iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Chapter 17. DVD Menus, Slideshows, and the Map

Chapter 16 shows you how easy it is to convert a single iMovie project into a genuine DVD. But iDVD is capable of far more. You can use it, for example, to make a DVD that contains six of your greatest iMovie masterpieces all on one disc. Or you can create a slideshow DVD, which happens to be one of the world's greatest methods for displaying digital photos. (You can even incorporate movies into a slideshow.) And you'll never know joy like that of designing your own navigational menu system, complete with menus within menus.

This chapter shows you how, by doing a few more things manually, you can gain far more power and freedom.

Adding Movies

When you get right down to it, all iDVD really does is add window dressing—menus, buttons, and so on—to movies, music, and photos created in other programs. Take movies, for example. As Chapter 16 makes clear, you can transfer an iMovie project into iDVD via the Media Browser. But that's just the beginning of the ways you can add movies to your iDVD projects. You can also:

• Use the File → Import command.

• Drag movies into the iDVD window from the desktop.

• Choose movies from the Media Browser.

The following pages take you through these additional methods.

The Import Command

iDVD's File → Import command lets you install video, audio, pictures, and background movies onto whatever menu screen you're editing; see Figure 17-1.

Figure 17-1. When you choose File → Import → Video, the Open File dialog box appears, ...