Comments

ScottW wrote on 1/5/2005, 7:24 AM
I'm not sure what you mean by "slide into the menu"

There's a couple of different ways to do nice menu transitions though they are harder to do with motion menus.

With DVDA, I start with Vegas. I create the main menu layout entirely in Vegas and then render this out as an AVI file. This AVI file becomes the background for the main menu in DVDA.

Then going back to Vegas I create a clip that is my transition from the main menu to either another submenu or the beginning of the movie - when transitioning to a movie this will typically be just a fade to black, but you could certainly do additional things such as move the objects around using keyframes and pan/crop and then fade to black or to your new menu. This will then get rendered as an AVI file as well and then inserted into DVDA as the background of a submenu. If we're just going directly to the movie, the submenu then contains a hidden button that is the movie which was placed on the submenu (you hide the button by changing it to text, delete the text and turn off the selected and activated highlighting), the end action of the sub menu is to activate that button.

So you've got your main menu with the background, you click on a button that takes you to the submenu and the background of the submenu supplies the transition effects, from the main menu then fades to black and then activates the hidden button to start playing the movie.

--Scott
amemain wrote on 1/5/2005, 11:00 AM
Very interesting Scott, I will for sure try that out.

I think what I was getting at was like in Encore you can send out the menu with its layers to After Effects and create any movements with whicever layers are in the menu, like titles buttons or text links. I was wondering if there was a way to export the main already created menu from DVDA2 into Vegas and create Motions with whatever I have in them.

My problem being that I can't seem to figure out a way to create a motion video and have it exactly match the menu when the video portion is done.

I think I have confused my self now too :-)
ScottW wrote on 1/5/2005, 11:18 AM
I'm still not sure what you are after, but DVDA doesn't have anything like what you describe for Encore and AE.

However, you can capture a snapshot of the menu. Just invoke the preview mode, then on the upper right hand side you'll see some icons and text. The text is the preview mode, change it to best. Then click on the CopytoClipboard icon and you can capture the menu to the clipboard. Use your fav' photo software to paste from the clipboard into the photo editor.

So, if I want to have an intro video that transitions nicely to my main menu. I create the menu first - I recommend staying away from motion backgrounds with this technique because to make it work right you really need delayed menu buttons that DVDA doesn't currently support.

Once I have all the buttons layed out, I'll then capture a screen shot like I described earlier. Oh, remember to turn off selected highlighting to that you don't have anything highlighted for your snapshot. This will become the end of my intro video.

So, I'll construct my intro video, then apply whatever transition I have to get me to the menu picture that was captured. I then render this out of Vegas as an AVI (no reason to do MPEG2 since in this case DVDA is going to recompress anyway).

Then when I put these together in DVDA you'll see the intro play then a nice transition (fade, wipe whatever) and the menu will come up, then when the transition video actually ends we'll go to the real menu and the highlighting will appear. It may not be a seamless transition, but most players don't do too bad.
amemain wrote on 1/6/2005, 12:33 AM
Thank You Scott, really appreciate the help.
Jessariah67 wrote on 1/9/2005, 9:12 PM
You can also do something similar by creating the motion intro and grabbing the last frame of the intro and using that as your menu BG. Size "blank" text links over your link text in the BG. The end result will look like this.

The "intro video" is everything you see before the grey "link box" appears. Once the link box appears, that is the menu BG taken from the last frame of the intro. (Personally, I like to use video files at "0" velocity instead of screen captures, as those JPEGs will often have artifacts in them...)
mjroddy wrote on 1/13/2005, 4:07 PM
Ok... I'm getting this... Having motion settle to a still, I think I can do that. What if I want to keep the motion in the background? I can even do that.
BUT! What if I want to have the buttons slide in over motin background AND THEN have it transition away - like break the elements up and have them fly off screen? Any possibilities?
The only way I can think of would NOT match the motion in the background.
Say, everything slides into place (and it just occured to me that I might be hi-jacking the thread - I hope not - I hope this is useful info), the motion is happenin' and the user makes the selection. Of couse you can now go to an exit anim, but that won't necessarily match where the background was in its animation. Is that just the way it is?
ScottW wrote on 1/14/2005, 5:06 AM
You simply cannot match the motion in your background at exit time - with any authoring program.

I think if you examine any hollywood DVD with motion backgrounds, you'll find that they usually keep the motion fairly subtle so that the transition is not as abrupt. In the few cases I've seen where there was more obvious motion they make large obvious transition.

I've been thinking though that if you could do some low-level authoring and kept the motion background fairly short - you might be able to do something where you simply set a flag that gets tested at the end of the loop, if the flag isn't set you repeate the loop, otherwise you execute the exit sequence. I'll have to investigate whether this could be done with DVD Lab Pro.