THEMES-Good Grief!

alastairbrown wrote on 2/13/2003, 3:22 AM

Please tell me there is an easier way to make your own themes other than that described in the manual. I can get by at the moemnt by saving buttons from another application as .png files and bringing them in as custom buttons and making my own motion backgrounds in Vegas. Seems un-necesarily complicated.

Comments

marcotronic wrote on 2/13/2003, 4:31 AM

Hi,

I fear there is no other possibility to create your own templates than using XML and creating your own theme-XML. Unfortunately there is no documentation on the tags available at the moment, so the only possible thing is guessing what all the tags in the XML file mean and just change the contents. At the moment I´m testing that a little bit and I plan to write a little application (written in Delphi) that makes creating templates a little bit easier. I´m thinking of a kind of wizard app that lets you select the filesyou would like to embed in your template and their position etc. and finally write your XML file to disk. I think it´s not that difficult, maybe (if I get some time...) I can present a first try on my homepage after the weekend...

Who else would be interested in such an app? It would be free of course... ;-)

Greetings from Germany,
Marco

Johannes_H wrote on 2/13/2003, 7:59 AM

That would really be a useful thing!

So I am interested.

Greetings from Austria
Johannes

barleycorn wrote on 2/13/2003, 11:05 AM

Editing the XML is extremely simple using Altova's XML Spy but a visual editor would certainly be welcome.

sacherjj wrote on 2/13/2003, 2:47 PM

Its not that editing the XML is hard. We just have no idea what the cryptic decimal values actually MEAN.

barleycorn wrote on 2/13/2003, 5:24 PM

Most of the quartets seem to be the x and y for the top left of an object and the x and y for the bottom right. The decimals are fractions of the width and height of the screen.

IMAGE and TEXT work similarly but appear to be the locations within an ITEMRECT.

SonyDennis wrote on 2/15/2003, 6:56 PM

We will be releasing a "theme developer kit" in the future.
///d@

alastairbrown wrote on 2/16/2003, 11:31 AM

For the moment, I'm making my own mation backgrounds using Vegas and some MAin Concept motion loops (Free Motion Loops - See my earlier post). For buttons, as much as I hate Pinnacle, Studio 8 came with a pile of really good buttons and motion backgrounds. Had to convert themn from .tga files to .png using Photoshop. Result is I can make up as many different looks as I want.

StepD wrote on 2/16/2003, 4:49 PM

You guys should talk to the developer of DVD Menu Studio about creating an export-to-DVDA filter. It's a great program:

http://www.mediachance.com/dvdmenu/index.html

SonicBorr wrote on 2/17/2003, 3:18 PM

You can now download the XML Theme Specification. It's located here:

http://www.sonicfoundry.com/download/step2.asp?DID=437

Thanks.

StepD wrote on 2/17/2003, 10:03 PM

Thanks.

SHTUNOT wrote on 2/18/2003, 10:43 PM

I've just emailed Oscar at mediachance about getting a export to DVD-A. His DVD menu studio looks cool as hell.

Ed.

kentwolf wrote on 2/23/2003, 1:58 PM

Could you please tell me how you *linked* the imported buttons to a video segment?

I have done the exact same thing with regard to importing old Studio content, however, I am cannot figure out how to link them.

Thanks!