How to extract Ulead DVD Workshop Menus (Static and Motion)

[marsmayhem]

How to extract Ulead DVD Workshop Menus (Static and Motion)

Overview
This article will discuss how to generate and extract menu screens from DWS for the purposes of using them in other applications, such as VCDEasy or TMPGENC, as part of your disc authoring process.

Description
Ulead System’s DVD Workshop has one great feature for the Video-On-Disc author – menu building. It makes it easy to use the provided menu templates, develop customized menus based on those templates, or develop your own menus totally from scratch (and save those as templates so you can reuse the layouts with later projects). Similar packages provide templates, but restrict you from customizing them or developing your own screens from scratch, and don’t provide many of the WYSIWYG features that DWS provides.

The interface provides the user the with the ability to add text, graphics, thumbnails from your movie, even create motion menus (at least for DVD – I don’t know why they don’t provide it for VCD, but there’s a workaround for this shortcoming, as I’ll show you later in this article). You can also preview your presentation before burning, so you can test the menu(s) you create and make sure everything is working correctly before you commit to disc.

Unfortunately, DWS doesn’t support navigation within a title once it’s playing, at least not for VCDs or SVCDs. For example, if you have a regular movie with several chapters in it, the Previous and Next actions on your remote allow you to skip to the previous/next chapter. DWS allows you to enter at a certain chapter point from the menu, but once the movie is playing, you can’t skip back or forward. The only way to jump to another chapter is to hit the Return button and select a different chapter from the menu.

DWS works in four easy steps. Capture, Edit, Menu, and Finish. Capture allows you to capture video from an external source. Edit allows you to import video clips on your hard drive, create chapter points, grab thumbnails, or trim your footage. Menu allows you to create menu screens for your presentation so the user is presented with some playback choices (such as where they’d like playback to start from in the movie, or go to the special features, or watch the music video for the movie, for example). Finally, the Finish step allows you to create a disc image for later burning, or burn the presentation to a CD (or DVD if you’re making one).

The steps we’re most interested in are the last two: Menu and Finish. When you create menus with DWS, they aren’t stored in bitmaps anywhere, so you can’t save them to disk and reencode them using something like TMPGEnc, for example. Why would you want to do this - because of the chapter problem mentioned above. Also, you may have your own reasons for wanting to do the screens with DWS – personally, I just like the WYSIWYG ease of use it offers.

Static Menus
Under Finish, select “Make Disc”. DWS will then create a temporary folder in your project folder called “~menutemp” (that’s tilde+menutemp). This folder only exists after you first build your presentation. It generates your menu screens with temporary filenames. Once you close your project, DWS will remove this temporary folder and the contents thereof. If you keep this folder open in Explorer while generating your presentation in DWS, you can copy the temporary images to another folder and rename them. This way, when DWS closes your project, the rendered menu screens won’t be lost, allowing you to use the images in other applications.

Once you have these images (they’ll be in BMP format), you will need to encode them to MPEG stills using something like VCDEasy, Philips VCD Toolkit, or TMPGEnc, to name three examples. VCDEasy is probably the easiest way to go: it supports long filenames (unlike Philips’ toolkit), multiple stills at a time (just drag and drop them all into VCDEasy), and gives fairly good control over the final quality of the menu stills rendered (simpler for most people than TMPGENC’s many options, although TMPGENC gives more options/control over the output file – something advanced users would enjoy).

This whole workaround could be avoided if DWS exposed the following options:
- save a rendered menu screen
- support navigation between chapters other than from the top level menus

Motion Menus
The above applies to static menus (ie. menus without an animated background). For motion menus, the temporary folder and its files are created in a different place.

When you have a motion menu in your project and render it, you will need to navigate to the “Documents and Settings{username}Application DataUlead SystemsUlead DVD Workshop1.0motion menu” folder (under XP – for other systems, you’ll have to go looking for the folder). In there, you’ll find a temporary MPEG file. It exists after you go to the Finish step and hit the “Preview Motion Menu” button.

Just pressing Play on the onscreen remote won’t create the file. When you select Preview Motion Menu, it renders each frame from the video selected for the background, and creates this temporary MPEG file. As with the static menus, the folder is removed once you close your project. So switch to Explorer, find the folder, and copy the temporary name MPEG file (and it’s a weird long name too) over to somewhere else and rename to a more readable title. I found an inconsistency between the length of time the motion menu is set to run for, and the actual rendered length. I specified a motion menu of 30 seconds long, but after it rendered, it was only 19 seconds long (my source video clip was several minutes long). You may have to play around with the numbers to get it exactly right.

The motion menu may not be in a format you want (especially if motion menus are only enabled for DVD projects), so you’ll probably have to re-encode it using TMPGENC to get it to a VCD/SVCD compliant format, if that is your target presentation format.

Again, this could all be avoided if DWS exposed the option of saving the rendered motion menu from within the application.

