Capturing thumbnails (Maestro)

[amirkhan]

This is incredabily easy to do with SpruceUp the question is how does one achive the same with Maestro.

From what i understand I'd have to export clips from the movie as images and just make the thumb nails in photoshop (resize and make button like in there). SpruceUp is much faster because when I make the button, i know for a FACT the play position wil be exact and its so simple / quick.

So is there a similar (quick) way to create thumb nails in Maestro?

For those that dont know you simply "grab" a chapter point in Spruceup and drop it into the menu, thereby creating an instant thumbnail, you can also (very easily) change the frame of the thumbnail in Spruceup.

So please lets what your opinion are experts..

Amir

[Doom9]

I've read pretty much the whole maestro manual so I'm rather confident saying there's no such thing. Keep in mind.. DVDMaestro is an authoring tool for professionals.. these are people who have ample Photoshop and Premiere experience to create their own still and animated menus.

[amirkhan]

Thank you for taking the time to confirm my thoughts.

Amir

[Arky]

When you select or create a chapterpoint (or punchpoint, chapter marker etc) in the Maestro movie timeline, a dialogue box pops up, and if you look to the bottom left (I think - it's been a month or two since I even looked at Maestro) of this dialogue box, you will see an option to create a bitmap thumbnail of the movie (from the exact place of the chapter point). This seems pretty easy to me..!!

Regards,


Arky ;o)


P.S. apologies to all for my extended absence of late - I'm just finding life a little busy at the moment, so I've had to put DVD-authoring (and the writing of promised tutorials) on hold for the time being. I'll be popping my head in on a casual basis (like now, for instance!) whenever I can spare a moment, though.

[amirkhan]

Arky,

thanks for the reply, as luck would have it i was playing with Meastro this weekend and noticed EXACTLY the same thing. VERY nice. I saves a BMP (full size) out to disk which i resize in photoshop and make into a button.

Thankyou for taking the time to answer, I think we are talking about the same thing, there is no DIRECT way to make a button but you can export a still that you can use as the image for the button after tweeking (resizing in photoshop).

In Spruce you can actually "pluck" out the still DIRECTLY into the menu without the need for photoshop. Thats what I was after but this is (almost) as good and I can live with it.

Again thanks for taking the time to answer.

AK