I am going to assume you have 5 videos. Open DVD2a, Click on New (top Left) Go to Top left box, RIGHT CLICK on the first YELLOW FOLDER and rename it to, let’s say, “WELCOME” so we know what page it is in the project. In the generic blue menu in the preview pane, click the text box labeled MENU 1 and then hit F2 on your keyboard and type in WELCOME, (do not hit enter) just click outside the text box. Since I think the names that they give these BOXES (Project overview, Preview, etc) are confusing, I am simply going to refer to them sometimes as Top left and top right, middle, and so on. To save some time later on, decide whether or not you are going to use the themes feature, they’re cool but a pain if you add them after you have built half your project. As soon as you add a menu to a page, double click on a theme if you are going to use it. If you don’t, it will move thumbnail links around that you might not want moved. I am also going to assume that you are providing your own background 30 second clips for motion menus.
1. Click on the explorer tab (bottom left) If it’s not there, hit ALT + 3 on keyboard.
2. Navigate to where your individual movie files are, not motion background clip
3. NOTE: Turn off autoplay feature by clicking the autoplay button, that’s the 2nd to the last button from the left in the top right of the explorer window. Sometimes it’s irritating. Turn it back on when you want. Now highlight the movie files that you want to include in a full length feature when someone hits the PLAY ALL button. Hold CTRL to select more than one video at a time.
4. Now, drag these highlighted files up to the top left of your screen, and drop them onto the little DVD ICON in the very top left of screen. You might get some errors about broken links, I can’t remember, but just ignore them if you do.
5. You are now going to right click on each of those videos(they have a green film icon) and choose rename. Don’t rename them, just add the word ALL to the end of the original filename. So they will be 01videoALL, 02videoALL, etc.
6. Right Click on the Welcome menu and click Set DVD Start, and a purple star will designate it as that, then right click on the purple welcome menu (with the star, not the folder) and choose INSERT SUBMENU, then double click on the “WELCOME” menu icon again to refresh, then right click on the submenu folder that you just created, rename to CHAPTER SELECT
7. Now we link the videos together. Double click 01videoALL, you will notice the preview pane now shows that video clip, and also in the top right properties box, you are able to change all that pertains to this video. In that Media Properties box, expand the END ACTION choices and click in the box that says command line. Even though it doesn’t appear to be a link of any sort, after clicking, it allows you to change settings. It would be nicer to have a hover effect of some sort on these to help new users. Anyway, I digress…On COMMAND LINE it should be set to “LINK”, and on the DESTINATION LINE, using the little drop down menu in the right column, click 02videoALL. Leave DESTINATION BUTTON at the DEFAULT setting.
8. Go back to top left of screen and double click on 02videoALL. Go to properties on top right and repeat step 6 except link the DESTINATION to 03videoALL. Repeat this process until all videos are linked in order of how you want them to play in one long movie. When you get to 05videoALL, you are going to make the DESTINATION link on that one go to the CHAPTER SELECT menu in the drop down list. Note: You do not have to have these videos in any sort of order in the top left box, you only have to LINK them in the order that you want them to play(with this method anyway) To make it ez on yourself, name your original video files in a way that it corresponds to its’ content (IE rockvideo, dancevideo, countryvideo, or formals1, formals2, ceremony, reception….you get the picture? (no pun intended of course)
9. Go to FILE, SAVE AS, and name your project
10. DVD2 auto names the first menu in every page of your project MENU 1, so if you have 8 pages, you will have 8 MENU 1’s, and it gets very confusing unless you rename them. DO NOT rename the DVD start page to Chapter Select or Chapter? as that will also get confusing.
11. Double click WELCOME menu, then drag your first video named 01videoALL from the top left box into the middle preview pane. Right click on the thumbnail image of it and select BUTTON STYLE, then TEXT ONLY. You can also do this in button properties in the top right box under GRAPHIC section. In order to do it that way though, you have to actually have the video selected by double clicking on it, having it highlighted in the project overview won’t help, it has to be open in the preview pane.
