DVD Menus

lynn1102 wrote on 9/10/2011, 7:38 PM
For the type of work I do, I normally don't need or use menus on my dvd's. I now have a client who would like menus. I have four projects ready to burn, but am having a problem getting the menus figured out. I used Vegas 10 for the edit and have dvda 5.2 for dvd's. Going thru the manual, it tells me lots of things I can do, but isn't real specific on how to do them. I can usually figure this stuff out, but my brain isn't connecting on this.
Does anyone have a good step by step video out there that might help.

Lynn

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 9/10/2011, 9:22 PM
Menus are easy to figure out. The right-click (context menu) and the Properties pane are your most powerful tools. Lots of info by doing a search on Youtube. Since you haven't told us what you want to do, I wouldn't know how to give you any more specific direction.
AlanADale wrote on 9/11/2011, 5:44 AM
Here are a couple of links to 2 very good video tutorials. Part 1 here basically gives an overview to the thinking/principles of creating menus and can be skipped if you don't think it is important. Part 2 of the tutorial here gets into the meat of it and you'll learn a lot from it.......certainly I did.
lynn1102 wrote on 9/11/2011, 7:45 AM
What I am trying to do: I have 6 reels of movie film that I have captured. These are of reunions held in different years. I have loaded them into Vegas 10 and did some editing on the film. Normally when I do these, I put a marker at the beginning of each reel and some kind of title overlay. If the client uses the skip button, the dvd will go to the next reel.
This time the client would like a menu at the beginning so she can go directly to the individual reels.
I did check the You tube videos and it answered some of my questions. Will I have to make 6 separate movies if I want 6 menu items?
This is something I never needed, so I never bothered trying to learn it.

Lynn
PeterDuke wrote on 9/11/2011, 9:03 AM
If you want sequential videos, they could either be one physical file with markers to the start of each video, or they could be separate files which by default wil go back to the main menu when finished, but you can relink the end action of one to point to the start of the next.

The former method is probably slightly less work. By default it has a main menu followed by a Scene Selection menu containing buttons linked to the markers.

The latter by default would have only one menu with buttons to each video.
AlanADale wrote on 9/11/2011, 10:39 AM
In the videos that I linked to Lynn the author does actually touch BRIEFLY on the subject of chapter markers etc. However, he has also produced a video tutorial concentrating specifically on the subject here
musicvid10 wrote on 9/11/2011, 10:42 AM
You want to render one compliant mpeg-2 file in Vegas with the markers included.
They import as chapters in the menu when you bring it into DVD Architect, in a menu-based project, of course. That's all there is to it.