Driss-A-Blog

iDVD supports slideshows, and has an interesting feature. It puts chapter marks after every slide, so you can use the forward- and backward-chapter buttons on your remote to skip between slides. That's wonderful, unless you have more than 99 slides. If you do, things start breaking down.

The technical problem is that a DVD can't have more than 99 chapters for a title. To get around this limitation, iDVD, when creating a long slideshow, will break it down into multiple titles, and have one automatically chain into the other. Except...

- In Apple's DVD player and in the PlayStation 2 DVD player, there's a large skip in the music during that chaining point.
- Two different Windows-based DVD players crash either when hitting that chaining point or after completing the movie.

This is bad. I filed a bug with Apple, of course (r. 5073870), but that didn't help me much. I tried building it with iMovie, but I didn't have much time, and with it wanting to render things out, it wasn't the best choice. I finally settled on Keynote.

The first thing to do with Keynote is to build a master template that works. Mine has a black background, a shared object box that's smaller than the slide (to deal with overscan), and appropriately-formatted title and body. Resize it to 640x480.

Keynote has support for background music during a presentation. Do not use it. I don't know what these people were thinking, but when you export to QuickTime later, the soundtrack will be exported as a separate file, which will be no help at all. Just build your silent slideshow.

Now you need to export it to a QuickTime movie. Choose a self-playing movie, and adjust the slide timing so that the entire presentation takes up about the same amount of time as your soundtrack. It's not too critical, so don't think too hard.

But be very careful with your export format. By default, Keynote will export with the H.264 codec. That's great if you're doing video, but for some reason, whenever I used H.264 for export, all of my slide timings were weird. Instead of three seconds per slide, I'd get 5, then 1, then 2, then 4, etc. I switched to the Animation codec for quality, though in later tests, exporting with the JPEG codec worked well, too.

Now open the movie in QuickTime Player (Pro, right?). Open the soundtrack. Make a new player, select the soundtrack movie, and copy-and-paste it into the new player. Switch to the slideshow movie, select it all, switch to the new player, and use “Add to Selection & Scale”. This will stretch the slideshow to exactly fit the music, which is what you want. Note that, however, it will also stretch the transitions. That's why you want to aim for the correct length, above, so that the effect on the transitions is minimized.

I tried adding chapters to the slideshow movie before pasting it over the soundtrack, but I ended up with weird duplicate chapter marks. I haven't been able to track that one down.

Then I ran into a problem with iDVD. The order that the menu buttons are highlighted depends on the order that they were created. Now, the slideshow was now the last item to go on the main menu even though it was the most important. It therefore didn't highlight automatically, and that wasn't good. I ended up having to delete and re-create the entire menu just to get the slideshow first. Moral: be omniscient about what you need to do, and get it right the first time.

iDVD also has a feature to add chapter marks to a video. I tried it, and it turned my menu structure into a hash. I quickly undid it, and hope to be able to take time in the future to figure it out again.

I created a disc image, and burned twenty copies for everyone on the trip. They haven't arrived yet, but I'm confident that everyone will like them.