I have just finished a video from my vacation in Disney World in August. For the first time, I used AVCHD Lite video instead of video from my mini-DV camcoeder. I used MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 15 plus for the video editing becuse it supports that format.
When I made the video, I did it in segments divided by theme. Each segment was really its own chapter.(themes divided by theme park, resort we stayed in, etc.)
Because I have an older computer, 2.8GHz, Pentium 4 HT, I needed to use proxy editing. It worked out great. I edited with a quality video and replacing the low quality video with the high def AVCHD lite when finished. I put all the segments together in the timeline (MEP allows the merging of projects). However, since I have such an outdated PC, I could not get MEP to export the extire timeline to a video without crashing at some point, with the Hi Def video.
So I exported each segment into a separate video.
When authoring, I used DVDAS, which made putting this whole thing togeter possible and straight forward.
From the main menu I inserted a sub menu. In the sub menu I added all my clips. It got crowded, so I added an additional sub menu in the 1st sub menu and added the remainder of clips in there.
Back in the first sub-menu, Ichanged the end action of the first video clip to go directly to the next. Made end action of second clip poin to the third clip. Did this for all the clips so that it would play continusously. The last video clips end action was to go to the most recent menu.
Then I chose button styles and background media as usual.
I wanted a play all button on the main menu. I first though a playlist would work, I added this and it worked fine on the preview, and also the burnt disc when played on my PC. However, the playlist did not play properly on my DVD player connected to out TV. Very strange. The order was not random, but at some point it would not play each video in order. I checked my setting and it was set to play continusously. But my DVD player had issues with this.
So I thought of another way. I just put the 1st video segment on the main page and made that the play all, and it's end action was set to play the second video, whose end action was already set, so it played the entire video sequentially, and when complete, went back to the main menu. Works great. Using the same video clip in 2 different menus does not take anyextra disc space. DVDAS is smart enough to know the media is already onthe disc.
I changed the highlight color and shape (used a mickey mouse shape) for each button.
I am more proud of this menu than with any other I have ever made. I need to thank Steve again for his book, which helped me get started with this software. Great book.