Animated thumbnails limited to 30 seconds?

rjchu wrote on 8/5/2007, 12:54 PM
Hi all,

I'm using DVD Architect 4.0b and am having a problem with animated graphics in my menus. I want to have a little thumbnail clip playing on the menu page (but it isn't clickable). I'm doing this by inserting a graphic and specifying an MPEG-2 video file (don't care about audio for now) and changing the style of the graphic from still to animated. All seems to work fine except for two key annoyances.

1. The animated clip stops after 30 seconds into the video. I'm working around this by only using 30 second clips but it's annoying to be limited to that duration.

2. For the life of me, I can't figure out how to tell DVDA to loop the animated clip. This only makes item 1 more annoying as if I could either loop it or have a longer clip I might not mind as much but not being about to do either is just frustrating!

Perhaps I'm going about this the wrong way and there's a better way to embed a lopping video clip into a menu that is not a clickable item. If so, please set me straight.

Thanks,

-joni-

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 8/5/2007, 1:17 PM
in dvda3 the length is limited by the total menu length. if that's thirty seconds you can't have the buttons/graphics be longer.

but I KNOW I've done longer then 30 second animations in menus in DVDa3.
ECB wrote on 8/5/2007, 3:33 PM
The animation clip will not run longer than the menu length which defaults to 30 seconds. Click on the menu and look under Menu Properties/General on the right. Click on menu length auto-calculate and change to specify. Set it to the length to what you want. I think the length maxes out at 15 minutes. HTH

EB
bStro wrote on 8/5/2007, 10:26 PM
In addition to what the others have said, you'll probably want to set your menu to loop. It sounds like right now you've got an animated thumbnail (well, an independent piece of video, really, since you said you added it as a graphic) on a static menu. So besides the fact that the "thumbnail" is limited to the length of the menu, it's also not going to loop because the menu doesn't loop by default.

For that, you click once on an open area of your menu so that the Menu Page Properties window becomes available. Then on the End Actions tab of that, you set Command to "Loop."

Rob