Summary
Use DWS to create static or motion menus. Use images grabbed from the video clip as chapter thumbnails. Replace the video clip with a shorter clip before creating a disc image. Find the appropriate temporary folder for static or motion menus before closing your project or exiting DWS. Copy the temporary files over to another folder and rename the files (images for static menus, mpeg for motion menus) to a more readable format. Encode menu images to mpeg stills using VCDEasy (or your encoder of choice).

Conclusion
With the above knowledge, hopefully you too can enjoy great-looking menus, be they static or motion, and coupled with an application like VCDEasy, enjoy proper chapter to chapter navigation.

Best of all, you can get this application for free since Ulead has a feature-limited trialware version of DWS you can download from their website. VCDEasy+VCDImager and TMPGENC are freeware applications.

I hope this helps others out there. I myself enjoy using DWS to put my menu screens together. Its integration with the video clips and ease with which you can grab thumbnails and put them into a menu makes it a pleasure to use. More so than most applications I’ve tried. It’s much easier than most applications - the integration of backgrounds, fonts, images and so on are way ahead of most I’ve played with. For those of you who have only created menus using TSCV, you owe it to your craft to give DWS’ menu features a spin, especially since TSCV seems capable of low-res stills only (this article will create high-res stills). For those of you tired of using Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro, or any other imaging application, in addition to another application to grab the thumbnails from your video clips, give this method a try as well.

Lastly, in closing, I leave you with a small tip that will save you a lot of time. Grab your chapter thumbnails and store them as images in the DWS image library, use these images in your menu screens (instead of dragging the chapter thumbnails, created when you set the chapter points, into the buttons on your menus), then replace your video clip with a 2 second video clip of anything before you render your disc image in the Finish step. Instead of rendering your entire video file to a disc image, it will only take a few seconds to generate the menu images using the short video clip– remember, you don’t need the whole video if you’re only wanting to get to the temporary images. You must have a video clip in your presentation, or the Finish step will not permit you to create the disc image, and thus not render the menu screen(s).

Good luck everyone…

Keywords
Ulead Systems DVD Workshop; Menu; Static Menu; Motion Menu; VCD; SVCD; DVD

[kHenryan]

Use Isobuster to extract those mpegstill files or mpegfiles from DWS discimage . No need to use those bmp ....

[marsmayhem]

Unfortunately DWS creates a non-standard disc image with an extension of .IXA, and neither IsoBuster or CDMage can open it.

[kHenryan]

I must be the lucky guy
My isobuster(since ver0.99) can open the .ixa discimage files created by Ulead DVD Movie Factory, PictureShow, Workshop

[marsmayhem]

Hmmm... When I looked at IsoBuster it never mentioned IXA, but you're right, it does extract it. Don't even need to re-encode the stills in VCDEasy this way.

Motion menus will have to be re-encoded if you want them for S/VCD, since DWS only does it for DVD.

Oh well... glad to know. Thanks for setting the record straight.

[LeveL_42]

Although this works, you will end up with a really low resolution mpeg, unsuitable for full screen display if you ask me.
Remember that ULEAD DVD Workshop is only creating a PREVIEW version of the menu, so low res. THis also explains why it's 20 seconds long, no matter how long the REAL motion menu will be. This is also mentioned in either the manual, or an instruction I read from the Ulead site.

Now trying the Isobuster option....hope this will work !

[LeveL_42]

Although this works, you will end up with a really low resolution mpeg, unsuitable for full screen display if you ask me.
Remember that ULEAD DVD Workshop is only creating a PREVIEW version of the menu, so low res. THis also explains why it's 20 seconds long, no matter how long the REAL motion menu will be. This is also mentioned in either the manual, or an instruction I read from the Ulead site.

Now trying the Isobuster option....hope this will work !

Well it works with the Isobuster, but there's a much simper way: In the Make Disc stage, simply select the Create DVD directory option. You will end up with the filestructure of the DVD on your HD. The first VOB file will be the menu. You can change this VOB file to a MPEG-1 (VCD) file with f.i. DVDx.

[SaschaJr]

Thanks for the hint of creating true chapters with DWS. I was looking for a solution on how to get true chapters with DWS for months ! Unfortunately I do not clearly understand how to do it (I just want static menus). I've managed to get the bitmap files out of the ~menutemp directory and made mpeg stills with vcdeasy. But what now ? What do i have to do with that mpeg stills ? Where do I have to put them ? How do I burn the whole thing back to a vcd with true chapters ? Sorry if my questions might sound stupid. I am more or less a newbie. Thanks for any help on that subject !

[SaschaJr]

More than 120 people read this thread since I posted the above question and nobody really knows an answer ?? That can't be true ! Please somebody help me ! I urgently need to find a solution on how to create true chapters with DVD Workshop.

[marsmayhem]

SaschaJr:

You take the mpegstills you've extracted, import them into VCDEasy, add your main video file (the one you want chapters in), go to the chaptering section, set the entrypoints for the video file, and create the VCD image (then burn it).

Hope this helps. Read the guides for VCDEasy on these forums, or visit VCDEasy.org, for more info.

[alxdotnet]

For some reason, the "Preview Motion Menu" button is disabled in my DWS...somebody please help?