Seriously, though. Recently, I learned about a very neat transition in Final Cut. Introducing… The Gradient Wipe!

(Disclaimer: Remember when I talked about cheesy transitions? A gradient wipe can be just as cheesy if you overdo it. Don’t.)

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s jump in. First of all, what is a gradient wipe? My local dictionary says nothing on the subject, so you can make up your own definition based on the explanation. Let’s play with a gradient wipe.

Add a gradient wipe between two clips just like you would any other transition. Now, for basic experimentation, find the second clip in your browser and drag it into the slot I’ve pointed out in the picture. Drag the softness slider up a bit, play the video, and you should see something pretty interesting. Here’s what I got:

Gradient Wipe from Phantom Moose Films on Vimeo.

Pretty neat, huh? Let me explain how it works. When you added the clip to the slot, you added a matte. Final Cut uses this matte to decide which areas of the shot to transition first. Darker areas at the beginning, lighter areas last. We can use this to our advantage to make a very artsy transition.

You’re going to need Photoshop or some similar photo editing application for these next examples. Launch Photoshop and create a new image the size of your video. Make sure your foreground and background colors are black and white, then do Filter>Render>Clouds. Save that image and bring it into Final Cut.

Drop your new cloud picture into the matte slot on your gradient wipe. Play it and see what happened. Here’s mine:

Cloud Gradient Wipe from Phantom Moose Films on Vimeo.

Let’s make this even more interesting. Remember the movie National Treasure? When Riley is explaining to Ben the security surrounding the Declaration of Independence, there’s a really neat shot of “kids on their eighth grade field trip.” The kids come in first, and then the background fades in behind them.

The filmmakers probably did a lot of motion tracking and matting and such to pull off this shot. Here’s a low-budget/lower-time way to get the same effect with a gradient wipe.

First, shoot some video of your people walking in front of something. Plan ahead more than I did and make sure they stand out against the background. The key to making this work without too much hassle is to have your subject stay still for a few seconds before they start to move.

Bring that video into Final Cut, and then export a frame of the part where your subject is standing still. Open the image in Photoshop.

Do a nice cutout job of your subject and get them on a separate layer. Get rid of the background and make it white. For the foreground, you have two options. You can either shade your subject all black to make them fade in all at once, or, as in the National Treasure effect, paint your subject in gradually lightening shades. Remember, darker fades in first.

Once you’ve saved that, bring it back into Final Cut and drop it in the matte slot. You may have to do some adjustments, but you should come out with something like this:

Complex Gradient Wipe from Phantom Moose Films on Vimeo.

As you can see, the possibilities are nearly endless. If you come up with anything interesting, leave a comment linking to your video. I’d love to see it!

Moving the Menu to iDVD

Open up your Final Cut project (unless you left it open all week) and get back to the sequence we built in part one. In order to get the intro separate from the menu background, position the playhead at the marker you added to mark the spot where the intro ends. Press the o key to set the end point, and then go up to the file menu and choose Export:QuickTime Movie. Name it “Intro” and export it with the default settings.

The intro is exported, so now click inside your sequence window and hit Option-x to clear the in/out points. Now set your in point at the marker, and your out point at the end of the sequence. Run another export like the one above. Call this movie “Menu” and save it where you’ll find it.

Launch your iDVD project. Now go find your menu file out in the wilderness of your computer. Drag this file into the project area of iDVD while holding down the Command key (labeled with an apple on all but the newest Mac keyboards). This brings up a menu asking if you want to add the movie or replace the background. Choose Replace background and iDVD will put your movie into the background.

Let’s add the intro now. Click the button to the left of the loop button. This brings up a DVD map. Find the box that tells you to “Drag content here to automatically play when the disc is inserted.” It’s pretty simple. Drag your intro movie here. This makes your intro movie play automatically when your DVD is inserted into a player.

Customize Scene Selection

When you click the button for scene selection, iDVD will take you to a menu that either looks like the theme we’ve modified, or looks exactly like your fancy custom menu. Neither is good. iDVD builds scene selection menus with six scenes to a menu, and as far as I know, there’s no way to change this. Unfortunately, this means that you have to have considerable space on your menu to fit six buttons on, especially if you want a preview movie.

Here’s how I fix this. Create a menu that looks like your first one, but this time, leave the top or bottom two thirds empty. Also, add a colored area to the remaining third. It’s probably a good idea to have no motion elements at all. Because of this, you can make this menu in Photoshop, or just export a still frame from Final Cut.

Get to your scene selection menu and click the info button. You should see a whole lot of options. Up at the top are three boxes. The middle one is the menu. Drag your scene selection menu into it. A little farther down should be a section for audio. Again, there’s a box. Drag your first menu movie into the box, and iDVD will use the audio from the movie as the background music.

The buttons are probably all out of order, probably quite like the picture of mine. Let’s fix it. Select any button and drag it to a new position. Do this to the rest of the buttons until you have them all arranged nicely in order.

Click and drag to select all of the buttons. The info window should change to show that you are now editing all buttons. Start by choosing a smaller font size. You may also want to change the font entirely, or maybe change the button color. Then head over to the right side of the main iDVD window.

On the lower right, there is a set of three buttons. We’re interested in the middle one, labeled “Buttons.” Once you click that button, you will be in the button editing mode. Select “Frames” from the menu at the top, and then pick one that you like. The frame is probably still too big, so go back to the info window, find the slider for size, and scale the buttons down until you like what you see. Repeat these steps for all the rest of the scene selection menus.

Well, look at that. I’m out of space again! Next week, I’ll break down Easter eggs and more button customization options. In the meantime, you might want to use iDVD’s preview mode to view your amazing custom DVD. Oh, and here’s how mine ended up after customization.