12. NOTE: If you highlight text in your project, the BUTTON PROPERTIES option will not appear because plain text is not a LINK. You change properties of a link in the top right box. To create a link, you have to EITHER add a video or graphic into the project, or you can go to the BUTTONS tab in the explorer window, bottom left, and drag a button of your choice and link it to wherever you want. You can then change the PROPERTIES of that link to TEXT ONLY, GRAPHIC ONLY, or the default both.
13. Once you have selected TEXT ONLY, hit F2 on top of keyboard, (NOT F+2) and text becomes editable. Type in “PLAY ALL”, adjust text size and style and then click outside of the text box. Don’t hit ENTER or it will auto resize the box. Drag it to wherever you want it to be.
14. Then in the preview pane, you will see a thumbnail link that leads to the chapter menu that you just created. You will RIGHT CLICK on that thumbnail image and change button style to TEXT ONLY, edit text size to whatever looks good and change the text to CHAPTER SELECTION or SELECT. Now, double click on that link in the preview pane.
15. Delete generic page title, then go to EXPLORER WINDOW, and drag all videos that were previously selected for PLAY ALL, and drop them into the preview pane. They will arrange themselves automatically as far as symmetrically on the page. Make sure each of these videos has the same name as the ones in the root folder, but without the ALL at the end.
16. Double click on the first video under the CHAPTER SELECT(page 1), this will bring up the video in the preview pane and in the timeline(bottom right). By clicking on the timeline, you can add a marker anywhere by hitting M on your keyboard. I usually just space 4-6 markers out evenly across the length of the video, then click on SAVE MARKERS tab, you will now get an error saying you can’t save markers because file is in use….blah blah….press ok, then right click on that same movie in Project Overview(top left) and choose insert scene selection Menu, a dialogue will ask you to title the menu (Label this Menu “scenes for 01video”) and then choose as many links per page as markers in the last step. For really long video clips, like over an hour, you could insert 10 markers, and then make 5 links per page, that would give you 2 pages, each with 5 links on them.
17. You will do that last step for EACH video clip in that menu, 5 in this case, but not yet. After you are done doing that to the first video, go to the CHAPTER SELECT(page 1) icon, double click it and you will notice in the preview pane a new thumbnail on top of the first one. Right click on the new one, change to TEXT ONLY, click F2 and edit text to “SCENES” or “SCENE SELECT”, now move this text box below the video that it corresponds to. On top of that video, insert a text box with a title to that video in bigger letters. This is not a link to it, just a title box so clients know what it is. In this case, the title would be 01video. Repeat this step for all the other videos, one at a time. It gets to cluttered when doing to many.
18. Each time you add a scene selection menu, you will see a new menu corresponding to it underneath the CHAPTER SELECT(page 1) top left. Expand all these folders to their fullest when you are done adding scene selection menus. Double click on “scenes for 01video(page1)”, then DOUBLE CLICK ON THE LAST VIDEO ON THE PAGE, if there are more scenes after this page, you will have to go to the 2nd, or the last page of scene selection in this videos’ folder. Double Click on it, go to top right, END ACTION, DESTINATION , change to CHAPTER SELECT, COMMAND should say LINK. DO THIS TO THE LAST VIDEO SCENE in every scene selection menu. Remember, you HAVE TO DOUBLE CLICK on the last video thumbnail, or the END ACTION menu (top right) won’t show up.
