After completing my last programming gig, I took a collection of Bryan’s video clips and made a DVD for our moms. I guess Grace’s Mac is way too old (and mine is seriously running out of space), it takes forever to compress the damn thing into the MPEG-2 format that consumer DVD players recognize. It took a whole day for the poor 400Mhz G4 with 700MB+ RAM to compress two dozen 1-2 minute clips (plus the menu… etc)!! But the result is wonderful. The images I used in the background of the main menu are all moving movie clips. Each of them loops as the image panes rotate through 8 different movie clips, complete with background music. And of course, the mirror reflections below them move as well!!
Thanks for Apple’s iLife suite, putting the clips and the dvd menu together took only less than an hour (it’s the rendering and compression that really killed the process).
Unfortunately, something went wrong with the menu looping sequence. The first loop of the menu would flicker with a blue tint. And this only happens to the first loop of menu selection screens (including scene selections). My cousin’s boyfriend thinks it’s either that my DVD player is picky about the DVD-R I used or that Apple’s iDVD simply dislikes the DVD player… Both Googling and Apple’s iDVD support/discussion sites also didn’t provide any clues. I am compressing the DVD into disk image now. I will try burning again using a different burning software to see if that changes anything.
Just to make the record complete (for anyone else who’s having similar issues and for trouble shooting’s sake), similar issue happened when I used iDVD 5 with the same burner in Panther (as well as Tiger). So it’s probably not the problem with the OS, iDVD apps or their preference files. It might have to do with how iDVD writes to the DVD on that first pass which the DVD burner is not happy about… Live and learn.