Hi hovyo1 -

PDR 13 supports 14 buttons per page. Menus can have many pages, so your 18 chapters will be fine - except that thay'll be spread across 2 (at least) menu pages.

There are quite a few basic templates on DirectorZone with larger numbers of buttons per page... such as http://directorzone.cyberlink.com/detail/131986054

PDR will only use the number of buttons it needs when applying the menu to your project.

Cheers - Tony
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Thanks Tony,

I'll try and figure that out. So far not much luck with the menus. I did good , I thought, on building the chapters but when I came to the menus I ran into a brick wall. Really confusing.

Thanks Again, and Happy Holidays My favorite Quote:
"I'm not talking about dying Woodrow, I'm talking about living---Gus McRae, Lonesome Dove
PowerDirector 13 Deluxe v13.0.2408.0
DIY PC, 64 Bit, Win 7, 16 GB RAM, AMD FX 3.8G Quad Core CPU
AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series Video Card 1GB RAM

It's OK - menus affect many PDR users that way!

The attached PDF might help you out.

Cheers - Tony
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Hi Tony,

I'm finally back to work on my little project. Thanks for the link. You make it look easy in the images. I built a practice project with four clips hence four chapters. I would like to put two chapters on two separate pages. I have two chapters on the first page, but for the life of me I cannot figure how to create the second page. I can't find buttons or anything that will let me add the second page.

Could you give some guidance on this little issue?

TIA Howard My favorite Quote:
"I'm not talking about dying Woodrow, I'm talking about living---Gus McRae, Lonesome Dove
PowerDirector 13 Deluxe v13.0.2408.0
DIY PC, 64 Bit, Win 7, 16 GB RAM, AMD FX 3.8G Quad Core CPU
AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series Video Card 1GB RAM

Hi Howard -

No it's not immediately obvious... but the good news is you don't have to do a thing! You don't ned to add a second page.

If you have a menu template with 2 chapter buttons, PDR will populate as many pages as necessary when you apply it to a project. i.e. if you have 4 chapters, there'll be 2 pages... if you have 20 chapters - yep - 10 pages

Cheers - Tony
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Tony,

I made a page with chapters 1 and 2. Like you said, the page 2 showed up when I created the disk, but the (page 2) wasn't

modified like page 1. I thought the formatting would follow as well but it didn't.





How do you get the modifying of page 2 to follow page 1?
or
How can I see page 2, to modify it like page 1?

Sorry to be a pain!

Howard My favorite Quote:
"I'm not talking about dying Woodrow, I'm talking about living---Gus McRae, Lonesome Dove
PowerDirector 13 Deluxe v13.0.2408.0
DIY PC, 64 Bit, Win 7, 16 GB RAM, AMD FX 3.8G Quad Core CPU
AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series Video Card 1GB RAM

Hi Tony,
Forgot to say, Thanks, for your outstanding responses!

Have a safe and Happy New Year!
Howard My favorite Quote:
"I'm not talking about dying Woodrow, I'm talking about living---Gus McRae, Lonesome Dove
PowerDirector 13 Deluxe v13.0.2408.0
DIY PC, 64 Bit, Win 7, 16 GB RAM, AMD FX 3.8G Quad Core CPU
AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series Video Card 1GB RAM

Thank you Howard -

... and the very best to you too

When you selected a menu template, did you click "Apply to All Pages"? If so, each page layout would be (should be) precisely the same.

It is possible to apply different menu templates to different pages. It's also possible to modify the page layout of each page via Menu Structure.

BUT

If you click Apply to All Pages, the button layout will be the same for each menu (chapter) page.



New Year Cheers - Tony
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Hey Tony,

I think I have my mess figured out. I got the 2 page, 2 chapters per page figured out and I also got each of the 2 chapter pages edited. A lot of trial and error and starting over but I guess par for the course. I still have some questions pertaining to the menu structure.

1] I created a template (in the 'CREATE' window) and now I want to save as a New Template with new name, but no buttons anywhere. How can I accomplish this?

2] How can I get rid of the tiny number in the upper left corner of the thumbnails.



I checked out your videos on the tube and learned a lot and am still downloading more.
Thanks, your work is impressive!

Howard My favorite Quote:
"I'm not talking about dying Woodrow, I'm talking about living---Gus McRae, Lonesome Dove
PowerDirector 13 Deluxe v13.0.2408.0
DIY PC, 64 Bit, Win 7, 16 GB RAM, AMD FX 3.8G Quad Core CPU
AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series Video Card 1GB RAM

Thank you Howard. I've been the beneficiary of a mountain of knowledge posted by other forum members.

