An iDVD Slide Show

From The Imaging Resource Digital Photography Newsletter
Volume 5, Number 5 - 7 March 2003

Recently, we took a leisurely month to burn a DVD slide show using DVDit! on Windows XP. We chronicled our adventure in the Oct. 18 issue last year as part of our ongoing Slide Show Project.

Some helpful souls suggested we'd enjoy life more if we used iDVD on the Mac. So we did.

Apple sent a G4 with a SuperDrive and iDVD 3. We got out our calendar to time it, but then thought we should note the time too, in case those helpful souls were right.

It was 4:50 p.m. when we launched the Tutorial.

Our First Problem

The Tutorial explained how to choose a Theme, which is nothing more than a design motif for the main menu and its buttons. You do that by clicking on the Customize button. A drawer slides out the left side of the iDVD window with scrolling sets of themes to pick from. Lots of them (and you can add your own, too).

That was pretty much all we needed to be told to use iDVD.

Good thing, because it had suddenly become 4:55. We had to get down to business if we were going to make it home for dinner.

We selected a nice theme called Picture in Picture and forgot all about the Tutorial. The theme had a place for us to drag one picture, which it also blurred and enlarged as a background image. Hence the name Picture in Picture. All we had to do was drag a picture into the drop zone. Slick.

The tool button strip at the top of the Customize drawer has six options: Theme, Settings, Audio, Photos, Movies and Status.

We picked Photos to look through our iPhoto collection. You would, no doubt, have done the same thing.

Instantly, our iPhoto albums appeared in the Customize drawer with the whole Library selected and thumbnails visible in the pane below the album list. Click on an album in the list pane and its thumbnails are displayed below it. So you can select an album or an image or a set of images, whatever you happen to want.

We dragged an image we liked into the drop zone. Instantly the theme became our own, with our image in the drop zone and the background, too. You can even reposition the image in the drop zone.

Then it occurred to us, we really should use our own words in the title. So we did what came naturally. Just clicked on the title and typed. You know, like you'd do in any text editor. And it worked.

Hmmm, pretty easy so far. We had our own title with a picture-in-picture display for the main menu. But, oops, big problem. We had no content!

Then it hit us. The first real problem we had with iDVD wasn't how to do anything. It was what to do. Such a luxury, we can't tell you.

Picking Photos

With a thousand images or so lying in wait, it wasn't a trivial problem. But since they were in iPhoto, they were already organized into albums.

Could we really just drag an album onto our title screen and be done with it?

We tried it and ... it worked. The button text is picked up from the album name and the album contents all appear in the play list when you double click the button. You can rearrange the order and cut any images you don't want in the list view. You can enlarge the thumbnails a bit, too.

Notice we didn't say anything about importing, resizing, overscan, orientation, traversing directory trees or calling 911.

As the images are copied from your album to iDVD, they are resized -- and, miracle of miracles, even the orientation is maintained, with black borders added to the sides to fit the television format. That might sound trivial, but our one portrait image was stretched into fun-house mirror dimensions by DVDit!, ruining the show we built in Windows.

We could also have clicked on the Slide Show button at the bottom of iDVD's main window. There are buttons for Custom, Folder (which spawns a submenu) and Slide Show on the left and Motion (which plays animated themes), Preview and Burn on the right.

When you click on Slide Show, your main menu spawns a button with some text. Click the text and type to enter your own. Double click to get the list of images.

At the list screen, you can:

• Tell iDVD to add non-clickable back and forward arrows to the slide show (reminders to press the Next button on the remote),

• Set the interval either in seconds or to fit the length of the music if you've dragged a tune from your iTunes library to the Audio well,

• Have iDVD copy your original images to the DVD so viewers can copy them to their own hard disks, and

• Change the size of the thumbnails in the list view.

What you can't do is add transition effects like cross dissolves. You can certainly have them but you have to build a very custom slide show in iMovie (complete with the new Ken Burns effect, if you like) to get them.

We made several simple slide shows in iDVD for our first DVD, using button for each album.

Today's Theme

iDVD's new themes are unusually attractive themes, professionally designed, with interesting (not gimmicky) special effects. There's something for every taste but it's refreshing to see so many that don't look lifted from Saturday morning cartoons. There are actually a few subtle, elegant themes.

Our theme defaulted to the Optima font in black. We wanted to use the ultracool Zaphino (even though it's hardly flattered by TV-screen resolution) and a different color. Not a problem. The Settings button in the Customize drawer's tool button strip lets you do just that.

Settings never refers to styles, but that's how it works. Change the button treatment and they all change. No selecting, no problem aligning (that's part of the design), no issue with button states. All this is done for you -- you just make the major tweaks and leave the details to iDVD.

You can change the title's position, font, color and size. Same with the button style, although you can also snap it to a grid for easy alignment or leave it where you put it. There are also a number of button masks to choose from. And you can change the background image and audio, too. All of which you can save as a custom theme.

The Picture in Picture theme is pretty much a black and white motif. All the text is black. We changed it to red, dark gray and a few other things before we decided black really did work best for the buttons but dark gray spiced up the title a bit. The buttons printed over the ghosted, blurred background image but the title printed over white. So a little modification and it looked different without being ruined.

Testing, Testing

We spent about an hour assembling the content of our disc. After we dragged an album to the image list, we'd return to the title menu, press Preview and use the on-screen remote to play the show. If we didn't like an image, we cut it. If they were out of order, we dragged them into the right order. And Previewed again.

We made four shows during the hour, adding a button and then the images and then previewing the show. The more we did it, the more we liked it. We started to wonder what else we could put on the disc.

