Creating The Thumbnail Menus
Let us take a look at the DVD Menu creation screen:
I have marked 5 Areas:
A - Select a predefined Menu from here using the drop down list box
B - The Menu Preview Area
C - Menu paging controls where there are more chapters than thumbnails
D - Select Either the Main Menu or a Chapter Menu
E - Preview the Menu
Predefined Menus
I have written a guide
here about how to share menus from other Ulead programs
I have written another guide
here about how to create a DVD menu from scratch with PhotoImpact
Another forum member has written a guide
here about how to customize an existing menu with PhotoImpact
The menus are catalogued into various groups of predefined themes such as sports, holidays, business etc. The main thing to consider though when choosing a menu is the number of thumbnails contained on that menu.
In our project we have 9 videos and so we will need 9 thumbnails.
We can either choose a menu with 9 thumbnails and so everything fits on one page, or suppose we chose a menu with 3 thumbnails, we would have a menu comprising of 3 pages.
You need to take into account that the more pages that your DVD menu contains, the more disc space is used. The amount of disc space used will vary according to a number of factors such as motion backgrounds, motion thumbnails, background music and the duration of the menu before it loops back to the start.
You have to balance the number of thumbnails/pages against the amount of clutter that can occur if you have too many thumbnails on one page.
For the technically minded when you create a DVD menu, in fact you create a short video that resembles a menu. Superimposed upon that video are hotspots. These hotspots are your 'buttons' when you press the up, down, left or right keys on a DVD control pad you are moving from one hotspot to another.
These hotspots can be made to alter their colour or transparency when in a highlighted or selected state. Certain DVD menus also have what are termed 'highlight images' - what happens here is that when a hotspot is selected, another (nearby) area is highlighted to signify which 'button' is active.
The Menu Preview Area
In this area we can also make various alterations.
To alter the Text double click it and then you can alter or replace the text.
Compare the following picture to the one above:
The menu I have created so far does not need the page 1/1 at the lower left - it would be required if there was more than 1 page. So we will hide this item by right clicking it to bring up a dialog box:
Here you will see an option to Hide Item.
The background is somewhat plain and so we will replace it with something else. We do this by selecting the [EDIT] tab
You will now see that you have options to alter the background music
alter the background image or even insert a background video.
Here you can see I have chosen a two tone blue background and I have also used the hide method to remove the overlay at the bottom of the screen.
The problem now though is the text colour is unsuitable for this background. I am going to alter the text colour by holding down the [SHIFT] key and clicking each item of text so that they are all selected.
The right click to bring up a dialog box and this time select 'Font Attributes'. This in turn brings up another dialog box where I am able to change the text size, colour and font.
Doing this the Title has also adopted the font size of the Thumbnail text, and so this time I will select just the title text, right click and then alter the font size accordingly. Whilst the text is selected you can also move the text using either the mouse or the keyboard arrow keys.
Here is my completed 'Main Menu' for our project:
Matching the duration of the audio to the duration of the Menu
If we preview or create the DVD as it currently stands then the chances are that the audio will be abruptly cut off as the DVD menu loops back to the start. Obviously this will detract from the overall effect and so we must co-ordinate the two durations.
Take a look at this screenshot:
Just below the [EDIT] tab and to the right of the words 'Background Music' you will see a small button. You can also see on this screenshot that the duration of the motion menu has been set to 20 seconds. Remember how I said that the DVD Menu will in fact be a short video with hotspots. When the video reaches the end it starts playing again from the beginning.
Now if the audio is of a different length - too short and you run out of sound or too long and the sound gets suddenly cut off - this will obviously spoil the Menu.
Click the [Set audio Properties] button and you will see this screen:
You can see from my screenshot that the audio I had selected lasts for 31.51 Seconds but my Menu is set to 20. You have controls to mark in and mark out a section of the audio.
There are also buttons at the bottom left of the dialog box to apply a fade in / fade out effect.
You have to repeat this process for each of the chapter menus.
TV & Title Safe Areas
You will notice a yellow square all around the edge of the menu. This will not appear on the final DVD, it is in fact a guideline. Although you will see this entire menu on a computer monitor, a TV screen behaves differently the edges of the video disappear off the edge of the TV screen.
Here are a few links describing the TV Safe Area:
Link One
Link Two
Link Three
Other Menu Modifications
Following the above steps I have so far introduced you to the following modifications:
1. Alter the background picture or include a motion background video.
2. Add or alter a background soundtrack.
3. Alter the colour, font and size of text.
4. Alter the wording of text.
Take another look at the bottom of this picture previously shown above
You will see a customize button.
clicking this brings up another screen where you are now able to alter the style of frames, buttons and the layout.
Here I have selected the Frame Option from the drop down list and clicked the heart shape - see how all of the thumbnails have now changed.
You can also choose different layouts:
And different navigation buttons:
You can select the objects and move them and even rotate them
You can then save your self styled menu as a template for future use.
Chapter Menus
Below the Preview screen is a drop down box. Use this to select the chapter menus.
So that we can demonstrate the use of chapters we will create chapters at 2 minute intervals for each of the following Videos:
1 - Getting to Know VideoStudio.................................8:39
3 - Adding Transitions.................................................6:50
8 - Sharing Your Movie.................................................7:10.
We then modify the chapter menus in the same way that we modified the main (root) menu. I suggest that you maintain the same style throughout so that the whole DVD has a co-coordinated look and feel to it. Where possible use the same background image/video, background sound, font size, colour etc.
Think of how the DVD menus look when you purchase a commercial one.
It is worth spending some time developing a pleasing DVD Menu because
First impressions count.
Give someone a copy of your latest DVD masterpiece and the first thing they see (other than perhaps the first play video if one has been included) is your DVD menu. One look at the DVD menu has in many cases made up that persons mind as to whether the forthcoming video is going to be worth watching or not.
Here are my completed menus for this project: