Hi

New guy to the forums, so I hope this one can be answered?

Having learned from Doog's excellent "Start to Finish" tutorials, I have created a menu system to allow me to choose from 7 menu buttons (simple text buttons).

When I select (float over) one, a 15 second thumbnail movie snip from the asociated movie plays in a chosen area of the menu. This is great - I only wanted one thumbnail area and this is exactly how Doog's tutorial shows it so that fine.

Unfortunatley, my 'customer' would like a ful screen looping video to sit behind the entire menu including the thumbnail but I don't know if its possible.

I need the background movie to be independent of the thumbnails so changing from thmb_1 to thmb_2 will not impact the looping background. In this respect I envisage the video background to be a layer, and the menu(set) to be layers on top of that.

So, over to you folks: is it possible to use a video background when you are already showing thumbnail like Doog shown on his "Start to Finish" tutorial (section3).

Hope you can help

Chris

Chris,

Having used that tutorial several times myself, and just reviewing it, it appears to use multiple menus with the auto-activate function turned on. You must have at least 7 menus involved each with a separate motion background for each of them.

There are a couple of ways to have separate motion (one in the general background and one involving a separate window), but as far as I know when you move from one button to the next as you are, you move to a new menu and therefore to a new background. Therefore you can't have a continuous background motion with motion from one button to another. ( I think I said that right).

In other words, all the background motion (button and full menu) has to be created in one layer created either AE or Premiere as Dave did.

Here's another way to look at having some motion background, but it doesn't do what you originally asked for.
http://jmrser.com/Tutorials.html

Look at "Encore Menu Renders for Backgrounds".

John Rich

Hi Chris, and welcome to the forums

It can't be done... it's the DVD spec not the software...

you would need the backgound motion menu along with the area for the short preview whenever the user highlights a button which in turn uses the auto activating feature coupled to multiple menus for each button, and this is the problem as the motion menu will start from the beginning each time a button is highlighted....

Thank you both for your fedback and thanks for the welcome Doogs!

From your comments, it looks like I was right on all counts (that makes a change for me) and so I am reverting to 7 motion based buttons with a single motion background. Not as elegant as the single movie area but works ok and does what the customer wants.

I think the version from the tutorial is very innovative and I'd like to thank you Doog for an excellent set of video tutorials.

Many thanks again

Chris
(Presses PAUSE)

Your very welcome, and I think that the tut your referring to was recorded by kind permission of Adam Kampia (from here on the fourms) to whom all credit is given.

then again I could be thinking about the wrong Tuts.... (it's a senior thing with me these days......LOL)