These notes are intended to help newcomers to Power Director 7 to overcome some of the initial difficulties they experience when working with menus.

First, during the editing stage, it is recommended that you rename your chapters to give them meaningful names, otherwise on the menu buttons they will as appear as Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc.

When all the editing is done, click on the Create Disc tab. Power Director then inserts a template into the right hand window, with the words My Videos, Play, and Chapters. (If you created subtitles during the editing phase there will also be Subtitles on this template.) What you do now depends on whether you like the appearance of this template, ie the background photo or video, the font shape, size, colour, etc, or not.

If you do NOT like the appearance of the template which Power Director put into your project when you clicked on the Create Disc tab, you can try other templates simply by clicking on them in the left hand window. If none of these suits your needs, you will need to modify a menu, or create a new one. These notes focus mainly on modifying a menu, not creating a new one.

Click on the Modify tab, and the Menu Designer opens up. This is where you modify your template, and you will then use the modified template in your project before you burn the DVD.

In the Menu Designer you can modify the attributes of the text such as the font, its size, colour, shadows, etc. You can also change the background image. But you cannot change the actual words as they appear on the screen, ie My Videos, Item1, Item 2, and Item 3. Remember, this is a TEMPLATE you are working on, not the menu for your project.

When you have made all the changes you want in the Main menu page, use the drop down menu at the bottom to move to the Chapter page, where you can change, for example, the text attributes and the button attributes. You can add buttons if you wish, and make other types of changes.

When this is done, move to the Subtitles page (if you are using subtitles) and make any changes you want.

When you have made all of your changes to all of the menu pages, click on OK. Power Director then asks you for a name for this modified template – enter a name and click OK. Power Director then brings back your project, with the new template inserted.

This template (or the one originally inserted into your project by Power Director if you liked its appearance) is now the basis for your menu, and you will want to make some changes to suit your project. For example, you might change My Videos to Our Holiday, or John’s Graduation, or whatever.

Click the Author tab if it is not already highlighted. DO NOT CLICK THE MODIFY TAB.

To change the text just double-click on it, type the new words and delete the old. You might similarly want to change the other words eg Play might be changed to Play the whole video, etc. The choice is yours to make.

You can also change the position of the words on the screen by clicking and dragging. You can also change other attributes of the text, eg its font, size, colour, shadows, etc by clicking on the "T" symbol at the bottom of the preview window. However these changes, which can be saved with your PROJECT, will not be saved in your TEMPLATE. Further, in the Author mode you cannot change the background image or video because these are features of the template.

At this time if you wish you can also change the background music, and include a First Run Video if you want to.

When you have made these changes you are ready to burn the DVD.

Remember, you use MODIFY to modify a template, which is then used as the basis of your menu in your project. To make changes to your project menu, not the template, you use AUTHOR.

Note. If you want to start from scratch and create a NEW template, just click on the New tab. This also opens up the Menu Designer, and you can proceed very much like described above for modifying a template.

Hope this helps.

Robert



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