Possible to play Movie in Logic without the sequence playing too?

Question

In Digital Performer, you can un-lock (un-sync) the Movie window so that you can click on its Quicktime Play button and play it independently from the sequence. This way you can experiment with different start times for the music for other parts of the film you're working on. It looks like this is not possible in Logic 8. The Movie window is ALWAYS playing when the sequence is playing, and you cannot play the Movie by itself just to watch it alone. Is there a way around this?

Answer 1

O.K.
Before you go ahead I would suggest you make a copy of your iDVD application as a backup just in case anything goes wrong. Also make sure it's not running.
Next right-click on the iDVD app and choose "Show Package Contents" - it will open just like a folder.
The theme resides in this location:
iDVD/Contents/Resources/20TransparentBlack.theme
The theme files are packages just as the application itself so right-click it and go to:
20TransparentBlack.theme/Contents/Resources/MenuBackground.pox/Contents/Material/
Inside there's a TIFF file
CB7F3266-25EA-11D8-9A70-000393AE67F4.tif
That's the one that needs to be edited; open it in PS Elements.
The next step requires you to access the image's alpha channel, not sure if that's possible in Elements but here it goes.
The alpha channel should look greyish, that's because it half-transparent. Select all (Apple-A) and fill the channel with pure black, that will make it totally transparent so it won't show anymore.
Save the file, close it and also close all open iDVD folders.
Start iDVD by double-clicking - the theme should now appear without the black band.
One word of caution: I only applied this modification very recently and haven't used the theme yet to actually burn a DVD so you might want to keep a copy of the original in a safe location.
Cheers Martin
PS: here are some tutorials on customizing iDVD 3 although I think the principles still apply to iDVD 4:
http://www.creativemac.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=16349-0