Problem with animated menu....

[Kryal]

I'm having problems with making an animated menu for my home-made DVD. I want to have an animated menu with scene selections, etc. From fooling around in Scenarist, I finally learned that I needed to make the menu and animations into one video file. Simple enough right?

I can make the Picture-in-picture videos for the menu, but it's the background I'm trying to put on that makes all the problems. I made my still background into a BMP file (i have also tried all other formats) at 720x480. When I put my image on top of the animations in the editor, everything looks fine in the preview, but when I multiplex the animation, the background image is miscolored and blocky, while my video is fine.

I've tried doing this with many programs with the same results. This is what I can speculate:

1. The background image is being processed as a video instead of layering it on top of the encoded video frame(s).

2. I would need to have a plug-in that will allow me to take a video stream and place an image on each frame...

I hope somebody can help me out, because all those commercial menus are starting to look too good to be true....

[auenf]

uhh, i think i know what your trying to do, the whole menu (including the PiP) needs to be as one video file when you bring it into scenarist, the easiest way to do that is look at the top of this forum, and there is a PiP sticky started by Arky.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?threadid=27176

Enf...

[Kryal]

That's exatly what I'm doing and exatly what I tried. I made the whole thing into a video file. The problem I'm having is that the BMP image file I'm placing over the videos turns out discolored and blocky in the final, generated video. So this is what I get to put into scenarist: a few good PIP videos on a messy menu. It might help to understand by making a simple 720x480 BMP image with a few lines and other splotches (just to test) and import it under a few PIP images (you don't even have to do that). I even took the image and generated a video all by itself and it looks just as terrible. The closest thing I could get to a clean menu was by importing the BMP image directly into scenarist as a still menu. Even then it's discolored.....

[slk001]

Make sure that your BMP and your video files are in the same color space. Bitmaps are usually in the RBG color space, while the video is usually in the YUV2 space. I think that this is your problem.

[Kryal]

How would I go about making the BMP in YUV2 format? I'm using Paint Shop Pro 7, which doesn't have that option....

[dp]

Let me ask something...Have you tried with Premiere to create one video set containing the still image for background and your videos?
When you export the project chech the settings of the video.Because for a test I have made the same menu that you're trying to do...and it's fine.

[Kryal]

I didn't use Premiere, I tried many programs. I tried Vegas Video and Avid XpressDV. I also tried importing the BMP directly into Scenarist and DVDMaestro as a still menu. Needless to say, the clearest I ever got was with Scenarist and DVDMaestro, but they still made the picture discolored and faded. Although I did find an alternative solution....

On the post about PIP backgrounds, someone mentioned using a Filter in VirtualDub for this, and I've had great results with my menu.

But there is still the problem of making a still image/slideshow on the DVD, because all the pictures will be off...