Creating menu with video and after few seconds fade-in of menutext

Question

I'd like to make a dvd , showing part of some footage after inserting the dvd automatilcally, and after a couple of seconds i'd like to fade in the menu text, with a choice of diferent titles, which you can choose from... i wasn't able to find how to do this in the manual... please help..
thanx a million

Answer 1

Hi - welcome to the discussions.
You can do this in several ways. You could, for example, set the opening animation into a track and set the end jump action for the track to go on to a menu with the buttons. However, there would appear to be a pause and the buttons wouldn't 'fade' in.
What I would do is create the footage for the animated intro in FCP or Motion and add on to the end of it a still portion of about 30 seconds or more which has the text in place. Make the text fade in as you want it.
I would then take a still of that last part of the footage into Photoshop and use it as a background. Add a layer and on that add on the shapes you want to appear if a button is selected. Hide the background and you should be left with a mostly white image with shapes on it - convert it to grayscale and export that image (without the background) as a .pict file.
Bring both the footage and the .pict file into DVDSP and add the background to a menu. Then add the .pict as an overlay. You can now use the loop point to set where the buttons become active - adjust the middle control to a point just after where the text becomes static.
You then treat it as any other menu - draw out the button rectangles, assign targets and navigation between buttons.
The effect is that your animated introduction plays and the text fades in (as part of the background footage). The buttons become active as soon as the loop point marker is reached, and stay active until the end of the menu. When it loops back there will be a slight flicker, but the buttons will then remain active again.