Even when we agreed to add the original photos to the DVD-ROM, we had a lot of room left on the disc. The 4.7-GB capacity is really about 4.4-GB worth of data. The Status button on the Customize drawer tool button strip showed us at any time how little of that space we'd used. No surprises like burning and burning until the last minute when the disc ejects in an unreadable state because, well, you had too much data.

Music, Maestro

All the space was really why we added music to each show. And enough images that, when image display was tailored to the length of the music, nothing was on screen for more than five seconds.

Music was as easy to add as images. The Audio button in the Customize drawer's tool button strip shows you your iTunes libraries. Just pick a song, drag it to the Audio well in the slide show list screen and that's it.

You can also add music to the title menu, but only a 30 second cut that loops. Click the Motion button on the main window to hear the effect, moving the time slider to get a cut that repeats gracefully.

Burn, Baby

At 6:10 we were ready to burn. We had previewed all four slide shows with a Picture in Picture main menu using an attractive type style we'd customized a tiny bit. We had sound on the main title and a different tune to accompany each slide show. We set the duration of each show to match the length of the music.

And we'd spent the whole time -- not just a large part of it -- arranging the show contents rather than fighting the program interface.

To burn, you just click the Burn button. You're prompted for a blank DVD.

And that was really the only aggravating part of the whole process. Getting the blessed cellophane wrapping off the blank DVD. We can't wait to get these in spindles.

We popped in our blank, the drawer shut itself and "Stage 1, Preparing" appeared on the screen. Briefly. A few nanoseconds later, "Stage 2, Menu Rendering & Encoding" appeared with a note that it would take about 13 minutes. The title window went blank and was gradually redrawn as everything was rendered. Suddenly our disc was ready.

Want another or are you done? We were done, but we appreciated the question. What good is it to ask you at the start of the process how many copies you want? You still have to be there to swap in new blanks. So why not ask you at the end? Want another? Another? iDVD is smart enough to hang on to the disc image until you say you're done.

We were done at 6:26.

A Recommendation

DVD slide shows do not contain archival images. The images they use are greatly downsized for lower resolution output. So don't for a minute think your iDVD presentations are all you have to save.

If you enable the copy originals option, the disk will contain your original images. Archival indeed.

But you'll probably prefer to archive your original images from iPhoto itself. Just click the Burn button after selecting some albums. Your originals, in all their glory, will be written to CD or DVD.

More Than One Way

We started with iDVD because that's how we'd done the project in Windows XP.

But we could just as easily have burned a DVD presentation from iPhoto or iMovie. iPhoto has an iDVD button. Select an album, click on iDVD and you have a DVD presentation with a button for your album.

Same with iMovie. Except when you click the iDVD button there, you get a pane to mark chapters. Select any frame in your movie, click on Add Chapter and you have a chapter. You can remove them, too. When you have what you want, click on Create iDVD Project and you've got a main menu with chapter menus.

iMovie provides the most flexibility for creating a slide show. You can vary the time any image is displayed, cut music to fit, add transitions and subject your stills to the Ken Burns effect, too. Export to the proper format is invisible, too, so you can't make a mistake picking MPEG-1 over MPEG-2, say.

Compatibility

In our XP story, we detailed (a bit) the issues surrounding Plus and Dash media (DVD+R/+RW and DVD-R/-RW). To sum up, it's a confused issue between competing standards.

Apple, though, has been helpful in unraveling what's at stake. Recently they've been shipping Sony DVD players that handle both Plus and Dash media. But their software (iDVD) writes only to DVD-R discs.

Apple's explanation is that DVD-R discs are more likely to play on older standalone DVD players than Plus discs. And in our case, that's certainly true. Our two-year-old Antique DVD player handled our iDVD disc with aplomb. No complaints.

Heard This Before?

When we dreamed up the Slide Show Project, we knew it was more than we could chew, so we solicited your advice right from the start. And you wrote in with recommendation after recommendation (indeed, we have another in this issue).

But to read through them you'd think everyone ran Windows. We heard from only a handful of Macintosh users -- and they all said exactly the same thing. No problem, use iDVD.

In January, Apple upped the ante by providing a level of integration between iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD worthy of a new name -- iLife. The imaging suite is included on all new Macintoshes, can be purchased for $50 at retail outlets or the Apple store and can, with the exception of iDVD, be downloaded from the Apple Web site (http://www.apple.com/ilife). It does require OS X, however.

While no charge is associated with iLife, we wouldn't quite call it free. You have to buy a Macintosh. But that's why you buy a Macintosh, really. We prefer to think of the Mac hardware as free and the software, from OS X to iLife (plus that wonderful Safari browser) as the stuff that's really worth the bucks.

With Mac OS X and iLife, the chaos of file glut is somehow databased. Your images get albumized, the albums are visible to iMovie and iDVD, disc burning is a button (you actually hardly ever use the menu bar for anything) in any applicable application. The links are there, you just have to follow them.

And when you do follow them, you can get to places you never imagined existed. It isn't just easy, it's natural. It isn't just fun, it's what happens after fun.

Of course, Apple's approach makes it very difficult for third parties to play. Adobe didn't bother to arm Album to compete with iPhoto and iMovie preempts many vendor-specific editing solutions. Fortunately, relying on iLife leaves you with very few regrets. And a few bucks to spend on nice enhancements like Adobe Photoshop or Elements.

Conclusion

Hardware is easy to talk about, test, evaluate, review and sell. Software takes a little more study. Which is why we remain one of the very few imaging publications to review software in any depth.

Most people find software is a solid that must be chewed to derive any nutritional benefits. And so they chew and chew and chew. But, no matter how much they chew, the stuff is still pretty hard to swallow.

But, as the helpful souls pointed out, Apple's software is a liquid. You can drink it. No chewing necessary.

When you get tired of chewing, have a glass of iLife. Some things do just go down easier.