Mastering DVDs

Step 2: Make a Menu for Your DVD

A commercial DVD contains two kinds of menus: a title menu, which displays chapters (or the disc's elements); and scenes menus, which let viewers jump quickly to various places in your movie. Accompanying each menu entry is a button that viewers can click to navigate to the corresponding piece of content on the disc. In Premiere Elements' timeline, you can create menus and buttons that organize your disc in various ways on the basis of three types of markers: main menu, scene, and stop.

After you've assembled your movie in Elements' Timeline, you can get started setting the markers. Right-click the Timeline's time rule and choose Set DVD Marker to open a dialog box containing three scene-programming options: Main Menu Marker, Scene Marker, and Stop Marker.

Whenever you create a main menu marker, the program places a button on the disc's title menu. One of the buttons on the title menu should take your viewers to a scenes menu that follows the main menu (if you have a large number of scenes, you'll need to create more than one menu). Setting scene markers creates buttons in the scenes menu.

You can instruct Premiere Elements to insert scene markers automatically (at each video clip or still image within the compilation, or after a time interval that you choose); for easy customization, you can have Premiere Elements automatically generate the markers, and then move these where you want. You can rename them by double-clicking the buttons in the DVD layout. To add scene markers automatically, first click the Timeline window to activate it, and then choose Marker, Auto-Generate DVD Markers.

Stop markers tell the DVD player to stop video playback and return to the main menu. They're useful for adding elements like bonus footage or a slide show. Placing a main menu marker at the start and a stop marker at the end of an element creates a chapter (or stand-alone element) that viewers can watch before being returned to the main menu.

In our soccer DVD, season highlights might be the first choice on the main menu, followed by a slide show, and then perhaps a blooper reel, followed by separate pages containing scenes from the highlights movie. In a simpler structure for the disc, each game might appear as a chapter on the main menu, and we could assign scene markers to make the most dramatic plays appear on the menu's scene pages. Because of space limitations, however, you can't put many buttons on the menus. Premiere Elements generates as many scene menus as necessary to accommodate the markers you've set.

Unfortunately, Premiere Elements won't create menu links to files (such as Word documents or PDFs) that you can't include on its Timeline. But you can get around this deficiency by inserting text in the menus--or in the credits of the movie itself--that alerts the viewer to this material. For example, you might add a line to your main menu that says, "To find additional materials, right-click the DVD icon in My Computer and choose Explore." See step 3 for more information on editing movie credits and disc menus.

If you're producing a simpler disc than the one we're creating in our sample project, you can make your video begin to play as soon as the viewer inserts the DVD into the drive. To do this, choose DVD, Auto-Play DVD With No Menus from the main taskbar. Using this approach is quite a bit less complicated than creating a menu-based disc, but it's also less convenient to use: Viewers have to fast-forward through the movie to get to their favorite parts, and you can't use menus to alert them to other content elements.