making your own motion menu`s (with music)....

[Stormz]

Any suggestions on the best ways to do it?

I have some motion menu`s without music, which I added music to in Premiere, but TMPGenc dvd author didn`t like the mpeg files I saved.... so I`m still trying to figure that one out.

As for creating the video for an abstract motion menu from scratch, Particle Illusion is quite good, but obviously not as good as 3D progs.

[Baldrick]

did you export to compliant dvd???? what kind of mpeg settings? what mpeg encoder?

[Theophilus]

I made a custom motion menu last night with Ulead Video Studio SE Basic. It just had some 240x160 videos fading in and out on a static background. The video editor let me adjust the audio to the exact video length of about 26 seconds.

I encoded the resultant avi to mpeg2 with TMPG at CBR of 8200. I put the motion menu in DVD-lab and made a test DVD without audio and with dummy video in place of the main movie. The resultant DVD did not play properly in PowerDVD. The video on the menu would speed up and slow down intermitantly. When I reencoded the avi to mpeg2 at VBR with an average of 8100, the compiled DVD menu (still no audio) played properly. I did not know that DVD-lab has this problem with CBR mpegs from TMPG, so I'm sticking with VBR in the future even at high bitrates.

As for the question, any mpeg within the dvd spec should work as a motion menu. I like to edit my video and audio in avi format first to make the video and audio the same length so the menu will loop seamlessly.