How to make DVD menus like iLife's templates

[dvjunkie]

Hi everyone,
Just found this awesome, informative forum, and I'm hoping someone can help me out!
A friend showed me this DVD they made on their Mac, and the beautiful menu blew me away. I was wondering if it's possible for me to make something like that on a PC, from scratch (or partial template)??

http://www.apple.com/ca/ilife/idvd/features/themes.html
(or the attached image)

On that Apple page, it's the image on the top-left, with multiple playing clips showing different scenes, and a reflection on the "floor", and a menu etc. Stuff like that. How could I even begin to get the menu videoclip to be skewed in perspective like that, or the reflection etc.

I've been using DVD Architect 4, and so far it's the standard flat on, nothing particularly fancy. Just snazzy backgrounds put together in Photoshop, and sweet background music, lol.

If anyone has any idea if/how I can do this in DA4, or perhaps another good PC software product, that would be awesome!!

Thanks!

[videopoo]

You need to learn 2 programs:

Photoshop and After Effects

Just remember...the look of your menus has nothing to do with the authoring program.

[guns1inger]

Yes, very easily. All it takes is photoshop and a good eye for design. Apple and other firms that package these types of templates employee professional designers to create them. They buy high quality stock images, and they spend some time getting it right.

Your average user grabs some quick stills with the digital camera under poor lighting, throws it onto the menu with little though, uses the default font, and wonders why it looks cheap and tacky.

With software like photoshop, paintshop pro or even the gimp, and time, and planning, it is not that difficult to produce something easily as good as what you have linked to. There are some very good free, royalty free, stock image sites to get source photos. And plenty of tutorial sites for graphics packages and design sites to see what's trendy. If you have DVDA then you probably also have Vegas, so motion menus are also a doddle (technical term).

But it is not something you throw together in 15 minutes so you can burn a disc for Aunty Dot's birthday.

[dvjunkie]

Thanks for the quick replies!

Hmmm...can either of you elaborate?
Yes, I could in Photoshop skew the video clip (preview menu item), but then it would not be animated.

Also, I believe the iLife template, those clips "move" along that axis that those videos are aligned? Unless I'm remembering that incorrectly and it's nothing like that.

Or is this something that Adobe After Effects can magically do?
It does say something about motion graphics, but is this something that would be usable in a DVD authoring program like DA4, would I be forced to use Adobe Encore?

Thanks!

[dvjunkie]

Oh, just re-read your post.
Hmm...motion menus....I think that's what I was looking for maybe.
In Vegas you say? A doddle??

Cool...I will have to investigate this some more, unless you have some links to some helpful tutorials on how to do these fancy motion menus.

Thanks again!

[guns1inger]

In Vegas start looking at, and playing with, Track Motion. It is the key to doing this type of effect.

[dvjunkie]

Excellent! I will look into that!

[guns1inger]

Once you get your head around that, start looking at nested projects. This will allow you to build a basic template that has all the movement and masks in it, and to easily replace the video with anything else without the need to render lots of intermediate clips. Performance takes a hit when working on the timeline, but you save a lot of disk space.

[dvjunkie]

Ahh, yes, I was going to ask about that next...how to make a template of it all.

Yeah, so I got a second look at that iLife theme, and it's totally not like how I was remembering. What I was trying to do seems like it was harder. The background I was envisioning as a huge scene selection, so that the whole thing was like an animated menu, sliding the frames left or right along that axis. But it's just continually moving in the background, and DA4 easily supports that as a video in the background. So yes, I can totally just render a video of that in the background.

The other part i wasn't sure about is the second screen, with the scene selection...again each clip is skewed in perspective

I'm thinking the clip will not be skewed, but the content is...and just make the background match the DVD menu background so that there is the illusion that the scene-clip-button looks skewed...if that made any sense! Just have to figure out how to add the highlight box to just the skewed content...

For creating a template...I'm assuming you mean nested projects in Vegas??

Unless you're thinking of an approach totally different than what I'm thinking of....

[guns1inger]

No, nested projects was pretty much it.

One quick method is to create a project that has separate timelines for each clip, but with placeholders in them. Add another one with a text generator for menu text. Line everything up, use Track Motion to alter the perspective angle until it is pleasing.

Now, whenever you want to create a menu, use this as the basis. Replace the place holders with either clips, or other Vegas projects, change the text and render away. (Actually, I would put a copy away for safe keeping, and use a copy for creating menus in case you trash it while working - it happens).