Now it's perhaps time to have a look at the navigation programming overview. Double click on Connections in the project window:
As you can see, the disc starts out with the root menu, where you get to choose from my two movies. Then there's one main menu for each movie, with the Smallville one having an audio track. Both movie menus allow you to play the movie.
As it is now, playing a movie is a dead end. The user has to press the Title button to get back to the main menu and there's no automatic return to a menu after the movie has played. We'll change that in a bit.
Wouldn't it be nice to have some kind of motion transition between the menus DVD-lab has a bunch of built-in templates to achieve this. To get to these templates, press the wizard wand button, then select Menu Transition...
Then you can select the effect and the menus affected.
This example shows how a transition between the main menu and the main menu for the movie Phantoms is achieved.
There are 38 different transition templates, and you can additional determine the speed of the transition using the Hold A, Transition and Hold B parameters. Hold A indicates how long the original menu is shown before the transition starts, Transition indicates the length of the transition effect, and Hold B indicates how long the new menu is shown in the transition, before the player actually switches to the menu page.
When you press Proceed, DVD-lab will encode the transition, import the movie asset and automatically create the proper links if a link between the From and To menu already exists.
If you go back to the connections, you'll see a circle symbol in the link from the main menu to the movie menus.
As you can see, the chapter menu is already there, but pay no attention to this, we'll create that shortly.
Also note how the movie now has a link (the black one) back to the menu. You can create such a link by selecting the Draw Links button, then drag and drop from the circle on the right side of the movie to the menu page.
In case you did not have a menu link defined when creating the transition video, you'll have to insert a blank menu page, add the drag and drop the transition video item to the menu, link the menu button in the start menu to go to the transition menu, and create an end of play link to the motion menu to go to the menu page you want the transition to lead to, using the same mechanism as when linking from the movie back to the menu.
If you change your menus, the transition menus become outdated. To save you some work, you can simply right click on the transition symbol and select Rebuild Transition.
To finalize our menus, let's create a nice animated chapter selection menu:
As previously explained, you can add thumbnails from the actual movie using the thumbnails button (that's the lowermost button to the left of a menu page) and selecting the appropriate chapter. Then you link the thumbnails to the appropriate chapters as you'd link any other button.
A note on that: Doing it that way will make the entire thumbnail a button. If you'd prefer to have a border around the thumbnail, which constitutes the button (so the area around a thumbnail would be selected rather than the image itself), you should create a non filled rectangle and use it as button.
Okay, so far we have a standard non animated menu. Now this is where the magic begins. From the wizard menu select Render Motion Menu...
In this screen, you once again see a preview of what you're getting. Motion Objects are all items that can be animated. In our case, we have 4 movie thumbnails representing the first frame of a chapter.
In Global Settings you can indicate how long the menu animation lasts. As it is configured now, the menu will loop after 10 seconds.
If you were to uncheck Render this object in the final clip, then the currently selected object (also shown with a red border in the preview area), would not be animated.
GO HOME
