[John Rich]

Johan,
Would you mind answering a couple of questions?
Windows or Mac? Which version of Encore?
BluRay of SD DVD?
PAL or NTSC?

Assuming you are doing a SD DVD, and you right click in the project window and select import as time line, a file that is .avi and 720x 480, you should be able to preview this in the monitor as you suggest ie hitting the spacebar should play your file.
However, as you probably know, the preview window is for the whole project with menus etc.
What type of file are you trying to preview?
John Rich

JOHNR

[John Rich]

If I understand you correctly,
1. You are using a Windows machine and CS5 and making a regular DVD not BluRay.
2. You want to have your menu with several video buttons, but only the selected one having motion and the other buttons just a still picture.

You could, I believe, make a separate menu for each moving button, and use the auto-activate feature. YOu would need after effects or a NLE to make the background motion menu.
It takes a little work, but if that’s what you want and have questions, I could try to help.
John Rich

JOHNR

[John Rich]

I’m going to assume you have some version of Photoshop. Then my approach is to use PS to make a menu with the buttons and then use AE to make the motion menu. I never used AE itself for making buttons, so I can’t help there.

Things like rendering out of AE and importing into Encore are better explained in the Help files.

Here is another screen capture which is kind of long, which explains the whole process I’ve used for what it’s worth https://jmrser.com/Tutorials.html (look for Simple Motion Menu ) in the list.
JOhn Rich

JOHNR

[John Rich]

Sorry, I got the idea you knew how to work AE. Anyway, you have to “render” in AE which means, you select your compositions in the project window and go to composition – make movie.

Then you render out an AVI(I use uncompressed).
Then you import the AVI into Encore and go from there.
See if that works.
John

JOHNR

[John Rich]

Here are several screen captures made in CS3 which might be of help.
https://vimeo.com/album/214460

John Rich

JOHNR

[John Rich]

This is what I do when using chapters for buttons. See the fifth post of this thread. Naturally, you would just make three separate chapter playlists instead of 17 mentioned in the post.
Let us know how you fare?
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/145/868321#868336

John Rich

JOHNR

[John Rich]

Sorry for this late attempt at an answer. If I understand you correctly you want some video to fly into your menu and serve as a button when it gets there. I think the only way to do this in Encore is to use After effects or Premiere.
I made this series of screen captures describing one method which might be of help. Let us know how it works out.

https://vimeo.com/album/214460

John Rich

JOHNR

[John Rich]

According to this, there is an 18 button limitation to widescreen menus
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/145/855764

I’m not sure why you can get 21 to work as it looks like you have a widescreen menu.
John Rich

JOHNR

[John Rich]

Bob,
No, you have to play BluRay HD material on a blu ray player no matter what kind of disk the video is on.
What I would do is post your question as a new question. That way you would get a bunch of new answers. This way, the question still shows up from back in January.
However, here’s what I do with my footage which was HDV (1440×1080) and now is AVCHD (1920×1080). I take the footage and scale it down to 720×480 widescreen (PAR 1.2). The scaling process, if you’ve followed the forums is somewhat controversial, but with the Adobe Media Encoder in CS5, I think that is pretty much the standard way to go now.

Anyway, once the DVD is made with widescreen media, I just play it in an uprezzing dvd player through a HDMI cable to a HDTV and I think it looks pretty good.
I’ve been told the new Bluray players aren’t that expensive, so you might check that out (I’ve been told $100, but I could be wrong).
The problem is, even if you make a DVD with bluray material on it, you are limited to about 20 minutes of video, which doesn’t sound like enough to do a wedding.
You might be surprised how many folks have bluray players.
Let us know how you work this out.
John

JOHNR

[John Rich]

Bob,
I gave what I thought was a good answer to George’s question a couple of posts above and he never responded. I don’t know if it worked for him, but burning a bluray .iso and burning to a regular DVD with ImgBurn works for me.
See what you think about the method and references I mentioned a couple of post above yours.
John Rich

JOHNR