19. If you want to, click on scenes for 01VIDEO(page 1), and add a text box on top of the page labeled “scenes for video 1” so people know where they are. I also like to create a link on the (SCENE SELECTION page1) of each menu to go back to the parent menu, the CHAPTER SELECT menu in this case. To do this, go to the buttons tab, bottom left, drag a button and change to text only, (or you can leave as is) edit text in it to say MENU. Then link that to the CHAPTERS MENU page in BUTTON PROPERTIES (command ‘link’ destination ‘parent menu’. You can also create another button the same way on the CHAPTER SELECT(page 1) to go back to its’ parent menu (WELCOME)
20. Double click on the CHAPTER MENU(page 1) to see your 5 video thumbnails in the preview pane. Double click each video and change the END ACTION properties to: COMMAND – link DESTINATION – chapter menu DESTINATION BUTTON – default. This will make each separate video play in its entirety, then take the user back to chapter select menu to choose another clip.
21. Last few steps. Go to every menu page in project overview and right click on the preview pane and choose SET BACKGROUND MEDIA, find the media, go to top right box in MENU PAGE PROPERTIES, MENU LENGTH should be set to SPECIFY, set the NUMERICAL LENGTH to the length of your VIDEO clip, not your audio, then down to END ACTION – COMMAND loop. NOTE: If you have a motion video clip without any sound, you can drag an audio file to play with it, but your audio is only going to play for that 30 second loop that the video is in, then the song will restart with the clip. If you try to make your MENU LOOP length as long as the audio file is, then your motion background is going to go black after 30 seconds, or however long it lasts, and it will be that way until the audio file loops over to start again. Keep separate audio and video files the same length.
YOUR PROJECT is now ready to burn
Make sure you delete the Generic MENU link on each menu when you first create it, remember, you can’t create a link from text, you have to drag something into the project, then change the properties that link to text only. Play with the color sets and button properties for different effects, that way you can learn how the terms that they use correspond to what they actually are, like masks and stuff like that.
You can add more than one audio track to a menu background, but you can’t place it in the timeline to play consecutively like you can in Vegas, so to me, it’s a worthless feature. You do that down in the timeline, just drag and drop audio track.
Good Luck with your project, I have only played with this program for about 3-4 days, so I am sure that there are some extreme shortcuts to how I am doing this in my tutorial, but it worked for me, I hope it helps you in some small way. I have much to learn. But this message board is by far one of the most courteous that I have ever seen, if you keep asking questions, they will get answered. Try going back to some older posts and just read them through regardless if they apply to you, you’ll learn a lot. Later Dude, those DAMN PACKERS LOST!! GRRRRRRRRR
Man, I looked over this report here and found a few mistakes, I hope you other experts take the time to read this and correct any others that I missed. Thanks guys. Good Luck BB
1. Click on the explorer tab (bottom left) If it’s not there, hit ALT + 3 on keyboard.
2. Navigate to where your individual movie files are, not motion background clip
3. NOTE: Turn off autoplay feature by clicking the autoplay button, that’s the 2nd to the last button from the left in the top right of the explorer window. Sometimes it’s irritating. Turn it back on when you want. Now highlight the movie files that you want to include in a full length feature when someone hits the PLAY ALL button. Hold CTRL to select more than one video at a time.
4. Now, drag these highlighted files up to the top left of your screen, and drop them onto the little DVD ICON in the very top left of screen. You might get some errors about broken links, I can’t remember, but just ignore them if you do.
5. You are now going to right click on each of those videos(they have a green film icon) and choose rename. Don’t rename them, just add the word ALL to the end of the original filename. So they will be 01videoALL, 02videoALL, etc.
6. Right Click on the Welcome menu and click Set DVD Start, and a purple star will designate it as that, then right click on the purple welcome menu (with the star, not the folder) and choose INSERT SUBMENU, then double click on the “WELCOME” menu icon again to refresh, then right click on the submenu folder that you just created, rename to CHAPTER SELECT
7. Now we link the videos together. Double click 01videoALL, you will notice the preview pane now shows that video clip, and also in the top right properties box, you are able to change all that pertains to this video. In that Media Properties box, expand the END ACTION choices and click in the box that says command line. Even though it doesn’t appear to be a link of any sort, after clicking, it allows you to change settings. It would be nicer to have a hover effect of some sort on these to help new users. Anyway, I digress…On COMMAND LINE it should be set to “LINK”, and on the DESTINATION LINE, using the little drop down menu in the right column, click 02videoALL. Leave DESTINATION BUTTON at the DEFAULT setting.
