Animated menu help

[dark.soft]

I am trying to make a dvd main menu of a telefilm with this scheme:

An animated background with the typical telefilm intro
In the lower left corner a small rectangle (160x120) with moving scenes frome some episodes
In the upper center a transparent layer with the title of the telefilm
In the lower right corner the menu voices (play, audio etc.)

So, the file will be long as the intro duration (about 47 seconds). If I want to do all in photoshop it will be a suicide, so do you know a program that can do this? Thanks.

[Arky]

Adobe After Effects is your best bet, although any decent modern NLE should also do the job (examples including Vegas and Liquid Edition). There's also VirtualDub and AVIsynth, at a push. Basically, anything that supports alpha channels and allows you to composite graphics and video together!

And if you have a MAC, then, like me, you'll be champing at the bit to get hold of Apple's 'Motion' (http://www.apple.com/motion/) app, that they were demonstrating at NAB (http://www.apple.com/motion/video/) in April. It's awesome!!


Arky ;o)

[dark.soft]

I know from the other thread "Seamless branching DVD" that you like mac, but i need pc software. So, you think that after effects will allow me to do all the things that I have mentioned before? If so, thank you very much for the help. Last thing: can you explain me what you mean with "decent modern NLE should also do the job (examples including Vegas and Liquid Edition)". I don't know what is a nle, can you tell me? Bye.

[Dimmer]

Originally posted by dark.soft
I know from the other thread "Seamless branching DVD" that you like mac, but i need pc software. So, you think that after effects will allow me to do all the things that I have mentioned before? If so, thank you very much for the help. Last thing: can you explain me what you mean with "decent modern NLE should also do the job (examples including Vegas and Liquid Edition)". I don't know what is a nle, can you tell me? Bye. Actually, there is a sticky (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=27176) on this subject Arky started a while ago in Advanced Authoring. There is a number of methods including freeware-only (all for PC!). I posted there my favorite one with Macromedia Flash, which would come handy if you've done some web design. Otherwise, go for Adobe After Effects, it'll do everything you want and more except for MPEG encoding and creating an audio track.

NLE = Non-Linear Editing, there is a separate forum on this here.

[dark.soft]

Great! Thanks for the help. Bye.