John,

Thanks for the links: I wished I'd known about them sooner. I pretty much figured all that out. The base version does have some editing menu editing capabilities, as I sort of mentioned.  From what I'd read, I was a bit surprised as I got as close to what I was after as I did.  I started with some template, probably from the "User-defined" catagory (sorry I don't remember which one and have saved several versions as separate projects--I've been working on this for a while). For the buttons all I really wanted was a rectangular sensitive area (with no border) of a specified size and aspect ratio, with static text in a font, size and color I could specify, to located in some empty spaces in the field of the custom background (with itself a single color background). The available buttons, which on the original template probably had a "user footage" label in some sort of frame and some text (by default the name of the movie tab in the top level of the arranger). I could delete a button (eg the DVD project name which I didn't need).  It seemed I could get rid of the frame (at least it's content) but  space was always "reserved" for it, apparently some percentage of the size of the button, which made positioning the text within the button area extremely difficult, since the only positioning options are left justified, center justified, and right justified in the space after that reserved for the frame. Most of the other templates I looked at, had a similar arrangement except instead of a movie, movie frame, or other image file, it was a "button head" type of graphic element which presented the same challenges. I was never able to get anything close to a balanced look.

I tried a few selections from the Buttons tab but didn't seem to have any luck with that at all.

I've a fair bit of experience with various graphics packages, but not much with video. From what I've been able to tell the basics don't seem so different, the "video" elements are just video content. If the Plus version has a more extensive selection of tools I wouldn't mind springing for it, but the jump to the Premium level for an application I may not use seriously again for quite a while just seems too much. If there's anyone who can provide some sort of summary of what additional features in this DVD menu arena the Plus version offers I would greatly appreciate that.

Hi

This thread made me look at John's excellent tutorial butwhat came to mind is that you do not need to render each separate movie or create multiple projects to achieve the same result. One minus of exporting to MXV is that it means rendering the footage twice as MXV is an intermediate format that needs to be converted again to MPEG2 during the burn of the DVD. This can lead to a slight generation /quality loss and of course means more render time.

At John's step 2) I would click the down arrow next to the Movie (Name) tab and select Export Movie which opens a save dialog to save the movie as a .MVD file which is all the timeline with edits, etc. for that Movie, which can then be imported into another project using the Import Movie from the same dropdown box (pictured in Step6 of John's tutorial) above the timeline. So you could export all the separate movies from their separate projects into one multimovie project as in John's example, by clicking the + sign next to the movie tab and clicking the dropdown arrow and going Import Movie, then selecting the next movie (Movie2).MVD file. This would bring in each movie without rendering to a separate tab (movie timeline) in the master project with the advantage that you could do slight changes to each movie if the Burn needed some tweaking retrospectively.

As far as I know, having separate Movies in the one project only uses the computer resources required for the Movie (Tab) you are working in, but if not this may be why John suggests rendering each project to MXV before combining them. I burn very few Discs so he would Know better than me, He could also help you more on what is possible in the menu design area.

In fact for the scope of you project and the computer horsepower you have the simplest would be just to create a second Tab (movie timeline) in one project and edit each separately in the same project. Then when you go to the disc creation step you will automatically have 2 separate movie menu buttons to which you can add additional chapter buttons to if you wish.

Or just edit both your MP4's in the same Timeline and create 2 chapters as in the tute. 

Peter

Hi

@ Peter

. . . . you do not need to render each separate movie or create multiple projects . . . . 

I agree with you if you have a PC with enough power, as tlwebb has, and have only 2 or 3 timelines in the project.

At the time the initial tutorial was written, back in 2012,  I was running an Intel Q9450 and it struggled once you got more than 2 timelines complete with collages, effects, etc  running.

Perhaps it is time for an update again !

. . . . why John suggests rendering each project to MXV before combining them . . . .

Again this was to reduce the loading on the PC and the render / burn times are much quicker - the MXV file format is not heavily compressed so the processor has less work to do, especially if the source videos are of mixed formats.

@ tlwebb

. . . . I started with some template . . . .

Can you upload, to somewhere like DropBox, a full screen shot of the disc menu editting page with the template you are trying to change?  If you post it here the image will be reduced in size and not be readable.  This way we can see what editing tools you do have.

Thanks

John EB

John... and Scene...  thanks for taking such an interest. The time differences work against us a bit: I'm in the western USA so it's just after 6:30 am here. Unfortunately I have a fairly busy day today (Friday) and may not get time to digest and respond to your suggestions. I'll have to set up a Drop-Box account or something. I'm very security concious with my home network and don't really have any online presence. Most of my computers are still running WinXP (because I have a bunch of legacy hardware devices that are no longer supported for any newer OS that I simply cannot afford to replace at this point in my life) and there's only one of the bunch that ever really goes online except for the [now] very unusual need to do some sort of update. My new DAW is a few generations newer than anything else here, but they all are still doing what I ask them to do (knock on wood). The large working subnet is usually even physically isolated (unplugged) from the internet service router.

