Actually you can't, not what the person asking or I want to do which is change the global parameters of the thumbnails so they stay CONSTANT one project to another. We're not talking font size. Rather the PLACE HOLDER for the thumbnails you drop on the menu AND those generated by DVD-A when you create chapters. Some nice features sadly end up also being a CURSE since some of the automation works against you causing you much wasted time and efford.

Example: The thumbnail size is automatically changed by DVD-A based on the number of thumbnails per menu page. On the surface this may seem good, but it isn't IF you have multiple videos on the DVD or if you want diffent sized thumbnails other than what DVD-A thinks you should have.

Illustration: Video one may have 3 chapters, while video two has 5 chapters, while video 3 may have seven. If you use the automated generate thumbnails "feature" to build chapters how many chapters you set determines the size of the thumbnail! So left to its own devices DVD-A would under this example create 3 different menu pages each with different sized thumbnails. Not very professional looking, focing you to change manually, which is bad because...

So the more chapters you add, the smaller the thumbnails get... so they fit on the menu page. This in my view is half ass backwards. I would think the designer (me) not DVD-A should decide how large the thumnails should be. While you can change them after the fact, the present method is a royal pain in the ass because you must change EACH thumbnail's size by hand and then reposition them on the menu and again align them which takes a LOT OF TIME! Much time wasted and me cursing the application under my breath for not being smart enough to give ME control and instead doing what it wants. Annoying if you have a few chapters, frustrating if you have a dozen or so, enough to make you pound your desk with your fist if you have to go through this twenty, thirty, fifty times... per project. Ridculous!

Now as far as the templates. I took a quick look at the XML they are made with. I see no option to set thumbnail size globally. This like I said is determined by the number of chapters you set if you let DVD-A generate the thumbnails. So in effect one of the best features of DVD-A becomes nearly useless, because the time you save having DVD-A generate the thumbnails, is totally lost because you are forced to repositon the thumbnails and resize them one after another if you add more than three chapters, because if you don't the thumbnails and resulting captions are way too small.

Yeah, this really gripes me too BillyBoy. The amount of time screwing around with menus when you depart from the DVDA defaults far exceed the time I would have to spend to enter timecodes in DVD Workshop to set chapter points. I sure hope SoFo gets version 2 out soon. This is so bush league -- it's almost like they were channeling Microsoft.

Perhaps I was a bit too precise in my reading of the post. The request said:

> Is there a way to make a template or similar with predefined thumbnail sizes and text sizes?

To me make a template means one template. Not change all templates. The process I explained would create a template with the defaults you want.

> The thumbnail size is automatically changed by DVD-A based on the number of thumbnails per menu page

BillyBoy, you are on a different subject, which is how DVDA handles defaults with regard to how many chapters are on a page. I agree the problem is that it doesn’t keep the size consistent. If I have 8 chapter points and I select 6 chapters to a page, the second page with the last two chapters should have the same size thumbnails but it doesn’t. They are larger because there are only two on this page. I agree that this looks very unprofessional.

> So the more chapters you add, the smaller the thumbnails get... so they fit on the menu page. This in my view is half ass backwards.

I agree with you that the thumbnails are too small and could take more advantage of the available screen space but I don’t follow the logic of your statement. There are only two options to get more stuff on a page and one is to make the page bigger (which is not an option) and the other is to make the stuff smaller, which DVDA does. How is this backwards? I think you were just complaining that DVDA makes them too small, which I agree with.

> the present method is a royal pain in the ass because you must change EACH thumbnail's size by hand

No you don’t. Grab the sizing tool, which is right next to the pointer in the toolbox and draw a rectangle around all the thumbnails. Now grab the lower right hand corner of the bounding box and resize all the thumbnails at once. Then move them to recenter them on the page. The text will grow and shrink accordingly so no touch up is needed. The whole thing takes about 4-6 seconds.

