iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Chapter 18. Designing iDVD Themes

Some of Apple's iDVD themes offer great backgrounds but weak audio. Others provide terrific sounds but so-so text. Some create a nearly perfect package, while others seem broken beyond repair. Fortunately, in the end it doesn't matter, because iDVD lets you adapt themes to your taste and save them as new Favorites.

Favorites let you move beyond built-in themes and presets to create truly customized DVD menu systems. You can change fonts for titles, adjust the length of the looping background video, move buttons around and change their styles, switch the fonts and colors for button and menu titles, move text around the screen, substitute new background art or background patterns, replace or remove the audio loop that plays when the main menu is onscreen, and much more. Let this chapter be your guide.

Note

One thing you'll notice in this chapter, and in iDVD in general: Learning the ⌘-I keystroke is incredibly useful. That's the shortcut for the View → Show Inspector command. It opens a floating black panel, illustrated often in this chapter, filled with formatting options that are specific to whatever was selected: a button, a text block, or the menu screen itself. (You hide this panel the same way: with another ⌘-I.)

iDVD's Built-in Themes

iDVD's built-in themes vary in complexity. Some offer completely realized presentations. Others provide little more than colors and fonts, leaving it up to you to mold them. Either way, the built-in themes, both old ...