8. Go back to top left of screen and double click on 02videoALL. Go to properties on top right and repeat step 6 except link the DESTINATION to 03videoALL. Repeat this process until all videos are linked in order of how you want them to play in one long movie. When you get to 05videoALL, you are going to make the DESTINATION link on that one go to the CHAPTER SELECT menu in the drop down list. Note: You do not have to have these videos in any sort of order in the top left box, you only have to LINK them in the order that you want them to play(with this method anyway) To make it ez on yourself, name your original video files in a way that it corresponds to its’ content (IE rockvideo, dancevideo, countryvideo, or formals1, formals2, ceremony, reception….you get the picture? (no pun intended of course)
9. Go to FILE, SAVE AS, and name your project
10. DVD2 auto names the first menu in every page of your project MENU 1, so if you have 8 pages, you will have 8 MENU 1’s, and it gets very confusing unless you rename them. DO NOT rename the DVD start page to Chapter Select or Chapter? as that will also get confusing.
11. Double click WELCOME menu, then drag your first video named 01videoALL from the top left box into the middle preview pane. Right click on the thumbnail image of it and select BUTTON STYLE, then TEXT ONLY. You can also do this in button properties in the top right box under GRAPHIC section. In order to do it that way though, you have to actually have the video selected by double clicking on it, having it highlighted in the project overview won’t help, it has to be open in the preview pane.
12. NOTE: If you highlight text in your project, the BUTTON PROPERTIES option will not appear because plain text is not a LINK. You change properties of a link in the top right box. To create a link, you have to EITHER add a video or graphic into the project, or you can go to the BUTTONS tab in the explorer window, bottom left, and drag a button of your choice and link it to wherever you want. You can then change the PROPERTIES of that link to TEXT ONLY, GRAPHIC ONLY, or the default both.
13. Once you have selected TEXT ONLY, hit F2 on top of keyboard, (NOT F+2) and text becomes editable. Type in “PLAY ALL”, adjust text size and style and then click outside of the text box. Don’t hit ENTER or it will auto resize the box. Drag it to wherever you want it to be.
14. Then in the preview pane, you will see a thumbnail link that leads to the chapter menu that you just created. You will RIGHT CLICK on that thumbnail image and change button style to TEXT ONLY, edit text size to whatever looks good and change the text to CHAPTER SELECTION or SELECT. Now, double click on that link in the preview pane.
15. Delete generic page title, then go to EXPLORER WINDOW, and drag all videos that were previously selected for PLAY ALL, and drop them into the preview pane. They will arrange themselves automatically as far as symmetrically on the page. Make sure each of these videos has the same name as the ones in the root folder, but without the ALL at the end.
16. Double click on the first video under the CHAPTER SELECT(page 1), this will bring up the video in the preview pane and in the timeline(bottom right). By clicking on the timeline, you can add a marker anywhere by hitting M on your keyboard. I usually just space 4-6 markers out evenly across the length of the video, then click on SAVE MARKERS tab, you will now get an error saying you can’t save markers because file is in use….blah blah….press ok, then right click on that same movie in Project Overview(top left) and choose insert scene selection Menu, a dialogue will ask you to title the menu (Label this Menu “scenes for 01video”) and then choose as many links per page as markers in the last step. For really long video clips, like over an hour, you could insert 10 markers, and then make 5 links per page, that would give you 2 pages, each with 5 links on them.
