Motion Buttons

Cunhambebe wrote on 5/20/2005, 10:17 PM
I really love DVD Architect. This application rocks! I'd just like to know if it can make motion buttons for my menus.
I'm planning some menus here and as the movie intro ends right before the movie for the main menu, I'd like to animate some buttons here (as they were comming off the screen to the very center of it). No need to say the movie for the main menu would be rendered showing all the buttons (after the animation - hope you understand what I mean). As te user hit each button, all of them would move away from the screen (I'd have to render at least one more movie for this, that would be repeated for all buttons; ex: hit button A>movie shows all buttons fade away or whatever...). Since I've noticed that main menus and static buttons created by DVDA are nothing more than movies (checking VOBs), I was just wondering how to activate a button for each area displaying an animated button or title on the screen.
Can that be done? Thanks in advance.

Comments

ScottW wrote on 5/21/2005, 8:45 AM
The easiest way to do this is with Vegas.

What you do is create a movie clip that has a starting point which is the same as your menu, then you cause the desired behavior with the buttons.

So, using DVDA construct your menu with just the buttons (black background), then using preview mode capture a snapshot of the menu to a file (in high quality); pull the file into your fav' photo program and select just the buttons (in photoshop I'd do this with the selection tool), copy the buttons to a new image with a transparent background, save the file as a PNG.

Then go into Vegas - create your background video; pull in the PNG with the buttons and set them so they are composited over the background, and then the end of the clip have the buttons fade out. Render this out.

Then going back to DVDA, bring your movie into the project and set the end action for button A to invoke the new movie you just created, and the end action of the new movie to invoke the movie you want to actually play when "a" is selected.

If you were careful not to mess with the alignment, what you should get is when the user clicks "A" the buttons then fade out (or rush off the screen, or whatever) and go to the movie associated with "A". There may be a slight pause when the button is selected - nothing that you can do about that, but I usually try to mask the pause by doing something with the audio track.

For example, lets say my background video is a beach scene, and the audio track has sea sounds (gulls, waves, etc.) with the occasional wave crashing on shore. The audio for my transition video starts with a wave crashing on the shore, so the wave crashing sound becomes part of the transition and a pause in the presentation isn't as noticable - plus most folks accept this pause anyway because all DVD's have them - it's just the artists composing the menus that get picky about it.

Hope that makes sense.
--Scott