Hopefully this will save you a lot of tedious rework until SoFo gives us a way to control how much it shrinks thumbnails when placing multiple on a page. It would be nice if all the chapter thumbnails for the same movie were the same size regardless of how many fall on the last page.

~jr

Nope wrong again Johnny.

Try this...

I'll pick up where we've already created six chapters.

First problem is the sizing tool doesn't drag into the work space. It just sits there, you can't select it. That of course is because it expects you select at least one object first. OK, lets try selecting the first thumbnail. Alright, that puts the selection tool around the first little thumbnail. Drag a corner. As expected is doesn't effect anything but the first thumbnail you've selected. Drag a side handle, again it only effects the first thumbnail extending it out.

Next attempt click on each thumbnail in turn. Oh... finally, but wait, it ignores all the captions, they didn't move because they weren't selected. Worse the boudning box drawn for the thumbnails OVERLAPS the caption. The smaller the thumbnials the more of a problem it is to select everything. Oops, attempt four. Click on each thumnail, and be sure you also click on each caption also.

OK may work. Nope don't either. Why not? The smaller the thumbnails are the more likely the bounding box will overlap one or more captions. So to get all on one try is nearly impossible. During all this senseless dragging around one or more thumnails are no longer aligned. Try again, and again.

What's that you say... select all objects first? I did. Guess what, the selection tool overlaps the menu boundry if you attempt to select everything if you try to make the thumbnails as large as you want and you still have no control over spacing between thumbnails. Worse you can't get the bounding box back it bounds without more stumbling around.

Stupid with a captial S. Crude. Just more time wasted trying to grap all the thumbnails. And that was just with six thumbnails. Try grabbing eight or ten and their captions at one time without missing one or more or running into the Title and then needing to fiddle with that next to get it positioned.

Face it... BAD design. Very bad for a "professional" application. Totally lacks basic features. Everyone that knows says the same thing. This version of DVD-A is a miss. Shame. I used it for about six DVD's. Then went back to DVD Movie Factory. I like seceral of the features in DVD-A, but as it stands now it is badly broken and very clumsy to work with if you do anything beyond a very simple very basic menu.

> First problem is the sizing tool doesn't drag into the work space. It just sits there, you can't select it.

That’s not how it works on my copy of DVDA. I can do a region select with either the pointer or the sizing tool and then switch between them without any problem. Something is not right on your machine. You don’t drag the sizing tool. Simply select it and then click anywhere outside the thumbnails and draw a rectangle around them. You can then manipulate them all together.

Even if you have to select one thumbnail first, should be able to click on the upper left thumbnail and then Shift-Click on the lower right thumbnail caption to select all the thumbnails on a page. Worse case you can Ctrl-Click on each individual one. This is standard Windows behavior. I just tried this myself and all three methods work for me. I can size them outside the bounding box and then move them back in without any problems.

It sure sounds like you’re having a hard time with thumbnail layout so I’ve gotta accept that you just think it’s a dumb design. I’m OK with that. I just haven’t had the problems you’ve had with it. Perhaps I don’t have as many chapters as you.

~jr

What I think bothers some of us is Vegas is very well behaved in that you have almost unlimited control in not only what your project properties are, but also you have very good and easily changed control over HOW Vegas acts. For example in Vegas 4b under preferences/options there are literally dozens of variables you can easily control. Change once, they stay changed till YOU change them. As it should be. Not enough, you can access many other things through a simple keyboard combination that adds the edit tab to options and exponses many more things to "fiddle" with if you so desire. That's slick.

In contrast, DVD-A forces you to do some things ITS way, sometimes you can't do certain things or if there is a work around it often is clumsy or poorly explained or not explained at all.

