Quote: The problem is that the duration of music that is currently set on the menu is 15 seconds. I need to increase this time and yet I am stumped. I have looked (I thought) at all the buttons etc to be able to do this and no luck? I see where I can set the time for video thumbnails if I want them but no time setting for audio.

As far as I know, the duration of music menu is equal to the duration of music file that you chose. With 'Add background music' menu you can make it play constantly or add fade in/fade out effect, but I don't think it is possbile to make some music track longer within PD menu editor.

It was discovered that PD7 has what appears to be an anomaly on background music. Instead of the duration being the length of the background music you added, it appears to be truncated at the length defined in motion menus (default is 15 seconds). This has been reported so hopefully CL is evaluating the issue.

As a workaround, one can tick the motion menus to activate and then change duration to say 1:00 and then untick motion menus again. I have found that the background music will then play for 1:00 then. Not really the desired feature but it may provide you what you want until the issue is resolved.

Jeff

Hello Jeff,

what do you mean exactly? I can not follow.
Tick where? Input 1:00 where? Viele Gruesse Georg

From memory, I don't have PD on this computer in front of me. In the Create Disc area

Click Create Disc Preferences
Enable video thumbnail, in this section you can set the time of the video thumbnail. The default is 15 seconds. It's not adjustable unless the video thumbnail is selected. Select video thumbnail, modify the time to 60 seconds, deactive video thumbnail. Background music will now play for 60 seconds.

Jeff

Thank you ... but is does not work for me.

I change the time in "Create Dis Preference" as you write - then go to adding background-music and there I read 15 sec for menue duration. Viele Gruesse Georg

Thank you. I will try it too. I noticed just this morning that this wasn't the case in PD6 (but since I have never tried to burn from there I didn't know that until I checked) I am hoping against hope that if I can't get it changed then maybe I can burn the same thing in PD6 for now and hope they get it adjusted.

Thanks for your input.

Didn't work for me either. I went and selected the video thumbnail, it was orignally at 99 secs (which is how it used to work in Power Producer) and then went back. The default is still 15 secs for the background music. I am wondering why they added this feature, since there was no limit on PD6.

As an addition, I downloaded Power Producer 5 thinking that I would at least get background music for longer than 15 second. Yayyyy it shows the whole amount, no stopping. The only problem is that it still only plays for 15 seconds. I set the video thumbnail to 99 seconds and kept it active and it still only ran for 15 seconds. I will copy and paste this in the power producer thread too, but so far 15 seconds seems to be it for both of them.

Are you by chance using a standard menu template? If I do the following the background music plays longer.

1) create disk
2) use a custom template that I defined
3) open config create disk preference (see image)
4) change duration to 95 seconds
5) open add background music and menu duration will now show 1:35 (see image)
6) burn disk
7) background music plays for 95 seconds on my burnt DVD

I could NOT get the above method to work with a default PD7 template. It works with my custom template though. I'm not sure what's special about my custom template.

Again, it appears to be possibly an issue in PD7 that I hope CL can address in an upcoming release. I thought the workaround might work for you too for the short term, I guess not.

Jeff

Thank you. I was using a template that I changed and resaved as an original template, would that count? I am having the same issue with the New Power Producer that I just downloaded too. Even though it doesn't show a cut of at 15 minutes. Hmmm I'm just wondering whether it took on the template from Power Director. I might try to uninstall PD7 and just in stall PP5 and see. (will report back)

It appears this little quirk to get the background music to play longer only works with non motion main page templates. While in create disk if you display all templates, then Template 20 is the only non motion template supplied with PD7(missing the movie strip icon). If you select this template, the background music can be extended as I described earlier. The maximum time permitted in the motion duration dialog is only 99 seconds though.

Again, this is obviously some form of bug in PD7. I'm not advocating this is a good way to extend the background music.

Jeff

Ah good point. I know that the 99 secs was uniform on the older Power Producers so I kind of expected that.

Obviously the video part of the background is taking up some of the accomodation for that piece. (doesn't make sense BUT that is what it sounds like) I know that in prior power producers if you loaded it too full with video (even though they would smart fit) some of the backgrounds (if they were video) would stop working.

It work with a picture in the background but not with a ready menue-template with a video-animation. Try to make a own videoanimation for about 60 sec, save it and import it to a menue-template. The menue will play for 60 sec. Viele Gruesse Georg

Thank you Georg. I tried this too. It took me to 20 seconds and that was it.

Well this is an update on the audio issue. I finally had a chance to research this.

I tested this in PP5 but I have the same template in PD7 so I would assume it would happen the same way.

In looking at the folder that contains the background that I wanted to use I noted that there is a still picture (white xmas) and there are videos (for the snow falling etc) The videos are 15 seconds long. When I put an audio track behind the background, it will only run as long as the video runs. (15 seconds) I copied the background folder out and put it on my desktop before I tested my theory.

In PD I made a line of the one video with fades in between. My song was 6 minutes long and I ran the video for about 7 minutes. I produced the video (mpg) and then converted to wmv (which is what the files are in the folder) there are four of them with different names. I just renamed the same file (to suit the name that I saw in the folder) and copied it in. This still only gave me 1:39 but it was enough for what I needed.

I have not tested to see if I made the video longer whether I would get longer audio (it is totally possible that I could have run a video for 2 minutes and still gotten 1:39 of audio, I didn't test this either), or whether that's my limit. In addition, you need to be aware of the fact that this video background still adds volume to your DVD.

Hope this helps some of you. I realize that this is a work-around solution and it would be great if Cyberlink didn't have the background audio linked to the background video (but at the present it is) so it helped me complete what I was doing, while I wait for the hurdle to be taken away.