Making A More Creative Menu

The purpose of this tutorial is more to INSPIRE your creative process so you experiment and push the envelope a little. With just a littler effort and some practice you can make far from ordinary menu pages. While DVD Architect comes with several templates and also a means to make your own using XML there are other probably simpler ways to liven things up. I'll give some hints on a few ways to approach it using some other applications you probably already have in combination with Vegas and DVD-A.

One quick way to spice up your menu pages is to add some textured background. There are several ways to do that some more involved than others. A quick short cut is to use something you may already have like your CD/DVD labeling application and borrow a design using a screen capture utility. I used Sure Thing CD Labeler Deluxe since it comes with over a thousand pre made templates, many with good designs suitable for general background creation. I simply captured a small area, brought it into Photoshop via copy/paste then pasted the pattern several times filling in the image. From there you can take it many steps further. I'll explain some of the simpler ideas in this tutorial. You don't have to use Photoshop, any of the popular graphic programs should be able to do pretty much the same thing with minor variations in how you go about it. Also what follows is similar to a building a tiered wedding cake. You can stop after just doing the first step, go to the end or beyond with your own ideas or stop somewhere in the middle. In fact that's the whole idea. You'll create simple building blocks you can use over and over with minor variations to make almost a limitless assortment of interesting backgrounds.

Assumptions

I make DVD's mostly for the NTSC standard. If you live in PAL land modify as necessary. The background image I'll be making conforms to the suggested frame size of 655x480 which is what you want for a typical DVD to be played on a 4/3 ratio (old style) none LCD or Plasma television. So when its time to open your graphics application that's the 'new file' size I used, adjust as necessary along with the other steps if you're using a different frame size. To make it easier to follow along you should have at least three or four projects ready to render, and of course copies of Vegas and DVD Architect.

Making a Textured Background

Open your target background in your application of choice (I used Sure Thing CD Labeler Deluxe) then capture a small area using any screen capture utility. The first step is just copying the capture over and over until you fill the frame.

Image at left shows it partially finished. Depending on the pattern you choose you may wish to flip some of the capture either on the vertical axis or flip left and right in some places to better blend the pattern. Use blur if necessary to hide the seams. Once you have the pattern fully filling the image, use your application's merge or combine tool or just flatten to end up with a single one layer image. Since it is a background you may wish to soften it a bit further again applying some soft blur to the whole image.

Creating Thumbnail backgrounds and placeholders

Next we'll use Photoshop's Elliptical Marquee tool to draw some ellipses. Draw as many as you have videos that are going to be on a single DVD on its main menu page. Remember not to get too close to the edges when setting the positions of the placeholders to avoid having your artwork cut off when viewed on a television due to the overscan issue. To dress things up a bit more I set the foreground and background colors to colors in the pattern then used the Gradient tool to add some variation within the placeholders. This is where you can have some fun and add many more effects like lighting effects, drop shadows, more texture or borders, whatever strikes you. When you're happy save as a JPEG or your use your favorite file format. Also save the Photoshop file so you can modify it at a later time. While I was at it I made several variations just by using the Color Balance tool to quickly get different hues. You could also use curves or just adjust the hue and or saturation settings.

The letters A-B-C-D represent the positions where your thumbnails of videos will go on the main DVD-A menu page. Try to visualize the actual frame from your vids. Open DVD Architect. Use its Media Explorer to locate the background image you just created. Drag it up into the work area, you should see a red border, let it go. The image should fill the frame completely.

Locate the source file you wish to place in position A. Position it roughly in place over position A. It doesn't matter if its already rendered as a MPEG-2 in Vegas or will be rendered in DVA-A later. Click on the object tab selecting video A. Check enable frame on the object tab at the right of the work space. Click on the little arrow next to the image icon and scroll down to near the bottom and pick the borderless oval design. Adjust size of thumbnail so it fits nicely inside the placeholder. Repeat steps for placeholders B-C-D. Add whatever else you wish to have on the main menu page like a title at the top.

Putting it All Together

Use your Screen Capture application to take a screen shot of the completed Menu page and again save as a JPEG or whatever you prefer. Before you take the screen shot you should have dropped in all your videos with a thumbnail now positioned in each of the placeholders.

Be sure you align the captured area well prior to actually capturing the capture so you don't end up with any area either outside the menu area or cut off any of the top, bottom or sides or you'll need to repair in Vegas with pan/crop.

As I mentioned in a thread in the forum the other day if you plan ahead, once you know for sure what the first few seconds of each video is going to look like and you know for sure you won't change it you can save just that portion as a mini-project (it will only be a few seconds long) which then can be used to build what we have so far by TEMPORALLY using it as the source for each placeholder. Or just capture a single frame and that image becomes the source to create the capture of the "finished" menu page. Remember, at this point your DVD project isn't finished, just that you're doing what you need to complete the finished menu to add the effect.

If you just want to add this effect to a project you already rendered you'll need to add the menu page capture plus the few seconds of transition at the head of each of your videos. I hope I'm making this rather hard to explain part with just words clear enough to follow.

This revised page now includes four different menu transition demos. Normally of course you'd just pick one for the whole page.

The first is a button click (highlighted) combined with a page peel. To do this little trick just duplicate the track and use our old friend the cookie cutter filter. All that's necessary is to resize the filter to match one of the thumbnail buttons, then position over it. To add a little more drama I added some brightness and contrast to make the first button stand out to roughly simulate a roll over. For the second selection I used the cross zoom transition alone since it has plenty of animation already. On the third button I picked a simple Linear wipe, the fourth the Squeeze Down transition.

What I was trying to get across is by using this type of method where you transition from the menu page of the DVD rather than simply doing transitions in Vegas alone from one video scene to the next you always have the transition changing from the menu page you design, which adds more realism.

Once you build the menu page in DVD-A cross-fade it with each video you plan on putting on the DVD, overlapping the menu image with the actual start of each video then adding your favorite transition. I just scratched the surface, many more transitions are possible and you can further animate the menu selection too. Finally finish rendering like you always do and when its times to finish your project in DVD-A, of course you'll use the full video for each placeholder replacing the still image or mini vid.

The Top Right Medium Page Peel for the effect for the first button is probably my favorite because you see the "back" of the menu page peeling off. While it takes a little time and planning the final result looks better transitioning from the menu button you clicked revealing the start of your video as a transition by either peeling, rotating on a cube, or cutting across on a diagonal or whatever transition you decide to use. Kind of a cool effects, and of course you can take it far beyond these fairly simple methods.