animated menu buttons

john-beale wrote on 9/11/2007, 5:40 PM

I don't often use DVD-A, normally I generate DVDs using another package.
However, I'm doing one project today in DVD-A 4.0b because I want to use animated menu buttons. In particular, I want a chapter menu with several buttons that are moving thumbnails of the action in that chapter. I know this can work because I did this same event last year and had my chapter menus animated in this way. I can't figure out how I got it to work, though.

Right now everything looks OK, but the buttons are just still images, they do not play back animated. I want each to be animated for 6 seconds and then loop.

The menu page properties is set to
---------------------------------------
"Menu length" specify
Length: 00:00:06
Loop Point: 00:00:00
End action: loop

and each button has Thumbnail properties: Animated

is there any other setting I'm missing? Do I need the button "frame" to be of some special type? The menu does not have an audio track- does it need one to be animated? Thanks for any advice!

Edit- if I manually add a button and set the properties to the same .m2v file and set "animate" it actually does become a motion button. I can't find any difference in settings between the button I added that works and those from the chapter selection menu that don't - a real mystery.

Comments

MPM wrote on 9/12/2007, 8:36 PM

For the *L* of it I just fired up 4b & tried to break animated buttons on a scene select menu, and couldn't. Could it be that they didn't show in preview because too much to render? Or IOW did you try rendering to hdd to see if animation worked?

If all else fails, if you set initial button on main menu to animated, then create scene menus, all scene menu buttons copy that behavior & are animated. But that's a wild guess -- as I said I couldn't break it.

john-beale wrote on 9/13/2007, 11:45 AM

Thank you for trying this! It's a real puzzle to me also, since the buttons I created manually animate just fine, and all the relevant settings are the same as far as I can see. The buttons that don't work were auto-created by the create chapter sub-menus option. Then I applied a custom theme to get them the right size. Then I manually changed each one to "animate", but to no avail. AND last year I did a DVD with basically the same layout, 6 buttons per page, and they did animate. There are too many pages (over 50 buttons) to do every one manually- oh well- I'll just go with stills, it looks ok.