Themes aren't quite what you're looking for. They only decide the look of your menus -- the background image, what kind of frames are around your thumbnails, the style and color of highlighting. Themes do not automatically add any buttons to your layout. Somewhere in your DVDA workspace is a window / tab titled Themes; that's where they're kept. You simply double-click on one of them (within that Themes window), and DVDA will apply it to your current menu. But again, it only alters the appearance of your menu -- it does not add any menus or buttons.

If you want templates, your best bet is to make them yourself. Only you know what options your project needs (and, really, I don't think it would be feasible to make something like a scene selection menu without already having a piece of media as well as chapters in it). Create a new project, insert your various menus and buttons (you can insert Empty buttons), and save the file. When you want to use it, open up the template, save it as a new file, and then alter the buttons' properties to reflect the media you want to use.

And, yeah, reading the manul or Help section would be a good thing. :) It's a pretty powerful program with lots of options, but it's not particularly complicated.

Rob

Interesting idea. I think it might be possible for a software programmer to take the IFO (navigation) files from the DVD and feed them into some sort of user interface into which you could populate your new video. While there are many, many things in these files that are specific to the actual video in use, there is some information that could be re-used. The tough part would be to figure out how to drive the menus.

Thanks for the further info, this helps me out quite a bit. It didn't give me exactly what I'm hoping for but at least points me in the right direction.

John,
I have very little video experience, and made my first DVD movie with DVD A a couple weeks ago. I had the hardest time trying to figure out the UI to create menus. What I ended up doing was editing my Video together in Vegas and placed markers along the timeline in Vegas and rendered it using the DVD-A template. I then imported this into DVD Architect with the markers in place.

So my thinking in this is that I notice DVD movies have very similar menu layouts. There's the main menu, which has buttons like "play movie", "scene Select", "Language Setup". Well in my particular DVD I wanted to create a Scene Select and when I pressed the main menu scene select button it would take me to the scene select sub menu. From there I was imagining I could create small media clips where when I pressed one of those it would jump to the marker ID I setup in my movie. So for this I was hoping there was a kind of template, where I could just paste my media clips into a pre-layed out menu. So for the scenes menu it might have 10 buttons layed out, where when I press button "1" it would make the movie jump to Marker ID#1, and within that button I could create and then paste small previews of that particular scene in the movie.

We've all scene this feature on DVD movies and it seems pretty common. This seems like the kind of templates to me that would be more useful, especially for someone not so experienced with the program.

I'm pretty experienced in Vegas, especially on the audio side of things. My thought is that you can save a .Veg project which just has blank media place holders, but is missing the actual media. Is it possible to do the same type of thing in DVD Architect, where I can save a DVD Architect project and use it as a template and then just add the media to fit the menu layout template?

Inserting a scene selection menu is 3 or so mouse clicks. When you have your project in Vegas, put markers where you want each scene, then when you render, check the "save markers with media"

Once you've pulled the movie onto your main menu, right click on the movie, choose "Insert Scene Selection Menu..." from the drop down; tell it how many scenes you want per page and poof.

--Scott