iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Phase 4: Design the Menu Screen

On the main menu screen now before you, you’ll find two buttons:

• Play. On the finished DVD, this button means, “Play the movie from the beginning.”

• Scene Selection. On the finished DVD, this button will take your audience to a second screen, which is filled with individual buttons for the chapters you created (Figure 15-5). In fact, this second screen may well have arrows that lead to third and fourth screens, since iDVD menus vary in the number of buttons that fit per screen.

  If you’d like to have a look at this scene-selection screen, double-click the words Scene Selection. To return to the main menu, click the left-pointing arrow on the scene-selection screen or press ⌘-B.

Tip

If iDVD seems sluggish when you change screens, it’s because the program is busily processing video in the background. To make it work faster, choose iDVD → Preferences, click the Projects icon, turn off “Enable background encoding,” and then close the Projects window.

Creating your DVD at the end of the process will take longer now, because the video hasn’t been preprocessed. But at least you’ll be able to work in the program without feeling like you’re walking through quicksand.

If things are still slow, your Mac may need more memory. iDVD consumes RAM like the ravenous triple-toed dire sloth of the Northern Antipodes consumes white-tailed wombats. (And triple-toed dire sloths can be very, very ravenous indeed.)

All about Themes

The moving drop zones, any music that’s playing, ...