Take chapter creation. A BIG reason many buy a DVD Authring package. While its easy to set chapters, the only "control" at the start of making the menu page is you have an option to say how many thumbnails appear per page. What's missing is a property box that sets the thumbnail size, the spacing between thumbnails, and where the first thumbnail should appear on the menu page and a way to overide the very annoying auto text feature that on its own can upset values you enter yourself. Also some of the options you now set per object or menu page could and should be also be able to be set once per project. Example the highlight type. Also a surprise is DVD-A "remembers" the last name you gave a menu page...even into the next project. So if you're working on "My Michigan Vacation", then stop and start to work on My Aunt Jane's Wedding, there is a menu page labeled from some page in the Vaction project which you need to rename over and over. Why it doesn't default back to simply "menu" I haven't a clue.

Its things like that and dozens of other little annoyances that bug you if you spend any time using DVD-A. Because unlike Vegas where you're free to be creative, with DVD-A you spend a LOT of time cleaning up after what DVD-A decides on its own.

What I would like to see is when you click on new (to start a new project) it brings up a much more detailed project propety list. Before you can do anything else you decide the basics which of course should be able to be overidden later if needed and also SAVED to start the next project as an option.

For example:

1. how many thumbnails per menu page?
2. what size thumbnails, spacing?
3. What font for titles, captions, text size, color?
4. What background audio for Main Menu page?
5. Highlight style?

And so on. While much of this can be accessed off to the right under the page and object tabs, its easy to forget on or more things and I think its better to set up initially, just like you need to tell Vegas frame size, rate, field order, etc..

About the templates, the font size that you specify is ignored and the font size is set to auto, regardless of the size you specify - even when you re-apply the template!

BillyBoy, I agree about the bad design, but there are some things that works - first select the view transform tool (Alt -3). Than use select the buttons and you can type the width/height that you want. And you can retype the same size on all pages.

Placement of the buttom, I usually work on one column/row first using the center horizontal/vertical and space across/down and than the allignment buttons.
It is too tedious, but it takes 1-2 minutes per page - not too bad.

Well the sizing tool far exceeds the boundries of the thumbnails, so you end up moving (selecting) much more than you intend to. Just playing with it I had a modest six thumnails. Placing the sizing tool around the six to make a group and turning on the grid system I have only three thumbnails across which allows ample margins. To do that (by dragging the sizing tool) the boundry drawn is now almost three grids ABOVE the top edge of the top row of thumbnails while the captions are almost 4 grids below. An awful look that you must change manually. It gets worse if you have more thumbnails. I've had up to eight per page at a decent size 142 x 160. To do that with the sizing tool moving them as a group I'm already out of bounds. Worse, if you do it from the scene selection menu the captions don't always get included even if you encircle them, probably because they seem to be on a different layer. Again, if you select one at a time, there is no visual clue you've slected all the text captions because the only clue you get is the boundy expanding. When working with a bunch of thumbnails they are too small and too close together as DVD-A initially presents them, so you have no way of knowiong if or not they are selected because of the huge extention of the boundy which can and does overlap rows.

I'm not new to using place holders or selecting objects as a group and moving them around. I've used desktop publishing software for many years where that method is common. I've NEVER seen any so inaccurate and DVD-A's! Why in the heck the selection tool doesn't stop at the top edge of the thumbnails or the sides or at best a pixel or two beyond I don't understand. Nothing I do changes the border space which is always way beyond the object I'm selecting. Why is that?

For example right now I've enlarged one thumbnail. Using the selection tool and selecting only this one thumbnail the boundy is now at least half as wide as the thumbnail itself on both the top and bottom. In other words if the thumbnail is 100 pixels high, the selection tool now places a boundy about 50 pixel above and below the thumbnail with a similar distance to each side. So I'm not moving a thumbnail thats 100 pixels high, I'm forced to move a space almost 200 pixels high! The bigger I make the thumnails the greater the boundy border gets from the thumbnail. CRAZY! Worse, again, the captions seem to float on their own if again I don't again surround it when selecting the thumbnail you again need to reposition.

Perhaps what’s needed is a way to interpret the template literally. Just an option to turn off auto adjust of everything so that if the template specifies a certain font size or 6 thumbnails per page, that’s what you get. This is how DVD Movie Factory works and at least it produces consistent results.

~jr