there is a perception of movement; adding an audio track presents yet another dimension of mood. I could also add special transitional effects (cube, dissolve, push, etc.) between slides.

The slideshow maker of iDVD is good, but I also wanted to pan and zoom—the “Ken Burns” effect—across the static images of the paintings for certain slideshows in the project;  and although iMovie has the Ken Burns effect feature  (you export the slideshow from iMovie to iDVD), I used FotoMagico instead. This is a dedicated slideshow-authoring tool ($79) from Boinx Software. FotoMagico has a simple, powerful interface that gives you superior control over timing between transitions. It offers many cool transitions to choose from as well. You can also add a music track and voiceovers created with iMovie or in GarageBand.

A Legalism Stops the Music

But you can’t add music-protected  files from your iTunes library to your FotoMagico slideshow. This limitation is imposed by Apple, not by FotoMagico. According to Apple, songs bought from the iTunes Music Store are protected to “prohibit unauthorized copying"—meaning,  copying to anything other than Apple-approved software or devices, such as the iPod. Some would argue that this practice is unfair because it restricts users from using their playback mode of choice. (Unprotected files, e,g., from your CD’s, are no problem.)  Nevertheless, I didn’t want to infringe on copyright laws by distributing and selling a finished DVD project using music I don’t legally own. 

However, no money was changing hands in this case, so I was free to use music tracks from iTunes for my FotoMagico slideshows.  But how? With Audio Hijack Pro.

Audio Hijack Pro makes it simple to record any audio on your computer. In the process, the audio file is stripped of any copy-protection encoding scheme and you can easily save audio from almost any application to an AIFF, ACC, or MP3 file. This file can then be burned to a CD, or played in any software audio player like iTunes, or FotoMagico, or any hardware audio player like an iPod. Which is what I did.

Audio Highjack Pro. After using Audio Hijack Pro to record tracks from iTunes, I placed my Hijacked files in an iTunes playlist. And now, with the music no longer copy protected, it became available to FotoMagico and my slideshow
.

QuickTime

I assembled my (16:9) pan and zoom slideshows in FotoMagico with the selected tracks from iTunes;  although my iDVD preference was set to the standard 4:3 aspect ratio, I wanted the movies themselves within the drop zone containers to have the widescreen look found in films

DVD: Widescreen Preview   Here is a slide in widescreen. I exported this slideshow as a QuickTime movie from FotoMagico. Shown here is how it appears in the iDVD preview window in widescreen (also known as "letterbox").

 

[ MISSING IMAGE HERE? ]

Foto Magico Export. I exported my FotoMagico slideshows as QuickTime movies in the appropriate widescreen format; I accessed these preferences in the export dialog box: Customize > Size. For your work with iDVD and iMovie, it is essential that you use the most recent version (currently 7.1.2) of QuickTime. Upgrading to QuickTime Pro ($29.99) provides
extra options that you will need.

With my QuickTime movies of the slideshows now stored in the iMovie document folder, I had access to these files from the Media panel in iDVD. I then went to work as follows: I created standard slideshows from within iDVD to display each artwork  individually, but grouped by category—say portraits,  for example. Then, to complement each iDVD slideshow, I created a companion pan and zoom slideshow with FotoMagico using the same artworks. This approach gave me more dramatic control in presenting the art; for example, I could zoom in and pan on a portion of art as a teaser in the slideshow movie without revealing the entire piece.

Burning

I now had all my menus and visual components, including text, images, and movies, in place within the iDVD template, and was ready to burn my first DVD. I burned several DVD-RW discs, apparently smoothly, but then discovered  that the Apple DVD Player would not recognize any of them! They were now,  officially, coasters.  I thus learned that DVD media are not all created equal for burning video DVD’s. Rrewritable discs had worked well for burning data such as documents and still images, but they were useless for recording video onto DVD.

What to do? A click to Apple’s busy iDVD discussion group put me in the right direction; a number of discussion group members recommended Verbatim DVD-R DataLifePlus discs for their reliability, and they were right.  I also learned that burning at slower speeds (2x or 4x) would produce more reliable, error-free results. (For  an in-depth guide to DVD blank media, check this site.)

Tip: Sometimes iDVD acts up inexplicably. It may not launch correctly, or crashes, or themes may not appear, or the Spinning Beach Ball strikes— or other anomalies. Try this: Quit iDVD. Search in User/Library/Preferences for the file named com.apple.iDVD.plist. Trash it. A new one will be created the next time you launch iDVD. This may also resolve project-loading errors. Remember to Restart and use Disk Utility to Repair Permissions. 

Copyright © 2009
Metropolitan New York Macintosh Alliance