need help- Menus: Stills with Music

[Daimou]

With any form of VCD, Which programs are compatible with making menus? And of those programs, which of those can have animated menus? Finally, How can you add background music to stills by just having the still picture with the background music as a separate file? Thanx in advance for answering any of these questions, and please try to post the techniques to do so...

[Tommyknocker]

I do not know anything about making menus. Anyway, the cheapest way to make a still a slide show with music is this way:

1. Load Gold Wave, select New--OK. Select Edit-->Marker-->Set. Input in the Finish Marker box how long you want each image to last. Select OK and Save as a wave file. This is a silent sound file you will use tell TMPGEnc how long each image will appear in your show.

2. Load TMPGEnc. Load your first image as input video. Load your silent file from step 1. Name the resultant file. Select Start. Repeat this process remembering to give a different file name for each file until all your images will display as a image with no sound for as long as you wanted them to last in step 1.

3. Select File-->MPEG Tools...-->Merge & Cut. Select Add. Select the first file with your resultant file from step 2. Select the file you just loaded, then Edit. When the edit page comes up select the up arrow on the box that has "Last" in it, and hold it down until the indicator reaches the end of the limit. Select OK. Repeat until all the images created in Step 2 are in your File window. Name the resultant file and select Run. This puts all your images into one file (with no sound yet, of course).

4. Now the easy part. In the TMPGEnc main program window, select as input video the file created in step 3. as input audio select your music file. Select a name for your slides show. Select Start. The resultant file is your slideshow -- Voilá!

[Daimou]

thanx, i'll try that

[vitualis]

Programs compatible with making menus include VCDImager and it's GUIs as well as a number of commercial proggies like VideoPack5.

Yes, you can make both still menus and menus that use a video clip as a background.

MPEG Still images: http://www.vcdimager.org/guides/mpeg_still_images.html
Simple menus: http://www.vcdimager.org/guides/simple_menus.html
Complex menus: http://www.vcdimager.org/guides/multimenu_vcd.html

As for a still image with an audio background, you can either encode it as a video clip (and hence, it will be just a menu with a video clip -- problem with low resolution) or use the following method (in spec, but poorly supported): http://www.geocities.com/mikk999/StillsWithAudio.htm

I suggest that as a beginner, you use a GUI like VCDEasy ( http://www.vcdeasy.org ) as it is much easier than manually authoring the XML. However, you should give it a try once you want to free the shackles of a GUI and access the raw authoring power of manual editing of the XML file yourself.

Regards.