Menus for DVD

[Suzanne]

I'm pretty frustrated. I'd like some really 'professional-looking' menus on my DVD's, but I only have enough money for a program like PowerDirector 3. That program has an automated menu producer, but there are no options as to placement etc. and the menus are pretty amateurish!
I'd love to do my own, but don't have a clue where to start. I also use PaintShop Pro 8, and can do lots of graphics stuff with that, but haven't any idea how to make those buttons on the menu activate!

Any help would be so appreciated!

[Crusty]

Hi Suzanne. I understand your frustration.

First, the buttons don't really exist. They are something your authoring program puts or merges on the background to make a new picture. For every little change you see on the DVD menu, the authoring program has created a complete stand-alone image.

When the DVD user/viewer 'presses' a controlbutton or moves the 'hot spot' to a button, all the DVD player is doing is switching very fast between a selection of complete still pictures and if the pictures have been made correctly, it appears as if the buttons have been 'pushed' or selected. The reason it's done this way is the early DVD players were pretty stupid, no powerful microprocessors or huge amount of ram, so the DVD standards engineers created specs that imposed very special DVD formatting and structuring that allowed a relatively dumb piece of electronics to do the great job intended. This places a lot of responsibility on the DVD author. There are some 'professional' DVDs still being created with errors, so don't feel bad if you have troubles too.

Some authoring programs give much better control over every aspect of a menu and it can be a very tedious process to make a complete suite of menues for a complex DVD, but you are in total control of it's every aspect. I use DVD-Lab, which isn't as complete as the top of the line authoring programs that cost many thousands of dollars, but it's a lot cheaper, $99.

Some simpler authoring programs offer a good selection of 'canned' menu designs and will allow some customization. It's a good idea to examine the program's folders for where the button/background images are stored. With any luck they will be .jpg, .png and/or .gif types. This would allow PSP8 to make new ones or modify existing ones.

[Suzanne]

Thank you, Crusty, for your help
I downloaded a trial version of DVD Lab, and I'm pretty impressed with it. However, nowhere did it say that it was a limited version so I'm a bit puzzled by the "out of memory' message that pops up and then I am no longer able to save the project or go any further. I don't really think I am out of memory as I have a pretty powerful system. Consequently I don't know if it's the program or some other problem and I surely don't want to purchase this program if it won't work on my machine!
I have 18.6 G left on my main hard drive "C" partion. The "E" partition that I am using for my video work has 14.4 G left on it. CPU is Pentium 4 - 2.41GHz, 1.0 GB of RAM.
I would be very appreciative of any help anyone can offer.

[Crusty]

Well, I'm checking their forum for anyone else reporting this error and so far I don't seen anything. http://www.mmbforums.com/
I'm assuming the version you downloaded was the 1.31 version and not the latest Beta test release.

Does this error happen after you've added a lot of movies (assets)? Are you demuxing to elemental video and audio files? If so, that may be chewing up a lot of disk space.

I'm stuck with Win98SE and FAT32 disk format, so I have to be sure my movie files are less than 4 gig at all times. DVDLAB makes some temporary files when it 'compiles' the DVD and may run out of disk space on large projects.

It may be worth while posting a query on their forum about this, because I can't recreate it here on my setup.