ideas on displaying a lot of text in menus.

williamconifer wrote on 11/20/2003, 12:40 PM
Greets.

I am creating a demo DVD that will be a sales tool for Realestate agents. The DVD will show houses they are selling. I want to take some of the house's details and specs found in MLS listings and display it as menus before the video tour of a house. I want to use menus because the viewer can control how long they can view each menu page.

I envision 2-4 pages of details such as "total sqft: 2560" "tax rate: 8.6516" etc. Obviously I need to come up with a design that will not visually "buzz", be legible and be intuitively organized.

My question is what software can I use to quickly create these pages/images? I want to avoid a program like Photoshop because I will need to templatize the pages so I can quickly enter data and render or save as jpg or whatever. My first thought in data entry is Excel but this does nothing for me as far as layout for video. Powerpoint? Are there any graphic pgms out there that allow you to "lock" areas and have data entry areas?

Can DVD-A's menu creation tools build what I need?

any ideas?

thanks
jack

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 11/20/2003, 1:45 PM
You can do it directly in DVD-A to a limited extent.

I'll assume you'd like something like a picture or several of the property, then alongside have a description. To do that click on Insert, then insert text. Once the text box displays click on the sizing tool and drag it to roughly the size to want it to be. If you want it to be very readable on a TV pick a plain font like Arial and set the size to 14 points, maybe a little larger. Then just start typing.

Several "annoying things" in the present version, DVD-A likes to default back to auto which can make the text tiny. If however you make the text a larger size to begin with it shouldn't reduce it too much and you can always change it back to the size you want when you're done typing. You need to do a forced line break (hit enter key) when you want to go to the next line, otherwise the text box just keeps expanding to the right and soon will be out of bounds.

The trick is practice a little, be mindful of the "auto" feature and that you can resize the boundries of the text box anytime with the resizing tool and you can get a decent looking menu page.