Motion Menu the better way

Part 3: Motion Thumbnails for Scene Selection Menus

This is where it all comes together. First we have to create scene selection menus. This is of course trivial task.

First make sure the movie we would like to use has created chapters.

Select Add Scene Selection menus from the Wizard button. Of course you can create your selection menu manually by using Insert Chapter still tool in menu, but here it is faster using wizard.

Now choose the Template.

Depending on a number of chapters one or more selection menus will be created.

Here is the created menu. The template is done such way so the links are on a frame on top of the Video Stills. Now, use Render Motion tool.	The Render Motion tool is smart enough to pickup links from the frames and attach it to each video still. Because the links already links to a chapter, the Render Motion will already set the Start Point to the chapter point.	The start point is already pre-set but we can still adjust it a bit for example to go pass the titles.	When all is set, 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, adding it as a motion background to the menu. If we have more than one scene menu we have to generate the motion for each.

Here we go, we should have the first complete motion menu.

Shuffle Loop Point, virtually seamless looping

When you play the motion menu, it will loop. So every Total Clip Time (for example 10 sec) you will see a jump in all the thumbnails since the last frame of any thumbnail will change back to the first frame.

See the image below.

You see on the picture all the thumbnails will have the loop point at exactly the same time when the menu loops. The effect is a bit annoying and quite visible.

DVD-lab has an unique "Shuffle loop point "option to fix this "problem".
What it does is that each thumbnail with Shuffle loop point checked will offset its playback to have the loop point in different time than others.

See the image below.

You can see from the image above that when menu loops none of the thumbnails will be in a loop point by itself. Since each thumbnail will loop in a different time the effect is that you can't visually tell during playback when the menu loop occurs. It appear as if the menu is looping seamlessly.

How to set Shuffle.

What you need to do is to set for each thumbnail the Shuffle loop point.

It can be done quite easy. Instead of selecting the motion object and then setting the checkbox you can just click twice in the space between the check mark and text on the Motion Objects list box.

You need to click twice, first time the Repeat if Shorter is set, second time the Shuffle loop point is set etc....

Then Render the motion again. This time when you play the menu in a loop you will be not really able to tell when the looping occurs.

As you can see there is a lot of freedom building motion menus. You can for example combine this with the FilmStrip menu where the thumbnail in center is in motion while the others not selected are still.