--- ranger6350 <ranger@...> wrote:
> I have music video shot in three different locations. I'd like to
> have it all be one continuous movie from iMovie. However,
> I'd also like to have my main menu buttons be something
> like: Play Movie; Location 1; Location 2; Location 3;
> Slideshows and other stuff.
>
> Can I do this? What I intuit I want to do is have each of the
> Location beginnings marked as chapters (I have each
> song and some interspersed interviews all marked at the
> moment). How do I make a submenu link to a particular
> starting point (#1) and, #2, How do I connect the chapter
> markers under the particular Location in which they were
> shot, rather than numbered sequentially from 1 to the end
> of the movie?

Ranger,

OK, here are a bunch of facts and example about Chapter markers. Kind
of long...

When you add chapters to your iMovie and then go to iDVD you should
get a main screen with "Play Movie" and "Scene Selection" buttons.
Obviously "Play Movie" starts your movie up. If you click on "Scene
Selection" you get a submenu or series of submenus of your chapters
you put in from iMovie.

Just like any commercial Hollywood movie, chapters/scenes are nothing
more than starting points (a jump in point if you will) where you can
pick a chapter/scene, start it playing but then it will continue to
play to the end of your movie. Some people mistakenly think it will
play just the scene then stop at the end of the scene and jump back
to the menu. Until it is pointed out to them, they do not remember
this doesn't work that way in a Hollywood movie either.

Any chapter markers you put in can be renamed either in iMovie or
iDVD. So in iMovie when you tell it to add a chapter marker you get,
for example, Chapter 6. If you want you can click on that chapter
name and when it highlights you can type in any name you want, e.g.
"The Beach". When you go to iDVD those names will be as you changed
them. But you can also click on the names in the iDVD menu and change
them there as well. Useful as sometimes titles you picked in iMovie
don't fit nicely in the theme you chose, so it is useful to be able
to tweak them in iDVD if needed. For example, you might find
"December 25, 2006" bumps into other scene names on a crowded menu
screen, so you can change it in iDVD to instead read "XMas 2006".

Further more, you can cut (or copy) and paste scenes from one menu
into other menus. So you can move chapter markers to the top level
(main menu) if you want. Keeping in mind that clicking on any of them
will start your movie from that point, but continue on until the end
of the movie. By the way, the "Play Movie" and "Scene Selection"
buttons can also be renamed if you like. An example where this all
ties together. Say you have a project that is 20 minutes long and you
have only two chapters (not counting the first default chapter at
0:00:00 that is created in all DVD projects). When you go into iDVD
you will get "Play" and "Scenes" then in the "Scenes" menu you have
three chapters (the first default one and your two added ones). To
simplify the project you might select your two added chapters and
paste them into the main menu. You can then select the "Scene
Selection" button and delete it (button and submenu go away). You can
then rename the "Play Movie" to, for example, "Whole Recital", then
one chapter "Starting on Piano" and the other "Starting at Chorus".
So now you have a simple single menu project with three buttons.
Whole Recital plays everything and the other two jump in a little
later but play to the end.

Going back to chapter markers, you can create many chapter markers (I
think 99 is the limit for a single movie) but you do not have to use
all of them or any in a scene selection menu if you do not want to,
but all of them will be in the movie so the viewer can jump forward
and backward to all chapter markers inserted even if you don't show
them in the menus. I mention this because you can use this to your
advantage to force iDVD to create extra scene selection pages. Most
Themes are set up to display 6 or so chapters per page. So if your
project has 15 chapters (including the first one at 0:00) when you go
to iDVD, the scene selection area will have three menus with 6, 6,
and 3 chapters. Now say you want to have four groups of chapters with
each group on its own menu and you don't need the first chapter in
the menu. So you want the remaining 14 chapters on 4 pages as
follows: 5, 2, 3, & 4. To force iMovie to give your four chapter
pages rather than 3, pad your project with extra chapters (put them
in places that are useful for jumping forward/backward with the
remote). At 6 chapters per page, you need 24 chapters. Therefore in
addition to the default first chapter, your 14 chapters, create 9
more in your project to total up to 24.

Now go to iDVD with this project. You will have 4 "Scene Selection"
sub pages. First step is to highlight and delete all the chapters you
don't want the viewer to see (as I said earlier, the chapter points
are still embedded in the movie, so when you remote forward and
backwards, it will jump through all 24 chapters, not just the ones in
the menus). Now simply cut and paste your chapters and group them
onto the pages so you have 5, 2, 3, & 4 per page like you wanted.

And finally, if your intention was to be able to play the whole
movie, then pick a location and play ONLY that location (rather than
continuing through the rest of the whole movie) the only way to do
that is to create separate mini-movies of just those locations. Then
simply drag and drop them into your iDVD project. You can have more
than one movie on an iDVD project. Just note that the total time of
your movies can not exceed the limit of iDVD for the project. In
other words, if your total movie is 30 minutes and each location is
10 minutes long, you would need 4 movies (the whole movie, then each
of the three location movies) and they would total 60 minutes, which
is OK. If on the other hand you have a 90 minute main movie and want
to add five 10-minute location sub movies, that totals 140 minutes,
which is too long for a single layer DVD so could only be created on
a dual layer DVD.

I hope that helps. I wasn't exactly sure what you were trying to do,
so I thought I would include ALL the possibilities.


Patrick Timlin
http://www.geocities.com/ptimlin/