Rendering menus to files?

AJA wrote on 11/7/2004, 8:03 AM

Hi,

Is there any way of rendering the menus in my project to files? Because the menus which have animated thumbnails take so long to render (how is it even possible that it takes almost 30 minutes to render a 30 second menu with eight animated thumbnails on my 1,4GHz computer?) and because nearly with every project I have to prepare the project several times (don't ask me why). So it would be a lot easier if I'd have to render the menus only once to a separate file. Or is there any chance of this in the next version?

Thanks!

Comments

ScottW wrote on 11/7/2004, 8:13 AM

You can speed the process up, but you're not going to be able to avoid doing some rendering.

One method would be to create your menu (along with the animated thumbs) using Vegas and then render to mpeg. This mpeg would then become your background video for your menu. Drop in your movies, change the button style to text only and delete all of the text - resize the box to cover your thumb.

At this point DVDA will only need to render your background video to combine it with the text boxes, basically you'd be dealing with one stream of data rather than 9.

You may want to also try rendering from Vegas back to a DV AVI file, since that would avoid having DVDA decompress and then recompress - it would just need to compress for the final mpeg.

Another option would be to use something like DVD Lab or DVD Lab Pro - this authoring package doesn't do any rendering when it builds the menu (everything must be pre-rendered)..

--Scott

AJA wrote on 11/7/2004, 10:08 AM

Okay, thanks!