DVD Menu Editing Issues in MEP 2013

rjkowalski wrote on 6/5/2013, 11:19 PM

Strange issues with the DVD Menu creation portion of Movie Edit Pro 2013. I filmed a stage production and easily placed chapter marks during the editing process....very easy to do compared to other software I've used. The chapter marks easily generated scene selection icons in the DVD Menu creation phase. What got really messy and took way too long was the navigation between menus. I get them working just fine in the preview mode but when I burn the disk, the navigation buttons do not perform properly. The "Chapters" button brings me to the chapter selection submenu in Preview mode but does nothing (except highlight) in the burned DVD. Also, when I go back into the software to fix it, two new "Play" and "Chapter" buttons appear now in the center of the screen in addition to the two buttons I originally created. These navigation buttons weren't there when I saved the project. I've done this iteration twice and it has taken all day (changes & rendering time) and it still won't work. I've spent a lot of effort choosing the screen shot for each of 16 chapter buttons, changing backgrounds, adding music, etc. I really don't want to scrap the menus and start all over but I've checked all links & find no faults.

Has anyone experienced this buggy behavior? What other options do I have for easy DVD/Bluray Menu creation? Can I start menus with a clean slate instead of a template? For all of MEP 2013's good points in editing, it's not very useful if I can't easily create chapter menus for the stage productions I film.

Comments

johnebaker wrote on 6/6/2013, 1:01 AM

, , , , of 16 chapter buttons . . . .

Are you putting all 16 chapter buttons on one page or have you accepted the starting templates option and have multiple pages for the chapters possibly in your case 2 or 3 pages of chapters?

I have found that if a template gives you eg 6 chapters on a page then when you add another chapter(s) they do not work correctly in the player. Whether this is a bug or a deliberate design limitation I do not know.

I suspect that the maximum number of chapters allowed per page is limited to 9. This corresponding to the numbers 0 - 9 on the remote

. . . . . Can I start menus with a clean slate instead of a template . . . .

No - unfortunately there is not a 'blank' template.

HTH

John

terrypin wrote on 6/7/2013, 1:46 AM

. . . . . Can I start menus with a clean slate instead of a template . . . .

No - unfortunately there is not a 'blank' template.

Hi John,

One of the more serious weaknesses in MEP IMO.

But you can have more than 9 properly working chapters on a page, as in this example:

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

rjkowalski wrote on 6/7/2013, 2:01 PM

I've continued to battle the menu creation the last couple days. After much trial & error, I've gotten the main menu to function properly with background music, my own background image & two buttons (Play & Chapters). I had to delete the buttons I had added for "Play" & "Chapters" and use the template's buttons (if I deleted them, they reappeared when I re-opened the project later).

There are then two sub-menus. 12 scene selections on page 1 and 7 more scenes on page 2. The first sub-menu page contains a navigation button to return to the Main Menu or the next sub-menu.The chapter selection works fine except once you've chosen a chapter scene and it starts playing, you are stuck at that point in the movie. I can find no option to tell the DVD to return to the menu when you click "Stop" or Menu buttons on the remote. If you click stop & then play, it resumes where you left off in the movie. I have to eject the DVD & re-insert to get back to the menu.

Burning the image is also buggy. After creating the menu structure, I burned to a DVD and all the navigation works fine. I burned the same project to a Bluray, and the navigation button on the first submenu (chapter selection page 1) causes the screen to highlight yellow and locks up the bluray player. Thinking it was a fault of the image burn, I created another image & bluray and had the exact same problem. The navigation works perfectly in the Preview mode in MEP 2013.

I like MEP 2013 Editing but the menu creation process has wasted so many hours & unusable disks that I'm considering going back to Sony Vegas with it's DVD Architect companion. The only other thought is editing in Magix and creating the disk menu in Architect but that removes all advantages of chapter marking within the editing package and rendering multiple times.

If I report these shortfalls and bugs, is there hope for improvement? I don't want to waste my time documenting all the issues if there is no hope it will be improved.

larcom1 wrote on 8/3/2013, 12:41 AM

You are not alone sir. I have been having problems with the DVD menu creation tools for years with Movie Edit Pro. I started out years ago with version 10. Then 11, 12, 14, 15 16hd, 17hd and now 2013. YUK! I love the software for editing. It can't be beat. But when it comes to creating a DVD I avoid it if I can.

I can go in and creat a nice page and then go to PREVIEW and nothing is there. I go back to EDIT and suddenly I have 7 pages with all kinds of crap all over them. I delete them and they come back. Then I get no text in my boxes, and then I get text I never created in my boxes.

Then the software just does what it wants. It keeps creating pages, I delete them and they come back. Then I create a new button and type in text but the text doesn't show up... I can't even specifically tell you what MY problems are because they are so varied and sporadic.

This softwere is crap and I can't believe Magix hasn't fixed it in the 6 years I have been using it. I have resigned myself to just making WMV files for upload to Youtub etc. I am now experimenting with Adobe Premiere Elements 11 so we'll see how that works. it it works better then I wil still use MEP 2013 to edit and save as a WMV and then import the WMV into Adobe and creat a DVD that way.

I have given up using MEP for DVD creation. Like you said.... it takes hours and wasted discs for testing and it just never works right.

Instead of all the fancy bells and whistles Magix should just make the DVD menuing basic and useable.

If anyone has any of these issues or has fixes or can tell me if I am doing something wrong then you can conntact me at: Larcom1atcomcastdotnet