Editing a retail DVD menu for use on cistom DVD

[Ogami]

Hi There, I own the retail DVDs of the 1st series of Lost and was wanting to make a dvd out of the eps of the 2nd series. Which I can do no problem. However I saw that someone has used the retail menu off a 1st series DVD and somehow managed to edit out some of the buttons while keeping the motion menu, sound and part of the original buttons. Looks cool but I can't work out how it's been done. Obviously I could disable the buttons in dvdremake but the pictures of the buttons themselves are still there. On the official one they do seem to load over the top of the motion menu but how do you dismantle the menu completely so you can fiddle with these buttons?

So that I can have the motion menu, and keep the play all button but remove any indication of the episode & setup buttons?

Any ideas how this is done?

[guns1inger]

have you loked at menuedit ? might be part or all of the solution

[Ogami]

Yeah, I looked at menuedit but as far as I can tell that does the same as DVDremake, in that it takes away the functionality of the buttons but you can't edit out the physical buttons.



This is a shot of the original retail menu, and below is the fiddled with menu



The motion of the original menu as well as the sound is all still there, but as you can see some of the buttons are missing as well as the part that says disc 3... which isn't a button at all. This is what I want to learn how to do.

Any other ideas as to how this was achieved?

Thanks

[MackemX]

someone could have probably reauthored the main menu using something like DVDLab after demuxing the menu. The buttons may be subpics which would not be in the DVDLab output

have you tried demuxing the menu at all to see if what the m2v file actually includes and what exactly is encoded into it?

are there not any other similar menus with the same background but without the Disc3 part etc?

[Ogami]

I have demuxed the video and the buttons are in fact hard into the video.

I have been messing and my best guess is that the video was ripped, then messed with in adobe after effects.. you can use clone stamp in the same way as in photoshop I've discovered.

My only problem now is I can't seem to export a good quality video out of after effects, I'm on a crash course..lol. I think I'm making progress and can't see any other way that this was done!

Thanks for the suggestions, any1 know where there's a newbie guide for after effects?

[guns1inger]

Export it as an uncompressed avi (yes, it will take up a bit of space, but it's only temporary), then encode it back to mpeg.

[Ogami]

I did export to avi... but still jerky! Would you suggest i encode to avi before messing with it in after effects? I'm not using the pro version of after effects... could that be part of the problem?

[adam]

You can do this really easily with Virtualdub. Check out the guide I wrote which covers this.

http://users3.ev1.net/~CavemanLawyer/

Click on making motion menus and then read the sections under Step 5.

If want to keep using After Effects, you are probably getting jerky video because you are not properly handling the interlacing. Make sure you don't set it to deinterlace and of course make sure you are exporting at the same framerate as the source.

[Ogami]

Thanks for that, I'll give it a try today