Designing background videos for menus

[JohnnyO]

For motion menu backgrounds, I used to just get a small video clip from my video and have it play.

I was never satisfied with how that looked.

For the last couple of DVDs I used a different method that looks great.

I create the background in my video editor.

I first find a nice photo. Usually a landscape of something from the video I made. Sometimes you can use clip art backgrounds. This is the background of the video.

Then I find a photo with usually my family in it. The proto sis always of people that are the main folks in the video. I use PSE to select just the people inthe photo, and in the end I have the people against a transparent background.

I add this people photo to my video over the background. Then I keyframe the people photo to move into the video and over the background. You can do whatever you want to animate this photo. For the background, it is usually still. But last time I used a panaroma which was slowly panning in the backround. That looked really nice too.

I also add my titles to the video, as well as backround music. I use MEP 15 plus as my video editor and it has really fantastic animated 3D title templates.

During the design of this small video, I need to keep in mind where the menu buttons will go and leave appropriate space for them. I always have a main menu with a sub menu in my suthoring of the videos. The main menu for my videos is usually just two text buttons. A' Play Movie' button and a 'scene selection' button.

My sub-menus contain chapter buttons which have an animated thumbnails.

So I need a different sub-menu background to work with the sub-menus.

Try this technique if you have time. It really does not take too much time to create these menu video backgrounds once you get the hang of it, and it really makes the menus look great. I am very happy with my menu backgrounds.

[momoffduty]

Thanks for the write up! Will have to try this out. I quit using video clips for the menu background because it didn't look very good, not clear. Wonder why it doesn't look the same as in the project.

[Steve Grisetti]

Great ideas, Johnny!

[Bobby]

Thanks for the write up! Will have to try this out. I quit using video clips for the menu background because it didn't look very good, not clear. Wonder why it doesn't look the same as in the project.

Interesting Cheryl - I use video clips all the time as menu backgrounds. Are you using PRE or DVDAS or ??? to generate the menus? My experience is with DVDAS.

[momoffduty]

Bobby, used the clips as backgrounds in PrEl3 and the clip looked poor. I still use thumbnails in PrEl & Encore.

[Bobby]

Bobby, used the clips as backgrounds in PrEl3 and the clip looked poor. I still use thumbnails in PrEl & Encore.

Yes, forgot you were an Encore user, but I would think that Encore would handle video menu backgrounds properly.

[Chuck Engels]

It is very easy to add a video background in Encore.