DVD Studio Pro 3: In the Studio

Quick Motion Buttons

Another quick way to get some dynamic content into your DVDSP projects is to use video assets directly for your buttons. You've actually done something quite similar when working with the templates in Chapter 1. You can do the same work in DVDSP with your own custom backgrounds.

Adding motion video buttons

Let's make another quick-and-dirty test menu to prove how easy it is to incorporate your own video buttons.

Motion video button demonstration

Start a new project and grab the following files from the projects/ch04 folder:

• castle_tours_scaled.psd

• cawdor.m2v

• cawdor.AC3

• holyrood.m2v

• holyrood.AC3

• urquhart.m2v

• urquhart.AC3

Then, perform the following steps:

1. Create a New Menu. Use the castle_tours_scaled.psd file for the background of a standard menu (not a layered menu). Then, use the property sheet to turn on the background layer. See Figure 4-24 for an example. Notice that you don't have any buttons now. That's just fine.

   

   Figure 4-24. Setting up the background for the motion button menu

2. Create a Video Button. Grab the holyrood.m2v asset and drag it over to the menu. Choose the Create Button and Track option, as shown in Figure 4-25.

   

   Figure 4-25. Creating a motion button (and video track)

   Voilà! You should have a video button. We moved ours into position along the right side and ended up with the menu you see in Figure 4-26. The default size is based on the video's aspect ratio. You can resize it as you want. DVDSP will scale and crop the video to fill the button while keeping the video's aspect ratio intact.

   

   Figure 4-26. A video button

3. Add Video Buttons for the Other Tracks. As you add the other tracks you can reposition them in the menu. DVDSP will highlight alignment points with other objects in the menu. If you want, you also can steal some of the audio from one of the castles for the entire menu to utilize. The menu's property sheet will enable you to choose which segment of the music you want to loop. It also sets the duration shared by all the other buttons. These properties are highlighted in Figure 4-27.

   

   Figure 4-27. Setting an overall audio file on a menu with video buttons

   You can use the property sheets for the individual buttons to select which video segment is seen in the menu loop (see Figure 4-28). As noted before, the menu properties determine the button loop's duration (refer back to Figure 4-27).

Figure 4-28. Picking the starting point for your button loop