Creating Video for Motion Menus
The video used for motion menus must follow the same DVD-compliance rules as video
used in tracks. There are a few additional considerations you should be aware of:
• If you add any shapes, text items, or drop zones to a menu, the menu will be rendered
when you build the project. See
About Menu Rendering
for more information.
Important:
If you know your menus will need to be rendered, you should avoid using
highly compressed video (MPEG-2 for example) as the background video because it
will get compressed again, potentially with visible artifacts.
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Chapter 6
Preparing Menu Assets
• If you want to include button art beyond the capabilities of what an overlay can provide,
you need to edit these over the video with an application such as Motion or
Final Cut Pro. You can create the button art and associated overlay with your graphics
program, then superimpose the button art over the video with your video editor, and
use the overlay in DVD Studio Pro to set up the buttons.
Note: An alternative is to use shapes to provide buttons over motion video.
• You can set the video to loop once it reaches its end. There will be a short pause in the
playback as the menu moves from the end back to the beginning. This can be minimized
or eliminated by carefully selecting the video to use. For example, a car driving by a
mostly static background can be looped cleanly. If you are creating an animation for
use as the background, be sure to keep looping in mind.
• Don’t create excessively long video for motion menus. The videos can take up a lot of
disc space, and if you use a lot of them, you can have problems building your title. See
Standard SD DVD Video Zone Files
for menu size limitations.
• Menus in SD projects can only use full-frame MPEG-2 video as a background. If you use
an MPEG-1, 1/2 D1 MPEG-2, or a cropped D1 MPEG-2 file as the background, it will be
encoded to full D1 MPEG-2 when you build the project. Menus in HD projects can use
either full D1 MPEG-2 video or any of the supported HD video resolutions as the
background.