Video menus using DVD Studio Pro

This is all pretty straightfoward stuff...

Do not encode your "menu video", import is as a .mov file and let DVDSP do the encoding for best results.

Use the "Loop Point" feature to keep the video from starting from starting over completely when the menu loops, select a button style that complements your Play, Chapter, etc labels and link them in.

For the continuous play, create a story of the "Play" track and set its End Jump to the Story beginning.

Dive in and enjoy... everything you need is there, so read, experiment, and have some fun. It's maybe a 29-minute job after you know DVDSP better.

Good Luck!

As I recall, when I had to do music that way, I edited it so that the audio "loop" coincided with the video loop. I used a short intro on the fron end that started with the clip.

Just read the Story explanation in the online Help files... it's remarkably easy. You'll make a story of your play track, then open the Story editor, drag all the chapter contents to the right side of the window. Then you just select the Story in the Outline Tab and set the End Jump (in the Inspector) to the begining of the Story. It'll loop until you hit the menu button or shut the player off.

Have fun!

You can't get the audio to be continuous throughout the menu and the transitions because you will be moving to a different physical location on the disc, and there is no memory cache on a DVD that'll keep the audio playing as you do the move.

Tupically, you do the starting animation and button fades using a single piece of audio, and the exit transition is at the start of the track that the menu button takes you to. A short piece of footage that uses a still of the menu, and then fades into whatever the transition is, and then on to the first frame of the track (or to a black screen) is normal, however different people do this sort of thing in different ways.

There was a time when to achieve this you had to use a track as your menu, and add buttons over video. You could still do it this way, but DVDSP is now more sophisticated and you can achieve a lot more using the standard tools built in.