IDVD = Cheese. C'mon "your picture in a fishbowl as bubble sounds play??"

Question

I gave IDVD a good try. But c'mon, those themes are cheesy. If you're an artist the last thing you want to do is make someone navigate the seas of cheese to finally get to your movie. Those themes are ridiculous. And nothing is cheesier than the "drop zone" to make it look like one of your photos is inside an aquarium, or resting on a mantle.
More stylish would just be a photo of your movie in the background, and the documentation buries how to do that in the back pages.
But the final thing that cut me away from ever dealing with this product is that your movies can't play consecutively. Anyone who uses imovie knows that a movie past 10 minutes gets too unwieldy to work with--It's better to make that file one section of the movie and open a new imovie file for the next part. Yet with IDVD with all that work on cheeseNavigation, they won't let you play your Quicktime files consecutively. After one chapter, you go back to the main menu and then have to select the next chapter. People want to chill on the sofa and watch your movie. Not sit there with remote control in hand ready to manually select each chapter ever couple minutes.
I'm sorry, but I don't have to be a computer scientist to know that that feature would be easy to add. And the idea that "Oh, I must need a PROFESSIONAL dvd program" to do this is bunk. Toast 7 can apparently do it for under 100 dollars. For this minor feature, which every dvd in your local video store has, I apparently need to buy the Final Cut Super Studio Suite of ProAuthor products or whatever it's called. Like I'm really going to drop over a 1000 dollars so I can play my movies files (woo hoo!) one after the other.

Answer 1

Dancing skyscrapers?? If they want to! They use FinalCut on the G5s at school to do their projects. Last year we watched "space movies" and they had to reflect architecture that used zero gravity in their films. Pretty interesting. This fall the theme is "dystopia and fear" - a little Blade Runner-esque. Most of the really intriguing uses of architecture in film seem to be in the future world genre - or just plain dark and scary. And to make a music video forces some very tight editing and compilations that use short sequences (to fit with the music), otherwise they drag.
I have seen some films that use reverse and slo mo with sequences of dropping nails, breaking balloons, ink in water. They are all over the map - which is wonderful to receive.
As for my G5... sigh. It is summer and the aforementatoff to university/art school in the fall for illustration, so Steve might be getting a bit more of our money if it comes down to fighting for time!
Terri