IPhoto Titles in iDVD

Question

If I add titles in an iPhoto slide show, they appear in the upper left hand corner of each slide. When I send the slide show to iDVD, the titles are outside of the TV-safe area and do not show on the DVD when played on a TV. Any suggestions as to how to make the titles visible? Can they be moved?

Answer 1

Howard:
The titles cannot be moved. If you are not using the Ken Burns effect in the slideshow creating it from within iDVD will let your automatically add the Titles at the bottom with additional space to add comments.
Otherwise you're going to have to scale the movie to fit into the TV Safe area and add additional "canvas" outside the movie. I think there may be an iMovie plugin that can do that. That will require you to import the iPhoto QT movie into iMovie (if you exported it from iPhoto to iDVD the movie file will be in your Movies folder) and apply the plugin.
There's a way to do it with Quicktime Pro and an Applescript that Apple has for download. Here's the workflow that I developed:
Masking Movies to the TV Safe Area for iDVD
The mask should be 640 x 480 pixels and the movie 514 x 386 (I arrived at this figure by making a snapshot of the TV save area of an iDVD project with Snapz). You can set this size after you’ve joined it with the mask movie with Quicktime Player Pro.
Import the black mask jpg file into iMovie and and export it as a .mov file at the same length as your movie (there may be a way to not have to create a specific length mask for each movie but I haven't found it. If the times do not match the movie file will be synced to the length of the mask movie).
Open the mask movie in QT Player Pro and then open your regular movie and make it the front window of the two. Now you'll need to run a QT Player AppleScript titled "Merge Movie 1 into Movie 2". You can get it from this Apple site: Quicktime Player Scripts.
Then run the script. You can then run the merged movie to check it out. Your movie will be located in the upper lefthand corner of the window when played.
When you open the Movie Properties window from the Window menu for the combined file you’ll see the following:
Video Track 1: the black mask
Video Track 2 : your movie file
Tween track: Have no idea what this is.
Sound track: self explanaotry
Black mask.
To set the size of your movie to the correct size select it in the Properties window and click on Visual Settings pane. Then enter 514 in the first field and hit enter. With the Preserve Aspect Ration box checked the other size will automatically be set.
To center the video track in the center of the mask select the Video Track 2 item and plug in a offset of about: 60 & 40. You'll probably have to play with that to fine tune the centering. Doing the math and subtracting the movie dimensions from the mask dimensions and dividing by two just didn't get it perfectly centered. I'm sure I'm missing something here.
Now save as a new self contained movie after checking the High Quality box at the bottom right.
You can not import it into iDVD for preview and burning. One drawback is that you can't invoke the TV save area for a movie in iDVD to check it out. But you can mark it on the monitor screen while viewing a menu or slideshow and then play the movie to see how close you came.
It will require some trial and error but it does work.
Do you Twango?