In the last post, I walked you through the basic uses of iDVD.

This time around, we’ll talk about compiling a DVD from scratch, and customizing it to levels beyond what the Magic iDVD wizard allows.

Using iDVD themes, you can create customized menus and chapter screens for your DVD, which look exactly like the ones you see on studio-made compilations.

To create a fully featured, professional-looking DVD, hit “Create a new project” in the screen that pops up when iDVD opens. If the popup screen doesn’t appear, hit “File>New” or click “Cmd-N”.

Note: You can also create a DVD project using the Magic iDVD wizard, and then customize it further by clicking on any of the three closely spaced buttons at the center/bottom of your screen. We’ll be learning more
about these buttons very soon.

Hit the “themes” button on the bottom right of your iDVD window.
In the sidebar on your right you should see a number of images pop up. They look like this:

You can choose from the latest themes – under the “7.0 themes” menu, the slightly older ones – “6.0 themes” – and the old themes, which you will have to install separately to use. You can also install more themes from sites like DVDthemepak – just make sure that they are compatible with your version of iDVD.

Each theme has a separate graphic or video for the main screen, chapter screen and extras. You will see the submenu as soon as you click the little arrow to the left of every theme – it will point down instead of left, and you will see the “Main”, “Chapters” and “Extras” versions of every theme. In the screenshot below, the orange rectangle on the sidebar shows you different sub-screens of the “Sunflower” theme.
If you don’t like the background image, you can drag and drop a photo or video from your sidebar onto it, holding the Command(“Apple”) key down the whole time. Click on “Replace background” from the menu that pops up, et voila!

The yellow rectangle added to the screenshot points out a very useful little feature – it allows you to select a slideshow or a video clip to play whenever the DVD is inserted, instead of taking viewers directly to a menu screen.

This option can be exercised by pressing the first of the three buttons referred to earlier – a flowchart-type image, which says “Show the DVD map” if you hover above it.

Using this, you can categorize your video clips and slideshows into folders, edit the order of pictures in slideshows and also rearrange the order of playback. Add data to a specific area by dragging-and-dropping from the sidebar. You can replace data by dragging something new over the existing data, and can delete simply by pressing the “delete” key.

The 7.0 themes all have background videos, and you can preview the playbacks using the button beside the DVD map button.

Now, you can progress to adding data to your DVD.

The button to the right of the playback button – with an arrow and a dotted rectangle – allows you to add content to your DVD using the “Drop Zones”.

The drop zones can be used to insert media that is played within the theme itself. The red outlines in this screenshot show you the various ways in which themes display media – it could be in a circle, a long rectangle or any polygon. So choose the media you put in the drop zone accordingly. Remember, all the media in your DVD does not have to be in the drop zone.

This is how you can use iDVD themes to add life and context to your DVD. From weddings and birthdays to memorials or academic projects, the theme will help you set the mood for the pictures and video that are to follow.

iLife is one of the most useful utilities available on the Mac. The combination of GarageBand, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and iWeb lets people record and archive their attempts at creating art or memories, with minimal effort and maximum convenience. Though iTunes has been cut out of the “iLife” label in the past two releases, its role is not to be underestimated either.

In a nutshell, GarageBand, iPhoto and iMovie are useful for organizing and rudimentarily editing your collections of music, photos and video respectively. GarageBand also lets you create your own music using either your own instruments or the computer keyboard, but that is matter for another post.

Once you come up with a suitable collection of videos, music and photos or a mishmash of all these, you’ll be looking for a way to present it attractively. This is where iDVD and iWeb come in.

iWeb is a basic WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) web page creation software, that lets you design a website to share your creations with your loved ones or the world at large. Similarly, iDVD is a program that lets users create professional-looking DVDs out of their media collections – from slideshows to audio to movie clips.

iDVD Help

Once you launch iDVD, you are faced with four options, as shown in the screenshot below:

If all you want to do is to burn a DVD, click on the “OneStep DVD” option. This lets you burn DVDs from digital video cameras with one single click, once you connect the camera to the PC via a cable.

To create a DVD from any movie file, use the “OneStep DVD from Movie” option that you will get from the “File” menu.

The easiest way to compile a DVD from diverse types and sources of media is using the “Magic iDVD” option. This lets you pick a theme and add media to your disk on one single screen.

The “theme” is the screen which first appears when you load the DVD, and you can use this to create folders and submenus, each of which can contain movies or slideshows.
Adding images, slideshows(from iPhoto folders) or video is a simple drag-and-drop affair, mainly thanks to the media sidebar, which automatically links to the “smart folders” on your Mac.

You can add audio to slideshows with a single click as well, by dragging the audio file on top of the slideshow. Merely dragging audio files to the “Drop Photos here” boxes won’t work, so stay careful about that one.
When you successfully add audio to a slideshow, you will see this icon on the little window:

Once you have added all the content you want to add to your DVD, it is technically ready to burn. Hit the “Burn” button on the bottom right of your screen, insert a blank DVD, and follow the instructions from there on.
If you want to customize further, you can hit the “Create project” button that is there right next to the “burn” button. There, you will be able to reorder your photos and slideshows, set content to play automatically once the disk is inserted, and do much more.

The beauty of iDVD – as with all Mac software – is that it is highly intuitive. Keep clicking around and reading the small print, and sit back to survey the results of your first iDVD project. The help menu available on iDVD will also offer iDVD Help options to guide you through any trouble you may be having.

This weekend, I’ll be walking you through the functionality of iDVD themes – where to get more themes, how to customize and use themes, and so on. Stay tuned!