Messages posted by Joe

Quote: Aghghg!

Yes, but deselecting that option affects all chapters.

I just want to be able to DESELECT what PD7 has chosen for me as chapter 1.....can't find a way to delete it, change it or freeze just that chapter while letting the others "play" a bit.

ALSO---I want to ADD a button on the main menu that links to a "notes page"----you know, click it and a page with a personal note appears. Anybody know how to do that?

"Birthday Video" is now 3 weeks late and needs to be overnighted......any help would be appreciated.

Melissa in Maine

I know your pain. My son's piano recital video was a week late. My neice's wedding video was three weeks. I still haven't completed the Christmas video from last year. All because I have vainly fought issues such as what you describe.

Unfortunately, it appears that you are asking for features that do not (yet) exist.

They would be nice features to have. But I would also like it if they would fix the bug-ridden menu editor that randomly re-adds music that I thought I had deleted, restores default thumbnails that I thought that I had changed, and ocasionally wipes out all the changes that I had made on its own whim.

Quote: Then -- horror of horrors -- I discovered that the chapter thumbnails and the image on the main menu wasn't the single frame of the chapter thumbnail I had selected -- it was several seconds of action immediately after that frame. Including a bunch of action that I definitely did NOT want in the thumbnail.

Here's an update...

I just discovered the "Enable video thumbnail" option in the "Create Disk Preferences" button. When I unchecked that, the thumbnails became static images instead of ten seconds of video -- which is what I was expecting in the first place.

In my defense, that's not a good place to hide this option. The dialog box doesn't have a help button or a mouse-over option to explain what that means. And in MY brain, there is a difference between "authoring" options (navigation and the presentation of the content) and "burning" options (disk capacity, quality). That's why the significance of the option never occurred to me before.

So PD7 provided the option. They just put in in a place that was far from intuitive.

Well, now I'm a little confused...

I bought PowerDirector because it looked like that's what I needed.

Now maybe I'm beginning to think that I should have bought PowerProducer in the first place.

But I can't see anything on CyberLink's web site that compares the two products. It just compares different versions of the same product.

So...

What's the difference between PowerDirector and PowerProducer? What features do they have in common? What features does one have that the other doesn't have? Under what conditions should we condsider purchasing one over the other? Is there a reason why we would need both?

Quote:
I'm wondering why there always must be a template?
Why not simply build a menu from scratch by creating whatever background you want ... creating the buttons, positioning them, and assigning their function ... slipping in a little music and burn the dang thing!?

Yep, that's pretty much my point.

I use PowerPoint a lot. When you create a PowerPoint presentation, you can choose a template which sets up basic stuff like fonts, background, style, stuff like that. Then you can change anything you want. If you want to apply a different template later, you certainly can. If you do, your formatting changes, but not your content.

Actually, every time you start a new presentation in PowerPoint, you start with a template whether you like it or not. It's just a very barebones template that basically defines a white background with a black font. That's the closest thing to starting from scratch.

And that's what I wish was in PD7.

OMG, The KISS menu template is exactly what I've been looking for.
Thanks!

I had a similar experience.

I created a video and very carefully selected thumbnails for each chapter.

Then I discovered that the menu template that I selected displayed the thumbnail for chapter one on the main menu. Well, that certainly wasn't the thumbnail that I would have selected, but after a lot of frustrating research, I decided there wasn't anything I could do about it, so I went on.

Then -- horror of horrors -- I discovered that the chapter thumbnails and the image on the main menu wasn't the single frame of the chapter thumbnail I had selected -- it was several seconds of action immediately after that frame. Including a bunch of action that I definitely did NOT want in the thumbnail. And there was no way of editing that. I couldn't trim it. I couldn't freeze it to one frame. Nothing. If I had selected that frame as a chapter thumbnail, by golly I was going to have it and the next ten seconds or so of action in my menu, whether I liked it or not.

I don't know why things like that aren't editable. They sure should be.

Maybe I'm "piling on", but I am so glad I found this topic in the forum... because that is exactly the type of frustration I have put up with the last several days.

PowerDirector is a wonderful video editing software, but DVD menu creation is hopelessly confusing and convoluted. Templates don't seem to work like I would expect them to. There are some things that you can only edit in a template -- not in the project itself. When you do that, you run the risk of having two templates named the exact same thing (it shouldn't even let you do that!) and many times your changes have reverted back ("My Video" and the canned music seems to reappear whether you want it to or not.)

The only hope is to edit a copy of the "template" to exactly what you need for the project. Then apply that template and finish the project. And hope that you never have to change a thing in the template or else you'll have to start all over again.

My concept of a template is that it should be a "beginning point for a project. But from that point on, anything that could have been assigned in the template can be customized for the project. That would include the selection of thumbnails and background pictures and videos and the number and position of buttons.