How do I have video playin and switch menus in dvd lab pro

[darkskies]

Ive been lookin at alot of dvds and the way they have it set up is nice, they usually have a scene or something playing in the background or to the side and when you go from Play to Scene Selection to Special Features there is a arrow or something that moves to each one to let you know where you are at. However I tried this with Dvd lab pro but when I do clone menu the background video I have playing is not transitioning along with the arrow movement. The same happens with the background music I have, It will start playing but if i move the arrow down to something else it will stop playing. Is there anything I can do to fix these problems or do I have to use another authoring program? thnx guys

[guns1inger]

If you look carefully at commercial videos, they fake their way through these changes. You cannot change menus without disrupting the video and audio, however if you are careful in how you set up the video and audio, and make clever transition videos to go between the menus, you can make it look smoother. No authoring software can give you continuous video/audio between menus. The spec just doesn't support it.

In DVD Lab Pros help files look up menu transitions as a starting point. These are fairly simple, and just create a video insert to play between menus. The built in ones work best between still menus. If you want to make one that looks good for motion menus, I suggest you create it in an editing system first, and add it as an asset to your project. There is no simple way to do, you just have to plan it out and create it bit by bit.

[abc-123]

What gunslinger said is true if you are trying to transition between menus with different button layouts and text. As soon as you transition, each video in each menu will play from the beginning no matter what you do. Can't be helped.

But if your button positions and text are the same, why are you using clones? You can have the arrow seem to jump around without using more than one menu.

What you do is put all the arrows on the same menu but set them to "invisible normal". Then draw a "group hotspot" around the corresponding text/picture and the arrow and set that to link to your clip. Your text/picture will always be visible so the user can jump to it, but the arrow will only show up if that group is selected.

You can also change what looks highlighted or how. Remember that you can use 3 different templates of highlighting colors at the same time so something doesn't necessarily have to look highlighted when it actually is.