Interactive Menus (HOW???)

[Liam Coyle]

is it possible to have an interactive Menu at the start of the DVD instead of some plain boring screen with some images which says START MOVIE, CHAPTERS,EXTRAS.

is there any programs out there that can be used to create say a spinning ball the it stops when u want to select something from the menu, or something to that effect,,

or a Cube, and when u press down on the remote the cube flips to the next side and says PLAY MOVIE, u push left on remote and it says CHAPTERS, u push left again it says BONUS Material, u push up and it says Subtitiles, i think u know what i mean haha..

Anyone know of Software that this can be done with im only new so im sure there is someone out there that knows yes or NO weather this is possible and how hard it would be

Regards

Liam

[agent_mulder81]

Yes it is possible.... i've even done it with VCDs!... i didn't use any special programs (other than a video editing program)... I just made the menues (like the various screens) which each run for an amount of time, with looping music. Then you make seperate video files that are transitions between the menus (ie if you wanted it to fade, then you would have a two second clip of it fading between the menus).

i know the explanation isn't very good, but i've never been good at explaning things!

then again, it would probably be easier if you did it in a program (but i prefer to do it manually, because it gives you more feedom than 'user friendly' programs do).

[vitualis]

Advanced VCD authoring (of menus and the like), are not particularly easy... for the beginner at least. What is required is a good understanding of how VCDs work at all. For that, I suggest having a look at the guides and articles here: http://www.michaeltam.com

Everything there is based on the VCDImager system -- which is the backend to VCDEasy so VCDEasy is a good start: http://www.vcdeasy.org

Regards.

[Liam Coyle]

Cheers for the help, will look into over the weekend, if anyone else has ideas please keep posting as everything helpful

[kitty]

If you want a cube that will spin around to react to selections you should look into a 3D rendering program. I'm not overly familiar with this area but I know such programs exist (maybe Xara - I was using their demo one time). So you'll need to storyboard out how it will look depending on selections then render the inbetween actions.

[Thorn]

I suspect it would take quite a bit of time to learn how to do this well. I'm still making still image backgrounds for my DVD since this is a hobby and I'm not spending 200 hours to make a menu for a home video .

However, an intermediate step before creating your own 3d animations would be to make motion menus (which just play some video in the background while your menu choices are in the front). There are royalty-free stock video clips for sale, but that may not suit your taste. It depends on how much time you have and how much experience or desire your have to learn 3d animation tools.

[icevideo]

Beside the time there is another issue.

Because you have to build some 3d movie like a avi format this stuff will eat you a lot of space from your disk. Don't be surprize if your main application will not fit anymore on disk because of enormous space ocupied by the menu.

Sound funny, but this is the true.

And if you still want to go with 3d video, I would suggest to try TrueSpace any version. This is very simple what you want to do, so you don't need nothing special.
Also 3d Max is a good way to go.

Good luck

[Arky]

Boris RED (or Boris FX as a cut down option) is awesome for this kind of work - you can even wrap video onto any 3-dimensional objects you have created within the Boris environment. Very cool. Sadly, the software ain't cheap, but then neither is Caligari TrueSpace or Discreet 3dsMAX!

w#w.borisFX.com


Arky ;o)