Hi,
A menu designer like the one on TMPGEnc Authoring Works would make me very happy !
But first there's a few things that I would like Cyberlink to fix on the current menu designer of PD10. I upgraded from PD8, and a few things are not working like they used to :
1- When designing motion on thumbnails, the video is always at 23.967 frame per seconds, even if the original video frame rate is at 29.97. That's not a problem I had with PD8. I don't think it's possible to change the frame rate of the thumbnail motion.
2- I don't know if the frame rate is causing the issue, but even though if I select the duration in the menu playback mode (I would like to have 15 seconds menu duration), I always end up with menu that are 19 seconds, and look to be in slo-motion. Not a problem I used to have with PD8.
3- The Navigation buttons cannot be updated. I created a menu template in PD8 that I'm still using in PD10, and in that menu I used the little 'Grey house' as my navigation buttons. Now, I tried everything, but the only highlight I can get is a lime-green color. I tried to change it several times, but it always comes back to that green color. I thought maybe it was because it was a template designed on PD8, so I re-did everything from scratch, but again if I use these navigation buttons, any highlight color I select will become lime-green. Plus, under PD10, the highlight also does kind of a black contour, which didn't happen in PD8, that I cannot remove even when removing all type of borders and shadows.
Now, there are a few things that are part of the current menu designer which never worked for me, under either PD8 or PD10 :
1- The text alignment is useless. Even when I click 'left' 'right' or 'center' it doesn't change anything.
2- Aligning a few items is not always exact. I will align 3 items when designing the menu, but when I'll use it, when selecting these 3 items at once and clicking on 'align bottom' will result in one of them moving.
3- Centering is not always working properly. When centering text, it's most likely going to be off.
4- Thumbnails are changing sizes when moving them in the screen. One example : I want 3 thumbnails by screen, with the second one right in the middle of the screen (and everything symmetric). So, if I have a video with 4 chapters, the second screen will have only 1 thumbnail, at the left side of the screen. If I click on 'align center' that thumbnail is not always the same size as the one from screen 1.
5- Moving things around and trying to set it at the same place under all menu pages is almost an impossible task.
What I really like about TMPGEnc menu designer is that the canvass is like a grid. If my menu is 1980X1080, then everyone one of these is a numerated pixel (X and Y axis) which makes it very easy to move things around, making sure it's the right size and at the right place. For every item on the canvass. I can see the location of the item, the length and width. That would be the most useful thing to add to PD10, imo.