Complex DVD MENU'S

[Ryudo]

From my knowledge there seem to be two types of DVD menus. Highlight and Complex.

Complex being fully animated buttons, widgets, etc. I think its done by breaking full screen animated footage (of shapeshifting buttons, little bouncing robots, etc) into dozens of smaller clips creating the illusion that animation is occuring upon a background or sub layer but rather what is happening is that an entirely new piece of data is being used. These stills or animations are then played when navigating. Actually may not really be a menu but the illusion of a menu. I really don't know.

I'm relatively new to this and there a probly have a dozen ways to go about it, I want to know which way would be most efficent and what program to useto make a complex menu.

The next is just my best guess, and written to show what im looking for and need help with.

I mean one way could mean having event handlers, that is the widgets or buttons layered over but cause an animation effec
or even navigation to a small 3 second clip creating illusion of animating towards next menu page
or perhaps the need to splice it all together with no text layer except the illusion of text actually put into the menu graphical, with only the hidden selection planes over the top of specific areas (those invisible boxes that when u click into performs a function). Then when navigating, each menu page is quickly replaced by a disimiliar one that has a the text portion in the graphical changed to look highlighted, instead of text highlights.

[videopoo]

I believe your talking about transitions. They are entirely new pieces of video connected to a button on a menu. When you click button A you play the transition which takes you to another menu. You would need to use tools like After Effects and photshop to develope these kinds of menus and transition.

[guns1inger]

The DVD specification is in fact a fairly simple beast. Most complex menus can be broken down into a few simple steps, and are, for the most part, illusion. If you want to get an idea about how some of it is done, have a look at the tutorials are mediachance, makers of DVD Lab Pro. While some of the tricks shown are specific to DLP, many, like switched menus, can be applied easily in other packages.

The real secret to complex looking menus is planning.

http://www.mediachance.com/dvdlab/tutorial/switchmenu.html
http://www.mediachance.com/dvdlab/tutorial/filmstrip.html

[tinker]

Try DVD Lab Pro, it is a DVD authoring software.
That one you can make animated buttons, animated menu or go from button selection to a short clip before main feature and so on.
They have trial version.
I guess gans1finger beet me to it.

[Bjs]

They are either static in format / motion , or a varied combination ...

Toolkit :

Avisynth - motion menu scripts , +
Wax2 - similar , but many ways of twisting things around .
The gimp - menu backgrounds , pngs with alpha channels for motion menus (avisynth)
Blender - 3d animation , supports raw avi "fit to 3d model faces" ... technical
Dvdauthorgui - very good basic dvd authoring pack
Imgburn - all your burning needs in one , burn bootable discs
Pgcedit - fix up nav commands and more
Visualsubsync - create subs / correct times , srt taken by dvdauthorgui
Virtualdub - handy , I use it to help locate chapter times , embed subs into video
Dvdslideshowgui - add a slide show of pics to dvd
Besweet - convert audio to ac3 (better file size)

Super - can convert nstc to pal and back , same as ulead video studios method ... convert even stubborn files when all else fails

Utilities :

Dvdshrink - helps if dvd project needs a little trimming , plus more
Rejig - authoring of streams supported by dvd , more
Quenc - encode to mpeg
FreeEnc - same
Bbmpeg - best mpeg encoder , can show preview from avisynth scripts
Ifoedit - basic dvd authoring , same as rejig , but able to correct info in ifo tables
Muxman - another basic dvd authoring tool
Pgcdemux - dose what it says on the box , damn handy tool
Vobblanker - remove / replace conent directly from with authored dvd title
Wings3d - 3d modeler , import models into blender
Vobsub - required if doing hard subs to video via virtualdub
Vobedit - strip vobs by streams , vob or cell id
Audacity - audio recording , trimming , stretching , more

Others :

Camstudio - grab their screen codec , can record anything seen on pc screen from any site ... some require hardware acceleration to be disabled (yahoo music video dose)

Url snooper - helps locate true url from cnn

www.keepvid.com - covers many others in discovering true identity of video url's

Handle last two using free download manager : http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/download.htm

Throw zipgenius in to cover archives , pull files from isos

Cdmage - convert cd images

Not hot :

Anything shareware related , when those mentioned above can do it all with a bit of knowledge and NO restrictions , at no cost .

[GeorgeW]

Switched Menus can look great, but sometimes there's a slight delay between "switching" menus. If you use the latest DVDLab Pro, I would recommend applying the technique using menu cells (instead of separate menus) for better performance.

Another trick you can use is the Inverse Selection Trick. Response time is much better than Switched Menus (because you are staying on the same menu).
Link to Inverse Selection Tutorial

Regards,
George

[Ryudo]

Delay? That would be caused by the dvd having to read directly off the disc sectors?
Is there not a way to have a dvd player read and store selected parts of a dvd prior to when its required. Like Pre-Processing. It already pre-processing but I was wondering if there was a way to control it. e.g. store such and such in the buffer, blah blah blah

[guns1inger]

Nope. Like I said at the beginning - the DVD spec is a simple beast. Cell based menus are the closest you can get to pre-loading. You can also minimise some of the impact by making sure the assets are stored in the right order when burning. But mostly you just have to work out how best to make the limitations work for you. Look at the commercial menus that impress you most, and try to deconstruct them while you watch. You will start to notice that they are not quite as smooth or clever as you first though.

[EddyH]

indeed, there's not really much in the way of pre-processing in the player, as I understand it, other than setting up the subpictures (subtitles, or button highlights) and what happens when you do a certain thing, all of which should happily fit into about the same amount of memory space as a single full-resolution frame and it's audio...

everything is, instead, pre-rendered. that video you thought was made out of lots of little videos all playing at once (such as i once did... til i saw a badly made commercial disc that broke the illusion)? naw. they've all been smushed together in something like Premier back at the production house, and what you're watching is a single video file just with some moving bits and some still bits. kinda like seeing a videotape of it being dynamically put together... but it's not happening on the fly inside the machine.

a DVD player is quite a simple beast, pretty much a 286 PC with a few kb's of memory, a tweaked first-gen SVGA card (720x480 / 576 in 16 colours from 16 million) that has chroma key capability (to do the button overlays) - the most advanced part of the whole setup being the MPG decoder chip (equivalent to a dedicated plug-in card... and probably an ISA one ) that takes compressed streams from the disc (one video and one audio stream at a time only - it really only has the minimum power required to show a normal film ) and dumps the result on the output ports, along with any of the overlays on top.
My mobile phone is probably more powerful in strict computing terms, all told.

... i'm having to deal with such simplicity right now. I think my own set top box is actually a 8086*, single kilobyte memory and EGA card gamely trying to do the job of it's slightly more "advanced" sibling...

* yeah i know it's likely motorola, or microcontrollers / risc chips, but may as well couch it in familiar terms eh?