ReelDVD vs Impression

[berek1138]

I know this has probably been answered before, but I cannot seem to find it in the forums, nor in the documentation for ReelDVD. Here is my dilemma.

I am attempting to author a DVD with 3 menus. 1 main menu and 2 submenus. Menu 2 which is a submenu of the main menu has buttons that link to several video clips. However, when authoring with Impression Pro, if the user presses the "menu" button on the remote, this will navigate to the main menu, not to the sub menu. I've noticed in ReelDVD that there is a "return" option for each video clip, but can you specify which menu you can navigate to when hitting the "menu" button?

Also, is the "Still Menu" option in ReelDVD equal to Impression's True Color menus? If not, there apparently is not a prosumer level authoring program that can satisfy the requirements of this project.

[McPoodle]

The "Menu" button is programmed on the level of the Video Title Set. On a Hollywood DVD, the movie would get a VTS, all of the previews would be on a second one, and the extras might be on a third. Each VTS would program a seperate "Menu" button destination (Chapter Menu, Previews Menu, and Extras Menu, in this example). By having your button destination be a command sequence, you can have even more destinations (such as the common trick of having the correct Chapter Menu brought up and default button highlighted depending on which chapter you where in when you pressed the "Menu" button).

Unfortunately, mid-level authoring solutions only allow one VTS for the entire DVD. As a result, the "Menu" button destination is hard-wired to be the same as the "Root" button destination--the main menu.

As for "True-Color" menus, that is a little trick by Impression that is really not part of the DVD specification. What is really happening is that there is one menu created for each selected button. By selecting a button, you are navigating to a different menu. If you keep this in mind, you should be able to reproduce a "True-Color" menu on any other authoring system (I believe Reel-DVD has an option to jump to a menu destination when the button is selected instead of when it is activated--this is what you need to use). The only way you can stay within a single menu and have navigation is with the dinky 16-color subpictures that all of the advanced DVD authoring tools have to live with.

This doesn't mean you can't get good effects by being creative. For example, on the main menu for "Big Trouble in Little China", the buttons glow and flash lightning bolts when they are selected (real cheesy, but it fits in well with the movie). The way this is done is by having the subpicture mask be a solid color for unselected and transparent when selected (the opposite of the usual pattern). Then you make your background video with all kinds of interesting stuff happening inside the buttons. Obviously, this will only work if most of the background is the same color, so the single-color mask will blend in.