incorporating advanced menus into projects for burning?

[flitzanu]

i think i may be missing something really simple here, but i've seen alot of guides on creating fancy menus and such, and i understand all that (sorta) but i seem to be missing the info on HOW you use those menus after you create them. is there a guide somewhere or a link to that type of info? i saw a couple of the guides from crazypants.com on how to make some with reeldvd and vegas, but no info on how to make use of them as a menu.

sorry for being a fool, and any link or anything would help a ton. thanks!

[housepig]

if you could link to one of the guides you are mentioning, I might be able to help.

lacking a link to what you are talking about, I'm not sure I understand your question.

[flitzanu]

ok, this was one of the links i followed:
http://www.crazypants.com/vegastutorials/vvmenuone.htm

and what i'm saying is that it tells how to CREATE the menu, but doesn't show how to incorporate any type of functions to them, like adding "play" buttons, etc, or how to use the .mpg menu that is created as a real menu.

[housepig]

okay, I thought that's what you meant.

let's say we follow the crazypants guide. what we will end up with is a mpg file of a static background with 4 mpeg files superimposed on it.

you would then import this into an authoring program that supports motion menus. it's the AUTHORING program that sets links and functions, not the video editing program. I use DVD Lab, so I would import this file, set it into a menu, and then add text on top of the mpeg and link chapters to the text.

I'm sure you can also make a "frame" around each little superimposed movie, and link to that, but I haven't tried that yet!

but basically your authoring software, if it supports motion menus, should tell you how to put links over a video file. check your help file - what software are you using?

if it's DVD Lab, let me know what kind of links you want to place on the image, and a rough idea of how it's laid out, and I'll see if I can help.

[flitzanu]

heh, i wasn't to "step 2" yet... i was first curious what to do with the menu .mpg that was going to be created, i'm actually trying to get an idea of what software is going to be most workable and useable for what i'm wanting to do. ima eyeball dvd lab first then, any other suggestions for software that will import motion menus?

and thanks again.

[housepig]

honestly, I'm not up on which ones support motion menus or don't, because I haven't done any yet, and DVD Lab meets all my other needs quite nicely so far.

I would page through the Authoring section of the Tools and see what is said over there.

[racer-x]

DVD-Lab supports Motion Menus. Just create the short MPG-2 file you want as a motion menu and drag it into the menue instead of image. Also drag the audio in there too if you want one.

I just finnish a Baseball DVD for my son's team, and I had a nice motion menue in it. I downloaded a picture of a Baseball Stadium. Then I flashed each team player on the scoreboard of the stadium. I added sound track and that was the motion menu. Real cool!!!

[flitzanu]

awesome info, thanks guys!

[housepig]

flitz -

be sure to let us know how it turns out!

[flitzanu]

seems to be working fine, and believe it or not, i made a nice motion menu from ShowBiz (?) which i believe came packaged with my Sony dru500 (or whatever that thing is). i've got so much software and trial versions on my desktop i forget where everything comes from

but as far as showbiz, it did EXACTLY what i needed, i imported a pic (jpg) and it has effects you can apply (i wanted a shaking/jitter effect) and then allows you to stretch what you import across a time frame.

so:

1. imported a (static) .jpg
2. imported an audio clip for background music
3. applied effect to .jpg
4. stretched time frame to 60.00:00
5. then encoded as mpeg2

so i got a nice little motion effect menu into an mpeg with just a simple .jpg and an .mp3 !!

i haven't tried the usefulness of the rest of the program, it looked a bit like a less intensive version of dvd-lab sortof...might be worth a look.

i was under the impression that most bundled software is UTTER crap, so i'm impressed.