iMovie '11 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Chapter 19. Designing iDVD Themes

Some of Apple’s iDVD themes offer great visual backgrounds but weak audio. Others provide terrific sound 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 your creations as Favorites themes.

Favorites let you move beyond canned themes and presets to create truly customized DVD menus. You can change the fonts and colors on buttons and titles, adjust the length of a looping background video, move buttons around the screen and change their styles, 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.

Tip

Here’s 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 specific to the theme element you selected: a button, a text block, or the menu screen itself. (You hide this panel the same way you launched it: 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 into a full-fledged theme. Either ...