reorder clips in idvd
I found the way to re-order clips in iDVD. For those needing a solution here's how to do it.
Turn off Background encoding found in the Advanced Menu so your Mac isn't churning away while you move clips around.
After creating your project and assigning a theme you drag your .mov files into the Main Menu as I did for this 7 clip DVD shown in my examples.
Rename your 'buttons' with names that are useful to the viewer. In my example for this real estate training DVD my original movies had nondescript names. I changed the button names to reflect the topic of each clip.
Then I went to "Preview" the DVD and discovered that clip 1 landed all the way at the bottom in position 7 of the button layout and that clips 4 & 5 were reversed. All not good for the end user of this disc. I want them in order from clip 1 to 7, from top to bottom of the main menu screen.
I opened the DVD Map view, which you turn on using the icon at the bottom of your layout window. It's the left icon in a group of 3 in the middle of the lower bar.
Map view shows you a thumbnail layout of the disc map. The first box is a place to drop something that should play first. Usually we leave this empty. A thin line goes to The next box which is an icon representing your Main Menu (highlighted in blue) another thin line goes to the tree which shows all the clips on the Main Menu screen. From top to bottom this is the order iDVD chooses to place these clips in. I cannot figure out how it determines this order. It's usually the wrong order. (These boxes are holders for each of your clips and show up in the layout screen in the same order they show up in map view, but may be the wrong order).
To re-order the clips so clip 1 is in the top position you must drag each movie clip from the Finder window to the appropriate box in map view. Your drag and drop action will replace the clip that iDVD chose to put there with the clip you've just dragged in.
Go ahead and do this with each clip, dragging from the finder window where the clips are stored on your drive into the appropriate box in Map View. Each time the original clip will be replaced with the correct clip. The entire operation will give iDVD the correct new order for all the clips.
Click out of Map View and click Preview Mode. Now you will see the new order, however you may have to drag the 'buttons' that represent each clip around the layout screen until they appear in the correct order. You will not be successful simply dragging these buttons without replacing the clips in Map View because what you see in Map View is the true play order of the clips. (It's interesting to work with iDVD after having used DVD Studio Pro for years because it gave me an understanding of how to really author a DVD and what all the connections do between Menus, Buttons, Clips, etc. iDVD does much the same work as DVDSP but hides the complex stuff from view of the normal user).
Remember to save your work frequently as you do this process in case the app crashes so you will not lose your changes. Be methodical and follow these instructions. If I've confused you in any way I apologize for lack of clarity.