Menus with DVD-Lab Pro

[FallenAngelII]

I'm making a menu with DVD-lab Pro and I need some help.

1) Is it possible to render motion clips that are shorter than the background sound and have the background sound play out fully?
2) How the heck do you set a menu so that it's the 1st thing that plays? So far, my main menu becomes "Root Menu". The DVD automatically plays Movie 1 through 4 and I have to manually choose Root Menu to access it.

[ashtones]

In the connections window draw a line from first play to the menu you want to come up first.

[Shadowmistress]

1.) Yes, it is possible by one of two ways. Either have your video repeat when it's over and play again (probably about until halfway through) until the sound is over, or create the motion clip outside dvdlab to have it play the way you like it.

Extract the last frame from the clip and encode it with your sound so that you have a still picture repeating itself while the sound plays. Then separate the video from the audio. Join the original video with the new repeating frame video. Then mux the audio back in, but have it cut off the avi/mpg when the audio is over. (So that all you're dropping at the end is the repeating frames.) Load that back into dvdlab as your motion menu.

2.) As ashtones said, draw connection from play to the menu you want. You can right click on any menu and reset it as root menu and the first play will still work with a sub menu.

[FallenAngelII]

Thanks guys.

Next question: What happens when the song runs out? Will it repeat? I've put music in all of my menus (I have 8) so I'd like for them to loop :P.

Edit: Also, what's the best way to play audio in DVDLab Pro? I want to be able to press a button and have the dvd player play an audio file. It'd be nice wit ha slider or a timer to shock how far gone the song is, but it's not necessary.

For the moment, I have solved it by creating menus for the songs with invisible buttons set as 1st button. Press them and you go back to the song-choosing menu.

Also, is it bad to have all movies in 1 VTS?

[Shadowmistress]

Yes the sound will automatically repeat in the menu, as will the video.

Best way to play audio: Project tab> Add> Add audio title. This will let you import a still pic to show while the song is playing.
Don't use menus to play your songs. You won't be able to fast forward or pause.

You want to get fancy with a slider? You'll have to make one for each individual song. Find a gif of the slider you're looking for. Extract the gif to individual frames. Load those into tmpgenc with 'open sequence files as movie' checked in the environmental settings. Drop in a minute of empty audio. Encode. Import that mpg into virtualdub and add the audio of your song. Alter framerate so audio and video durations match. Save avi. Load into tmpgenc again. Re-encode at 29.97 or 25 fps. There ya go.
You would have to repeat the avi encode and then the mpeg encode for each song. Is it worth all that trouble?

You should have all your movies in one VTS unless they have a different aspect ratio (4:3 vs 16:9). Only in that case do you need multiple VTS's.

[FallenAngelII]

Thanks for the help! Nah, the slider wasn't necessary. So this audio track thingie you told me to do, I'll get a timer right? And apaprentely I'll be able to fastfoward, which is very important as well (why I wanted the slider. Slider = Fastforward/Backtrack usually. Nobody would program something with a slider and not have those features).

EDIT: New question I forgot to ask: When making buttons (or just anything that links to something), there's Button Visibility. There's invisible normal and invisible selected.

However, when choosing Invisible Normal, it includes both Normal and Selected! >_<'

Also, is there any way to get more colors into the Color Maps (Selected, Activated) than those predefined ones?

EDIT2: Also, can you define what button the cursor should skip to if you press a certain direction while hovering over a button? For example, I've got this menu with 30+ buttons and the cursor basically just goes vertically down and then repeats with the next column >_>'.

[Shadowmistress]

Wow. So many questions are starting to wear me out. Have you checked out dvdlab's help files? http://www.mediachance.com/dvdlab/Help/index.htm

Does the audio track have a slider? Honestly I have no idea. I haven't had the opportunity to use that feature yet so I don't know what bells and whistles it comes with.

Invisible normal is not invisible when selected. You must press the little play icon at the far left to see how your buttons will behave. Invisible normal will become visible when selected. Invisible selected will stay invisible both in normal mode and in selected mode.

More colors: Project tab> project properties> palette tab> hit the drop down box.

Button direction: Find the icon that says Auto-route and select the little drop down arrow beside it on the left. Select show all. Figure it out on your own from there. (It's easy)

And as my buddy gunslinger would say..... "Now bend over and I'll wipe your a** for you as well. "

[guns1inger]

some people took offense when I said that.

DVD Lab's online help is actually pretty good. It seems sparse, but that is because, in part, it doesn't fill space for the sake of it. You will also find that most of the things you need to do all the time are pretty intuative once you get on it's wave length.

[Shadowmistress]

I wouldn't call it offense exactly.... at least not by me. I understand that people have their moments with how much they can tolerate and I think that's why it's good to have multiple users specializing in certain areas of software. They can compliment eachother's strong moments for the benefit of the masses.

[FallenAngelII]

I was up all night doing menus, so I was bit tired. I've gotten some sleep now.

Yeah, that's my point. Invisible Normal makes it invisible both in Normal and Selected. But I wanna make buttons like the LotR DVDs. Once something is Selected, two symbols that are invisible when normal will appear.

So, is it impossible with DVDLabPro?

No, it probably won't have a slider. But does it have a timer?

[FallenAngelII]

How do you make a picture gallery? So far, the best I've managed to do is a slideshow? Is the only way to make a menu for each picture and insert the images there?

EDIT: Also, what the heck are open goops and does it matter... at all?

[guns1inger]

Ignore the open GOPs warning. It was a moment of over-zealousness on the author's part because people complained about I-frame accuracy on chapter points. The next release will contain an option to turn this warning off (fingers crossed, as it missed the last release).

If you want frame by frame control of the images (ie, you use the remote to move on to the next/prev picture) then yes, you need to create menus to do it.

[FallenAngelII]

Thanks for the answers.

Well, now I know what I'll be doing the next couple of hours.

[FallenAngelII]

New Question: Is there ANY way to make something (in a menu) visible only when you're "hovering the cursor over it" (i.e. highlighting it/Selecting it)?

[guns1inger]

Set the Button Visibility to Invisible Normal, however all you will see is the sub-picture (highlight). If you actually want a detailed graphic to appear you will have to use switched menus with auto-actions

[FallenAngelII]

Yeah, I'm not really up for that. I'm making a picture gallery with 12 thumbnails on each page. It's gonna be approximately a total of 5 pages >_>'. Oh well...