I am wasting some DVDs due to the fact that I can't preview the DVD on a tv like I can preview video from the timeline of Vegas 4. My concern lies in not previewing menu pages. Am I missing something??
DVD-A does have built-in preview that does show menu pages and the videos plus the menu controls work. While you can't preview on an external monitor that shouldn't be a issue since most if not all of what's part of your DVD should/could have been previewed on an external monitor while you still were working on it from Vegas. That of course assumes you built your project in Vegas.
I agree with you that most of the video itself should have been externally previewed in Vegas but that doesn't address the menu structure. In my opinion it would be a good feature for the next version of DVD-A to have optional external monitor preview, if that's not too hard to do. Hopefully there would be some re-useability of external-monitor-preview code from Vegas.
I am creating a Demo DVD. The main menu has thumbnails for the 6 type of projects I sell. I have a "contact" object that goes to a submenu that has as it's background image a graphic showing my webaddress, email, phone etc. Also From the main menu I have inserted 3 more menus (using next and back objects) that show the 6 steps in the order process. All the graphics are created in Fireworks and all are used as menu background images. This allows my customers to take their time and read what they want and move on at their leisure. No timed slideshow. Because of the noninterlaced buzz thingy that we deal with with computer generated graphics, I have to bur the graphics in Fireworks. I just thought that it would be nice to be able to layout and check for buzzing on the menus before I burn.