HomePage 8 of 9: Finishing Up
Step 6: Finishing Up
We will now polish up the menus by adding transitions and other special effects.
Go back to the "Connections" window. If you had multiple audio tracks or a subtitle track, then you might want to have a special language/setup screen to select your audio track/subtitles. It's actually not that much different from any other menu, except when you right click on the object to do the linking, you need to choose the "Set Audio" or "Set Subtitle" option and choose one of the options plus an action after selection (eg. to return back to the setup menu, or to go to the main menu).
DVD-lab Pro also includes a built-in plug-in for generating an audio selection menu quickly and easily.
You can also add menu transitions. This adds an animation when going from one menu to another, to make the transition look fancier. It's strictly optional of course, but it adds a touch of class to your menus. To add transitions, you can right click anywhere in the "Connections" window and select "Transitions" -> "Generate New".
This opens up the "Create New Transition" window. First select which transition you want to create (from which menu to which other menu, obviously, make sure it is possible to go from this menu to the other menu). Select one of the transition types - the animation shown will give you an example of what the transition will look like. There is also the "Timing" settings. A and B refers to the two menus. "Hold A" refers to how long menu A will be shown in the animation before the transition beings - similarly for "Hold B". The actual transition length is specified by "Transition" (so total transition length is Hold A + Transition + Hold B). Press "Proceed" to create the transition and save it as a M2V file, and when it's done, the transition will be automatically added to the "Connections" window and will show up as a circular icon. A note about transitions and motion menus - if you had an intro effect for the motion menu, then the transition and intro might not fit well together (for example, the transition to the chapters menu will transition to a menu that has all the chapter thumbnails in place, whereas the intro to that menu will have those thumbnails coming in from the top - these two animations then aren't continuous and will look a bit weird). It's probably best to have only one of either, a transition or a motion menu, but not both unless you are sure the two effects will blend in nicely.
Repeat the above for every transition you want to make. Remember that if you change the menu, then you will have to generate the transition again, as it's not automatically updated. You can right click anywhere in the "Connections" window, select "Transitions" -> "Rebuild All" to rebuild all transitions.
Now you will notice on some DVDs that when you press the "Menu" button when playing the main movie, it will go back to the main menu, but instead of having a "Play Movie" button, you have a "Resume Movie" button. There is a special kind of link called "Resume" which can make this work. Placing a "Resume" link on the main menu itself will mean that the movie won't play the first time you select "Play Movie". So the solution is to create a copy of the main menu that is opened when you press the "Menu" button during a movie, which has the "Resume" button instead of a "Play Movie" button. The "Chapters" button still links to the chapters, so once you go into the chapter menus, the resume function is lost (the solution to this would then be to create a copy of all the chapters menus too, but adding a "resume movie" button to each menu page). Once you have created the copy, change the "Play Movie" link (currently linked to chapter 1, the movie start) to "Resume Movie". Go back to the "Connections" window and change the "Menu button (on remote)" setting of the main movie to point to this copy of the Main Menu (which I have named the "Resume Menu"). DVD-lab Pro should detect this kind of link structure and make your "Resume Menu" to have a "Self (RSM)" property for the "Menu button (on remote)" setting, but if it hasn't, you should change the setting for the "Resume Menu" to this.
This is what my "Connections" now look like:
