Motion Menu the better way

Part 2: Motion Thumbnail and Motion Background.

The Render Motion tool can work of course with more than one thumbnail. You can also include an existing motion background in the final clip.

In this Part we will replace the current static background with a short 5 sec animated background. Such pre-made backgrounds are part of various video clip-arts.

Then open the animated background clip in the Assets and you can then directly drag it to the menu we created in Part 1.

This is our motion menu created in Part 1. Static background and one motion thumbnail.	We drag the Smoky animated clip from the assets directly to the menu which automatically stretch to the whole screen.	The blue color of the background doesn't really fit in so we simply added this bitmap to menu (Created in Real-DRAW) and stretched it to the whole size of menu.	Then we moved the new bitmap object to the bottom, set No drop shadow and slide the transparency to middle.

Note: We added the Smoky clip as menu motion background. We could of course add it also as the first clip - as a Video still by dragging it to Preview and from preview to menu.

Now run the Render Motion again.

Repeat if Shorter.
Here is one interesting part. We would like to have 10 sec. clip, but our smoky background is only 5 sec. What we would like to do is to repeat the background. For this we have Repeat if Shorter check box. If you don't set it, then after 5 sec. the rest of the background clip would remain still showing the last frame. If you set it then the background will repeat (loop) within the 10 sec. result clip.

Above is a graphical explanation of this.

Now we have two objects , the motion background (our smoky) and the Video Still.	The Background is by default not included in the final clip so we have to check the "Render this object..." We want the smoky clip loop, so we check Repeat if Shorter.	You have to set the desired Start Point for the Video Still as well.	Now we can render the movie.

As previously, we need to encode the finished AVI to MPEG2, add it to the Assets and then drag it to the menu, replacing the current motion background (the smoky) with this combined clip.

Here not only the thumbnail moves, but also a background changes (thanks to the semitransparent bitmap overlay it is just as the background should be-subtle)

In this step we learned how to combine Video Still and motion background and how to use Repeat if Shorter option.

See the next page for Part 3..