I need help making DVD menus!

I want to make a DVD for my upcoming movie: legend of the black dragon, but I can’t find any DVD creation programs which are free to try and have the flexibility I need.(Motion menus, customizable menus, and other stuff). Does anyone know of a good DVD authoring program which is free to try out? (well, besides nero that is, I’ve tried it, and the menu utility isn’t powerful enough. All it lets you do Is add options to a basic template menu, and select the font) HELP?! :o

Heh… if you don’t mind doing practically everything by hand, you can always try out dvdauthor.

What do the pros use? And what about subtitles? I need the following in my movie:

  • Subtitles
  • Scene selection
  • Chapters
  • Custom Menus
  • Special features (Making of, short features, trailer, stuff like that)
  • and anything else I can’t think of right now

Oh, and that DvD author thing looks almost impossible, heh :stuck_out_tongue: :o

Pros? Depends on who you talk to. I’ve heard of some using in-house tools or building it by hand. Of course, there are the high-end DVD authoring apps.

Some of the better DVD authoring software out there right now for the PC are Sonic Scenarist, Adobe Encore, and Pinnacle DVD Studio. Of course, there’s also DVD Studio Pro in Mac land. Most software beneath those have arbirary limits to customization (like those you’ve already encountered)… but easier use. The apps I listed above aren’t exactly super-easy to learn… and they’re not cheap either. The advantage of dvdauthor is that it gives you the full level of customibility at the cost of learning and understanding exactly how dvds work (and no GUI). Everything you listed is entirely possible totally for free in this app… it’s just not for the faint of heart. You won’t find (or, at least, I haven’t found) all of those features that you’re looking for in a low cost commercial app… and certainly not for dvdauthor’s price.

Hope that was informative. I have more links and info if you’re interested in more techincal information regarding dvd stuff.

Not impossible, just a lot closer to the metal than most people are used to. Just a little XML and some basic encoder knowledge and you can do it.all. :wink:

Well thank you, Fweeb. I will try out that small app you suggested.

Rock. Feel free to contact me if you ever need any help.

dvdauthor Looks like the right choice for me - cheap sucker for punishment :wink:

I have a question though which may seam stupid to the well informed : ?

I don’t have a DVD writer yet as I have not need for it right now. But, If I write a CD-R with the files encoded like a DVD (mp2 with vobs etc) , will the average DVD player see it as a DVD playable and play it like a DVD even though it will have a much shorter playing time?

As far as I know, no.

If the stuff I’ve read is correct, since DVDs are more dense (data-wise) than CDs, they are read differently. I could be wrong, but I’d guess that the dvd media triggers the read mechanism (one for DVD, one for CD)… and I think the CD read mechanism doesn’t understand DVD.

Another possibility is the fact that a number of modern commercial DVD players natively support MPEG-1. You could encode your movies to that and burn them to a CD like you would any other data CD and then put it in a DVD player that supports MPEG-1. You should be able to browse through the CD filesystem and watch the movie. Of course, YMMV.

You can have a better quality with the SVCD format that lets you burn your CD with MPEG-2 files, you’ll get a 35mn time for your work on one CD.

YAYA

Good call, YAYA… I totally forgot about that.

You might checkout DVDLab.

Thanks, but I already have a demo of Adobe Encore.

Other than DVD Architect from Sony and DVDLab you will have a
hard time finding more features in any package that is under many
thousands of dollars per seat. There simply are not any other tools.

That being said, I know that DVD Architect 2, which went on sale
yesturday, can do sub-titles, motion menus, scene selection menus
and chapters. It includes Vegas for about $580 last time I checked.
It can do a few things that Encore can’t. But you can’t do Scenarist type ultra-complex menus with it. No software can and making
those ultra complex menus takes lots of skill, lots of testing and lots
of man power. You might want to adjust your goals to fit the tools
available to you.

As Potatophysi said, check out DVD-Lab. The Pro version (currently in Beta and with a 30-day fully functional demo) is US $199 and you can easily create extremely complex menu systems. It also supports subtitles, scene selection (and can automatically create scene selection menus using a template, and you can completely customize the template), custom menus, motion menus, transitions between menus, etc.

For the hard-core DVD author, you can also go in and edit the DVD structure directly and do anything that’s possible to do with a DVD (assuming you have the hard-core knowledge to go along with it).

The only thing still missing (IMHO) is multi-angle support, and this is coming down the line (and if you have the hard-core knowledge you can do it).

Here’s an unofficial DVD specification for those of you in this boat. :wink:

Seriously, though, it’s a good read for anyone interested in authoring DVDs… it gives you a good idea of why some authoring apps have seemingly arbitrary behavior.

What exactly does DVD lab have that encore doesnt? because encore has support for subtitles, multiple languages, scene selections, chapters, motion menus, and all that other great stuff! :smiley:

I don’t have or use Encore, so I can’t answer that question as completely as I’d like. It looks like Encore and DVD-Lab are pretty close in features. One difference is the cost. Encore is US $549, vs. $199 for DVD-Lab Pro. And if you don’t need the features in DVD-Lab Pro (multiple audio channels, subtitles, more hard-core features) then DVD-Lab standard is only US $99.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that DVD-Lab is better than Encore or any other high-end authoring program. There are better ones out there. Just not at this price point. IMHO of course.