I'm glad you're getting it under control

The thumbnail index question is easy - just uncheck that option in the bottom left corner...



For the other question:
1. Select the menu you want to modify
2. Right click > Modify
3. Select the Titles/Chapters menu from the dropdown
4. Select Text Only from the dropdown below
5. Save as a new template.



Cheers - Tony
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Tony,

The above info was well received and to put use. I burned a practice project to DVD and it turned out well, but there are still some things that aren't up to snuff. The menu preset I used had some issues but I will try another. Still haven't had much luck creating my own menu with "Create Disk". Still trying though, haven't given up yet. :

I've read several places that .png format is recommended for all images used in PD13. I'd like to know how important it is to have my photograph images in .png format. They are all in .jpg format as I created them before I owned PowerDirector. Will it make a difference if I converted them or shall I leave them be? There is no need for transparency in the photograph images.

The other thing, my jpgs do not fit the 32' HDTV screen. I have some text on the bottom of most of the images and that text is being cut off at the bottom and probably some at the top of the screen also. The images sizes are all 1280x768. I'm thinking of cropping them all to 1280x720 and maybe they'll fit the TV screen better. I'm not looking forward to doing this as there are about 150 photographs, give or take. What are your thoughts on these images sizes, also the resolutions for TV screens and jpg/png formats.

Thanks again for all the great info, Howard My favorite Quote:
"I'm not talking about dying Woodrow, I'm talking about living---Gus McRae, Lonesome Dove
PowerDirector 13 Deluxe v13.0.2408.0
DIY PC, 64 Bit, Win 7, 16 GB RAM, AMD FX 3.8G Quad Core CPU
AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series Video Card 1GB RAM

Hi Howard -

1280x768 isn't too far off 16:9 (1280x720), as you know. You'll see an easy way to "stretch" all the photos in your project without having to crop each one individually. This process, by the way, does NOT resize your original photos. It's the most painless way to do it.

Use CLPV rather than stretch, as it keeps the central portion of the photo more in proportion.

If the photos are JPEGs. leave them as they are. There's no advantage in making them PNGs, unless you need transparency.

Howard - I thought you were making some good progress with using Create Menu. Have I misunderstood?

I guess you've watched this tutorial already? http://youtu.be/f-do66vpFeA

Cheers - Tony
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Hey Tony,
Been away from the machine for a few days, I got back to it tonight. I've checked out the CLVP setting, but I haven't burned anything yet. It sounds like the way to go with that. The JPGs will remain as such.

About my progress. I thought I was doing good but apparently I got lucky on those first couple of tries. Seems like the more I floundered the worse it got. I hit it again tonight and I have built 4-5 practice menus with positive success. I'm getting the Pages and Chapters per page down now. I did some, 8 chapters with different combination of pages. 8 chapters 1 page, 8 chapters 2 pages and one with 18 chapters with various combinations of Pages and Chapters. So it is getting better. I was getting tired of seeing the Monopoly template popup every time I hit preview. LOL

On the tutorial. I did look it over in the beginning but it was still confusing because I wasn't getting the steps right and nothing was working. Then I forgot about the tutorial until you mentioned it above. Well I looked at it again and made notes as I paused and played my way through a few times and it finally started to fall together. I was getting a lot of information overload before and it was hard to sort out, but I'll tell you what, after studying that tutorial and with all your pics and information together paid off. I can now make custom menus with "Create Menu". I didn't say I was expert, but they're getting better. They're just practice menus and there's some formatting stuff that I'm still figuring out.

I'm confused about the way the formatting is transferred from the editing page to the real thing (In theTitles/Chapters editor). I build the navigation buttons and they look nice but when I preview it, they are still black and white arrows. Nowhere do I see any of my formatting. That's just the Nav buttons. The chapter numbers and thumbs are fine and everything works good otherwise. That's just one thing, but I won't. load you up in one post.

One, maybe easy, question. In working on the timeline with transitions. Is there a way to fix the same transition to all the images with one click? You can do it in AVS4YOU, just wondering if PDR has that feature. I can't find it, if it does.

Well I'm gonna let you go, sorry about all the rambling,
Thanks a million for taking the time in helping me out,
Howard My favorite Quote:
"I'm not talking about dying Woodrow, I'm talking about living---Gus McRae, Lonesome Dove
PowerDirector 13 Deluxe v13.0.2408.0
DIY PC, 64 Bit, Win 7, 16 GB RAM, AMD FX 3.8G Quad Core CPU
AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series Video Card 1GB RAM

Great work Howard You know what they say: Praktis makes purfickt

When I started trying to get control of menu making, I found the easiest thing was to (a) make one successfully, then (b) use that one to modify... rather than always starting with a "blank" template base.

