Encore 2.0 Motion Menus

[Jeff Bellune]

Glad to help. 🙂

[David Sapadin]

Hoping to catch the eye of Jeff Belune here…resurrecting an old post but a great answer: but I need to take the idea a step further…

Jeff, I followed your step-by-step for motion menus in this threadh with great success using Encore in CS2 Production Studio. I am trying to take it a step further though and you seem to be very knowledgeable on the subject of Encore and customizing menus.

I want to take one of the menus that came with Encore 2.0 and customize it. It is a MOTION menu (a .em file) that has a short .wmv video file associated with it. It is also only available in 4 x 3, and I need it in widescreen!

So….easy enough to change the .psd portion of the menu in Photoshop by adding some fill on either side of the 4 x 3 canvass to fill it out to 16 x 9. Easy enough to customize the title and buttons. (By the way this is the televsion.em menu which has a TV set in it and the video is simply snow/static on the TV screen…)

Also easy enough to go through the steps you outlined in this thread to animate the buttons in and then go to a static menu awaiting the user to make a selection.

The problem comes in when I try to link it to the .WMV video and get the static onto the screen. That I cannot seem to be able to do at all and have the static on the screen show up when I do a preview.

Can you help?

Thanks in advance,

David Sapadin

[David Sapadin]

I have made a little progress here. I decided to simplify for the time being by staying with 4×3. I ended up with two menus at the beginning of the DVD, one does the animation of the buttons into the menu (2 sec long) and then it links to an identical menu which is the original .psd that came with Encore (Photoshopped of course so both menus look the same). Since you can only (I think) link one menu to one video clip OR After Effects Comp, then the 1st Menu is linked to the AEP and you see the buttons animate in, but there is no static on the TV screen. When the 2 seconds is up, that first menu links to the 2nd menu which IS linked to the .WMV of static/snow that came with Encore. And then you see that the buttons remain static, but the snow appears on the TV screen. I have a feeling this is as close as I am going to get unless someone can tell me to have one menu linked both to an AE Comp AND to a .wmv file at the same time.

The only real problem with this is there is a short hiccup when Encore goes from the 1st menu to the 2nd. Is there any way to smooth out that transition? We’re not pressing any buttons when Encore goes from Menu 1 to Menu 2, so I don’t even get the Transition tab under properties.

Any ideas once again would be greatly appreciated.

Dave

PS. I should be able to duplicate the success I’ve had so far in 16 x 9, trying to do that is next on my list…