After 4 different authoring programs still no easy way of W.S. menus with thumbnails.

[f@chance]

I took this weekend to experiement with creating new menus. I usually burn 5 SVCD episodes of popular TV shows to a single DVD. The most difficult task here is the building of menus.

Sofar I have just used a collage of backgrounds from the show with episode titles and subpictures that will change the color of highlighted text and than authored it in DVDMaestro. This has been straight forward but now I wanted to move on to a background from the show with 30sec clips of each episode in a Thumbnail that acts as a button.

First searched Doom9 for motion menus thumbnails and the like. Seems to be a popular requestbut no easy straight forward ways of doing it. Just using CCE, AVI Synth and creating short clips. Finally arranging them into a menu. Not very easy and time consuming.

DVDMaestro does everything with a fantastic easy, except menus have to be created outside of it and I have tried now 4 times to get a hang of Photo Shop for creating menus and I am sure there will be a 5th time, but sofar that is not an option.

Adobe Encore. No import of SVCD, CVD just 720x??? or 704x??? did not pursue it any further.

DVD Lab. Excellent guide on Doom9 it does W.S. menus but I found no way of including 30 sec clips and using them as a button face. Single picture out of the video stream can be assigned to a button but no video stream.

ULead DVD Workshop 2. Does a good and easy job in creating menus with thumbnails but no 16:9 menu creation just 4:3. What an oversight. How in the world can this not be included in their product.

This left me with Vegas Video 4.0 and creating the menues in V.V. exporting and converting them to a MPEG2 stream than importing them into DVDMaestro assigning subpictures and we have the final product.

Questions: Are their easier ways of doing this? Are there any other authoring programs that will do this (Scenarist excluded) or am I stuck with creating the menus in V.V.?

Thanks
F@Chance

[Dimmer]

There is a sticky (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=27176) on this subject in the Advanced DVD Authoring forum. You can find more than one solution there to achieve what you need. I suggested myself a method that uses Macromedia Flash at the end of the thread. Of course, you'll have to learn some stuff about resizing the pictures and subpictures for different aspect ratios. Naturally, you won't get anywhere without Photoshop.

By the way, don't worry about Scenarist, it's not equipped to create fancy menus either.

[f@chance]

THanks for the quick reply Dimmer. I have read that "TEMPORARY" article many times and some of tries came from it. Many of the links are no longer valid. EditDV/Cinestream seems to have undergone changes, but something good came out of it, it lead me to the DVDLab tutorial and low and bejold there it was Thumbnail video clips on a menu page.

I was impressed with the ease of ULead's DVD Workshop but got bummed out by no 16:9. Anyhow, this evening I will try the DVDLab route. I will try their DVD Menu program to do some of the Photo Shop tasks. The learning curve for Adobe Premier and Photo Shop is just too steep for just a casual user.

Thanks
F@Chance