How much additional space do motion menus require?

[catback]

Some of the current DVD authoring programs allow motion menus. For each of such menus, do they actually add a little video clip to the DVD just for the menu or do they just refer to the main clip without adding anything?

Reason I ask is because I have a lot of video content to fit onto a DVD. I want to assign as much bitrate I can to the main video to get the video quality as high as possible. Motion menus are a nice feature but if they steal space away from the main video, I would rather stick with still images for the menus.

[influenza]

Every menu will have it's own background/movie. It's obvious that a motion menu will take more space tehn just a still.

Thats why some dvds have a simple menu of maybe 15-50 mb while others have huge menus of 300-500 MB

[Richard Iredale]

Look at it this way: a motion menu is just a video with an overlay that lets you select buttons. So if your motion menu runs for 30 seconds before repeating, then it takes up as much space as 30 seconds of regular video. Still, if you have a couple of motion menus totalling one or two minutes, it's not that big a deal if you are putting two hours of video on the disk. It means your bitrate for the main video is 1-2% lower than otherwise.