On the transitions question, yes. All you need to do is:
1. Select the transition(s) you want to apply
2. Right click > Add to Favourites
3. Open the Favourites tag from the dropdown menu
Ready?
4. see attached screenshot

This tutorial is a bit outdated, but it still shows the basic steps - http://youtu.be/70CTEAI9ozI - the options in later versions of PDR look a little different.

Cheers - Tony
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Hi Tony,

I like your idea of the template. I've made a lot of those when I used to sell motherboards on eBay. Thanks for the transition tip. I was hoping for a way to add one particular transition to all the images, but I guess you can't have everything.

On that CLPV. I found this in the manual.

"Use CLPV to stretch clip to 4:3/16:9 aspect ratio:

Select this option to use CLPV to stretch the image. CLPV (CyberLink Pano Vision) is an image stretching technology from CyberLink that produces minimal distortion in the center of the image."

What I'm wondering about is this "It produces minimal distortion in the center of the image". What about the edges of the image? Does it do anything to shrink the image to fit the 16.9 screen or does it just make the center of the image look better? I don't want to stretch them any more, I need to shrink them.

I have burned a couple of practice projects to disk using 16.9 setting and another using the CLPV. In both cases the images are still hanging out of the screen on my 32" Vizio HDTV. The CLPV didn't do anything different, or at least what these old eyes can see.

Another thing is they fit just fine on my 24" Vizio HDTV that I use for a PC monitor. That is, playing from the hard drive and not thru a DVD Player.

I also cropped my 1280x768 images to 1280x720 and even that didn't make them fit any better. No matter how I do it, my images still are too large for the screen.



I forgot to mention that my Vizio has three aspect ratio settings, They are Normal 4.3, Wide 16.9 and Panorama, whatever. I leave it on wide all the time. Panorama is worse and normal is what it is, 4.3.

Howard My favorite Quote:
"I'm not talking about dying Woodrow, I'm talking about living---Gus McRae, Lonesome Dove
PowerDirector 13 Deluxe v13.0.2408.0
DIY PC, 64 Bit, Win 7, 16 GB RAM, AMD FX 3.8G Quad Core CPU
AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series Video Card 1GB RAM

hovyo1 wrote: I also cropped my 1280x768 images to 1280x720 and even that didn't make them fit any better. No matter how I do it, my images still are too large for the screen.

You shouldn't be using a tv as a computer monitor as many of them have overscan whereas a pc monitor has no overscan and crt ones underscan so you see everything.

That is why there is a tv safe zone toggle when previewing and editing menus on a pc monitor. You may not see that on a tv because yours overscan as seen in your photo.

Hi tomasc

Thanks for responding, I'm not sure that I understand the overscan and underscan stuff, but I did modify a set of images by squeezing them into the TV Safe Zone and burned a DVD. I was surprised that they DID fit inside the TV screen, however they did lose some quality from the resize. I guess there's a price for robbing Peter to pay Paul or squeezing the balloon or whatever.

I believe if I left them a little larger than the TV zone, they will still be OK and still be inside the screen. Might help bring the quality back to where it was. Can't hurt to try!

Anyway, thanks for the tip on the TV safe zone. I was aware of it, but I wasn't exactly sure what it was for. I was kinda thinking it was to help in centering or something along those lines. That's what I get for thinking.

Oh, you're probably right about the TV for a monitor thing. It's handy in football season but I guess if I'm going to be doing a lot of this kind of thing I should consider a good PC monitor.

Howard

My favorite Quote:
"I'm not talking about dying Woodrow, I'm talking about living---Gus McRae, Lonesome Dove
PowerDirector 13 Deluxe v13.0.2408.0
DIY PC, 64 Bit, Win 7, 16 GB RAM, AMD FX 3.8G Quad Core CPU
AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series Video Card 1GB RAM

Hi Howard -

You said: "I was hoping for a way to add one particular transition to all the images, but I guess you can't have everything."

That's exactly what I described to you. That's exactly how you can easily apply one transition to all your clips & images - as long as there's only one transition in favourites.

You may be able to correct your off-screen issue by adjusting the ASPECT RATIO settings on your TV.

Cheers - Tony
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Tony,

Magic words

as long as there's only one transition in favourites.

I had about a dozen or so favourites in there. I got it.

Thanks again My favorite Quote:
"I'm not talking about dying Woodrow, I'm talking about living---Gus McRae, Lonesome Dove
PowerDirector 13 Deluxe v13.0.2408.0
DIY PC, 64 Bit, Win 7, 16 GB RAM, AMD FX 3.8G Quad Core CPU
AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series Video Card 1GB RAM