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Duration: 1:55
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Adding Additional Menus

Once you have your movies and slideshows added to your iDVD project, you'll need to decide the best way for your audience to navigate to the media on your DVD. For simple DVDs, you might decide to use a single menu. A more complex DVD with a long movie might include a chapter menu to jump quickly to scenes throughout your movie. You could even include an extras menu with shorter movies and slideshows.

iDVD 6 provides widescreen menus with theme families. Widescreen menus have a 16:9 aspect ratio to complement movies that are captured in widescreen format (and each widescreen 16:9 theme family has a matching 4:3 version too). Menu families include coordinated Main, Chapter and Extras menus, that all follow a similar theme. Menu families can give your projects a consistent, professional look across menus, making it easy for your audience to navigate through your DVD to locate and watch the movies and slideshows.



Tips

Family menus and when they're used

iDVD 6 introduces menu theme families, which include Main, Chapter and Extras versions of a menu design. iDVD automatically inserts the appropriate member of a menu family when adding a new menu to your project. When a new project is created, a Main menu is added to the project. If you insert a movie with chapter markers or add chapter markers to a movie already in your project, iDVD automatically inserts two new menus. The first is an Extras menu, which includes a Play Movie button and a Scene Selection button. The second is a Chapter menu, which is accessed from the new Scene Selection button, and which uses the chapter markers in your movie. If you add a menu by itself, iDVD chooses the Extras style. Family menus assure that your DVD menus share a theme. And you can always select a menu and change its style if you prefer a different design.

Creating a new menu quickly

If you have several items in a menu and decide you want to move some of them to a new menu, you don’t have to delete them and then add them to the new menu. Simply select the items while holding down the Shift key, open the Project menu, and choose “New Menu from Selection”.

Getting a quick overview of the menus in your project

As you create menus and other elements of your DVD, you may want to get an overview of the DVD’s contents. Click the Map button at the bottom of the iDVD window to see a map of all the items on your DVD. To access a specific item, double-click it in the map view. To exit map view, click the Return button.

Steps

Add a menu with additional movies

  1. From the lower left corner of iDVD, click the Add button and select Add Submenu. This will insert a new button called My Submenu.
  2. Click the button title and type a new name for your button.
  3. Double-click the button to open the submenu.
  4. Sample different menu themes and styles by selecting different choices from the Themes pane. To see all menu styles in a theme family, click the disclosure triangle associated with a theme family.
  5. Add additional movies and slideshows to this submenu.
  6. Click the Back arrow to return to the previous menu, then save your iDVD project.