Adding Some Pizzazz To DVD's

[Tom Saurus]

I use the program Tmpgenc DVD Author 1.6, and I am really pleased. I like to fool around with different backgrounds and fonts. I find you can really make your titles look neat if you have some interesting fonts to work with.

So I was wondering, does anyone know of a free resource on the Internet where one can get interesting backgrounds, preferable 640x480 or 720x480?

Does anyone know where one can download some really interesting fonts, preferably for free?

I hope there is a resource out there that is free, has no virus or spyware or malware lurking within it or attached to it.

A tip for you who use Tmpgenc DVD Author, try right clicking on the words in your titles and turn on "shadow setting". By turning it up to 100% you can make the words kind of pop out more.

[Stormin Norman]

Try www.dafont.com tons of free fonts.

[northcat_8]

Try photoshop, paintshop pro, or GIMP + personal creativity for backgrounds.

Could also try a digital camera

[adam]

For pictures just try google's image search. Just doing a search for "background" yeilds some decent results, or you can search for a particular theme. You can set it to only show medium or large results to ensure the resolutions are high enough for DVD.

[Tom Saurus]

Stormin Norman, northcat_8 & Adam: Thanks for the advice, and if you have some other tips, please post them, I am anxious to learn. Once again thanks.

[guns1inger]

If you are after still images, there are quite a lot of free, and more importantly, royalty free, stock photo sites. I use a number of these for starter images for building menus. Google will help you find them.

[Sabro]

Great place for background images is http://www.themexp.org

Fonts as images can be found all over the place, but here's a site that claims to have 6500 free ones - http://www.webpagepublicity.com/free-fonts.html

Enjoy,

Sabro

[Tom Saurus]

guns1inger & Sabro: Thanks for the advice. I hope this thread survives for awhile. I think there are others like me that want to put some zing into what there DVD's look like. Even leads to free well done Clip Art would be a good idea.

At times the Internet seems to be fraught with so many virus, spyware, malware, worms and trojans it seems like a mine field. It is nice to see there are some free resources left on the Internet.

What the title pages look like add character to the DVD's one makes. Tmpgenc DVD Author is a great program, but little hints here and there serve to enrich the final product. I recently read a tutorial about how to use DVD Lab, and it does seem to have some pretty fancy options when it comes to menues and such. Maybe in the future Tmpgenc will include a few more options in their program.

I think it is neat when one has a choice of different colored shadows other than black. It is important to really make the words stands out, atleast to me it seems to be. I had the Trial Version of Ulead DVD Movie Factory and there where tw things I liked about it, the way you could fool around with the letters for your Menu. Like make one letter bigger than others and such. The other was the circle frame one could put around their chapters. Tmpgenc's are all square or rectangle shaped, a little variety there would be nice.

Something that is really neat too is when one can use use gradient instead of just one colour for a letter. I will try to describe it: now you have probably ran across text that might be lets say yellow at the top and down at the bottom it is orange, well that is gradient. It is a very interesting effect. I have a Photo Editor that Ulead made, and it has functions like that.

Sometimes what I do is get a blank image, they are easy to make in Irfanview, for it has a blank image tool in it. Well anyway you can use the colourfill option in a Photo Editor and chose gradient, and you can have a background of any colour, that gradients between shades of a colour or one that is a gradient of two colours.

One can also paste images onto such a blank image with some colour, and use the transparency feature to kind of receed your picture into the background so it can be a pale backdrop. Sometimes that is a nice trick.

Feel free to post your tips and tricks. I have alot to learn. I think it would be really neat if we all contribute ideas and links to different tools so we perhaps end up with some pretty snazzy looking menues and backgrounds and such.

I highly recommend Irfanview. It is free,has many features, and it is updated fairly regularly. The panoramic feature built into Irfanview is quite neat, I use it quite often to stitch two or more pictures together. You can really come up with some interesting collages using that feature. Thanks once again for the advice and please keep it coming.

[Tom Saurus]

I am not sure if it is free or not, but I ran across a website selling fabric, and the pictures are really beautiful. They are so rich and invigorating.

http://www.fabricattic.com

[dewaynespaw]

Tom,
That is the big problem I have with TMPGENC DVD Author. They don't offer many options at all for menu creation. They don't have moving menus at all and I love to put moving menus on my DVD's. I make my own moving menus by filming something I want in the background and putting it in as my menu background. I know almost everyone here disagrees with me and hates Pinnacle Studio 9, but as far as menu making, it really gives you tons of options, way more than DVD Author. The one thing most people on this site seems to agree on is that Pinnacle does not encode your Mpegs as well as other programs, but after some messing around with TMPGENC and little, I found I could encode my MPEG with it, then use Pinnacle to make my menus and author my DVD's and it works great. Pinnacle keeps the TMPGENC authored MPEG file just as it was. It don't change it at all, it just zooms through to pick up the chapter markers and then burns the DVD.
I do know I am going to get a bunch of people yelling at me and disagreeing with me on this, but I have done it and I know it works so pay no mind to them, just try it for yourself, I think you will be pleased with the outcome.

[thecoalman]

2,000 or 3,000 free fonts here... http://instant.coffeecup.com/content/fonts/

[Stormin Norman]

http://www.good-tutorials.com/ for just about anything related to photoshop (making backrounds, borders, effects, buttons, textures, patterns ect.)

[crusty]

For free fonts www.1001fonts.com for PC and MAC.

[diana23]

Great recommendation!

I also wanted to share a personal recommendation. I found this Creative Fabrica tool for free font options — you can use ready-made ones or generate your own. It might come in handy!

[Alwyn]

Twenty years. Is that a record?

[Barrythecrab]

And the link doesn’t work!