Multilevel menus, Video thumbnails, and video transitions

[AntiJester]

Is there any way to make a mutlileveled menus? What I mean is there a way to have it so when you click on a button on your main menu that itll bring you to another menu? Like going from main menu to chapter selection?

If so, is there a way to have it show a little video going from one menu to another?

Also how do you make it so chapter selection is a small video instead of a still?

Thanks, AJ

PS All of these questions are refences to something like the menu of CTHD

[tacosalad]

Yes to all those questions. (Except I don't know what CTHD is.)

But the more elaborate your scheme, the more complicated it gets to build it. Just as an experiment with VCDImager, I built a VCD with a main menu and three sub-menus for "chapter" selection, complete with animated transitions between pages and chapters. The slickest feature occurs upon selecting a particular thumbnail, which grows to fill the screen, and then the movie simply continues from that exact frame.

It probably wasn't worth the effort for that particular movie, but it's nice to have this technique in my repertiore.

I wrote AviSynth scripts for the animated menus and transitions. The scripts were quite complex, but I'd be happy to share them if you really want to go to that kind of trouble. By way of example, the script to embed a single animated thumbnail into a background picture:

bg=AviSource("bg.avi&quot
StackVertical(bg.crop(0,0,352,30),StackHorizontal( bg.crop(0,30,44,60),AviSource("thumb1.avi&quot.BilinearResize(44,30),bg.crop(88,30,264,30)),bg.c rop(0,60,352,180))

That overlays thumb1.avi over a spot in bg.avi. A longer script could insert more thumbnails. Perhaps newer video tools will do this for you, but there's no similar feature in my copies of Video Studio, Digital Video Producer, or VideoWave.

So, how seriously do you want to pursue this?

[AntiJester]

Hmmmm Is there a WYSIWYG way to write these scripts?

AJ

PS CTHD is Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

[vitualis]

Firstly, almost all stand-alone DVD/VCD players DO NOT support clickable hotspots. You should probably give up your idea of DVD-like "buttons" for VCDs now.

As for animations between menus, this is certainly possible with stnadard VCDs -- but it is an authoring challenge (i.e., it is not trivial to do). If you have the original DVD, the best way is to simply rip all the animations from the original menus (i.e., they will be in the VTS_??_0.VOB ).

VCDImager with its XML system is actually very good for this sort of complex PBC authoring work.

If you author it cleverly, it can make a VCD's menu structure quite similar to that of the original DVD. The trick is to combine video clips and still images in a seamless way (if you've every analysed how the visual effects in the PSX game Final Fantasy VIII works, you'd understand what I mean). BTW, short video clips run more smoothly if you use them as segment-itmes rather than sequence-items.

For examples of XML authoring, check out the VCDImager XML repository: http://vcdimager.hvrlab.org/pub/vcdimager/examples/xml/ videocd_10.xml shows a VCD with the DVD menus translated over... (i.e., it has multi-level menus).

Good luck!

Regards.

[AntiJester]

What I really want to do is to get the whole menu from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and then Delete the bonus button (just that one) and on the chapter select page delete most of the movie chapters exept for the fight scenes.

I think this would be small enough to fit on a miniDVD.

Thanks for all your help
~AJ

[MDK]

Awesome Topic. Have been wondering about this myself and have lots of questions. Unfortunately no time to ask them this morning, but I will be back.

I personally am very serious about persuing this.

Thanks to all for their posts
Cheers
MDK

[tacosalad]

Having been through a lot of this, I have a strange-sounding bit of advice for anyone embarking on it: start your "grand experiments" with something you aren't desperate to get absolutely right! There are going to be a few glitches, so choose something you'll be satisfied with having a few defects. Then you'll avoid those mistakes from the start when you do your "important" project, rather than having to do it all over again.

Not having seen CTHD, I didn't quite get the "button" request in the original thread. I'd assumed it was referring to the buttons on the remote control! Even so, you could do a really lame type of highlight navigation using the next/prev keys and the play button, but I think it would probably suck beans.

Sorry, I don't know a WSIWYG way to write AviSynth scripts. Complex scripts and even complex XML layouts come quite naturally, which is odd since I'm ordinarily a really disorganized person. That really ugly-looking AviSynth excerpt above only took about a minute's thought, and it worked on the second try. (The first try I'd left out a parenthesis.) This is why I'd be happy to share--that's the only way anybody else'll benefit from them.

I don't have my scripts with me, so I can't post them yet. But that might be a good thing, since it would probably be better to put them up as a web site with illustrations. Bear in mind that even a simple-looking menu structure can get quite complicated underneath!