17. You will do that last step for EACH video clip in that menu, 5 in this case, but not yet. After you are done doing that to the first video, go to the CHAPTER SELECT(page 1) icon, double click it and you will notice in the preview pane a new thumbnail on top of the first one. Right click on the new one, change to TEXT ONLY, click F2 and edit text to “SCENES” or “SCENE SELECT”, now move this text box below the video that it corresponds to. On top of that video, insert a text box with a title to that video in bigger letters. This is not a link to it, just a title box so clients know what it is. In this case, the title would be 01video. Repeat this step for all the other videos, one at a time. It gets to cluttered when doing to many.
18. Each time you add a scene selection menu, you will see a new menu corresponding to it underneath the CHAPTER SELECT(page 1) top left. Expand all these folders to their fullest when you are done adding scene selection menus. Double click on “scenes for 01video(page1)”, then DOUBLE CLICK ON THE LAST VIDEO ON THE PAGE, if there are more scenes after this page, you will have to go to the 2nd, or the last page of scene selection in this videos’ folder. Double Click on it, go to top right, END ACTION, DESTINATION , change to CHAPTER SELECT, COMMAND should say LINK. DO THIS TO THE LAST VIDEO SCENE in every scene selection menu. Remember, you HAVE TO DOUBLE CLICK on the last video thumbnail, or the END ACTION menu (top right) won’t show up.
19. If you want to, click on scenes for 01VIDEO(page 1), and add a text box on top of the page labeled “scenes for video 1” so people know where they are. I also like to create a link on the (SCENE SELECTION page1) of each menu to go back to the parent menu, the CHAPTER SELECT menu in this case. To do this, go to the buttons tab, bottom left, drag a button and change to text only, (or you can leave as is) edit text in it to say MENU. Then link that to the CHAPTERS MENU page in BUTTON PROPERTIES (command ‘link’ destination ‘parent menu’. You can also create another button the same way on the CHAPTER SELECT(page 1) to go back to its’ parent menu (WELCOME)
20. Double click on the CHAPTER MENU(page 1) to see your 5 video thumbnails in the preview pane. Double click each video and change the END ACTION properties to: COMMAND – link DESTINATION – chapter menu DESTINATION BUTTON – default. This will make each separate video play in its entirety, then take the user back to chapter select menu to choose another clip.
21. Last few steps. Go to every menu page in project overview and right click on the preview pane and choose SET BACKGROUND MEDIA, find the media, go to top right box in MENU PAGE PROPERTIES, MENU LENGTH should be set to SPECIFY, set the NUMERICAL LENGTH to the length of your VIDEO clip, not your audio, then down to END ACTION – COMMAND loop. NOTE: If you have a motion video clip without any sound, you can drag an audio file to play with it, but your audio is only going to play for that 30 second loop that the video is in, then the song will restart with the clip. If you try to make your MENU LOOP length as long as the audio file is, then your motion background is going to go black after 30 seconds, or however long it lasts, and it will be that way until the audio file loops over to start again. Keep separate audio and video files the same length.
YOUR PROJECT is now ready to burn
Make sure you delete the Generic MENU link on each menu when you first create it, remember, you can’t create a link from text, you have to drag something into the project, then change the properties that link to text only. Play with the color sets and button properties for different effects, that way you can learn how the terms that they use correspond to what they actually are, like masks and stuff like that.
You can add more than one audio track to a menu background, but you can’t place it in the timeline to play consecutively like you can in Vegas, so to me, it’s a worthless feature. You do that down in the timeline, just drag and drop audio track.
Good Luck with your project, I have only played with this program for about 3-4 days, so I am sure that there are some extreme shortcuts to how I am doing this in my tutorial, but it worked for me, I hope it helps you in some small way. I have much to learn. But this message board is by far one of the most courteous that I have ever seen, if you keep asking questions, they will get answered. Try going back to some older posts and just read them through regardless if they apply to you, you’ll learn a lot. Later Dude, those DAMN PACKERS LOST!! GRRRRRRRRR
Man, I looked over this report here and found a few mistakes, I hope you other experts take the time to read this and correct any others that I missed. Thanks guys. Good Luck BB