I did at least want to acknowledge the replies and express my gratitude for the efforts. I'll be back.

Hi,

To answer your question about the features of the different versions, MEP Basic is quite limited in its features. For audio, it would be comparable to MusicMaker Basic, a long way from Sam Pro X2. If you can get an upgrade to Plus fom Magix, I strongly suggest that you do so. Unfortunately, Magix does not produce a comparison of the versions and you have to wade through the details. Even then, many features are not indicated in the adverts.

MEP Premium is just Plus with some good third party effects added. If you need to stabilize footage, proDAD Mercalli V4 is excellent and the plugin is made for Magix video products.

Of course Magix Video Pro X (VPX) has the most features and is my preference. Combined with the latest version of Xara P&G or Designer Pro, one can do pretty much everything. For really going into the details of DVD menus, VPX allows the menu to be exported to a PSD file which can be imported into Xara or PhotoShop, modified and imported back into VPX. This is quite advanced editing. I use it sometimes to change the buttons to make them more visible.

Since you are just starting out, MEP 2016 Plus is probably adequate but those plugins with Premium are nice to have. Your video will be a success and friends and relatives will ask why you haven't produced videos of all of the videos and photos that you have been taking over the years (and will take) and then........

To confirm what John EB mentions about rendering to MXV, I often do the same when I am using many effects, and especially with NeatVideo (video noise cleaning) as trying to render or burn with these effects present slows down the process for final editing and often does not come out as planned in the DVD after several hours of encoding. With MXV files on the timeline and not much else, playback is smoother for final editing, and encoding for DVD goes quite fast. Think of it as track bouncing.

Enjoy!

Long day today, sorry. But wow, so much information!! Still coming to grips with most of it, but as I was plodding through the day I was thinking about the stuff I'd read this morning, and realized that in my relative ignorance I may not have given enough info about my problem. My daughter's vidiographer did an excellent job of producing two MP4 videos from the photographer's wedding photographs, her video (they are a team) and the audio recordings by the DJ for the event (who provided sound reinforcement for the entire event), one a "full length" version, the second a much, much shorter "hilites" version. My goal was to combine those on a single DVD, playable on any dedicated DVD player or computer, that she and my son-in-law could send to special attendees and other members of the families (mostly my side) who could not come clear across the country to attend the actual wedding. So I'm doing absolutely no editing to the two original videos.

My daughter, much to my surprise, turns out to have quite a creative design sense (by trade she's a licensed vet tech) and numerous elements of the "lead-up" to the actual wedding (the "save the date notices", invitations, as well as the wedding itself, were quite unique and inspired. I have never shot a video, but since my youth I have been a photographer, and as an ancient engineer have some sense of graphic design. So my goal was to combine scans of as many of the various things the vidiographer had never seen into the DVD menu. My history with MEP is short, though over a long period of time. I got a free version back when I upgraded my original Samplitude 9SE (my first foray into personal digital audio after years of tape) for V10Pro. Then later some friends from the church where I take care of the audio system, and record some events asked if I could somehow change the audio of the procesional music on the DVD they had of their wedding at St Peter's in Rome...it was something that wasn't recorded live, but a canned track added when the DVD was made. I'd installed, but not really used that first version (2014 I think), but it was really limited and I'd gotten another promotion for a cheap upgrade to the 2015 version, so I did that. That project was a great success, but I figured that was the last video I'd do. Then this. So I did upgrade to 2016 (I think that maybe 2015 didn't do MP4s or something, and again, with the timing there was "great deal" promotion. After I found I could actually create a "customized" DVD menu (which wasn't even an issue on my first project), this project really took off. I accumulated all of my scans, some of  the actual audio for a background soundtrack for the a short DVD intro video, and a "stand-in" audio track for the actual audio I wanted to use behind the menu itself, but have not found the actual recording (it's the processional my son and one of his bandmates played at that the wedding, another totally unique and personal element...we know it's somewhere in the various recordings, but just haven't found it yet). So I've already made those elements into two MXV "movies". I'm just about where I want to be, and I could live with the "buttons" the way I've gotten them to now, but they're just not "right". I want to make them as large as possible since the active area is "invisible" (so you have to get close but not right on the label), but not so large you could activate the wrong one. That is hard with the huge offset of the text even in my latest version.

I've actually burned one disc a couple of versions ago. It sort of works, but I learned a lot from it's various failings. My new machine handles almost anything I throw at it with relative ease. It's optimized for audio, and there are few, if any, unnecessary processes or services in the way. Based on my initial lack of confidence, but then supported by some of the things you folks have mentioned, I have a lot of questions about video, simply because I know practically nothing. For example, what video/audio settings I should be using for the overall project? As I read some of the earlier comments, I wondered: are the two vidiographer's movies totally re-rendered when the disc image is created?  Are there project settings I should be using to prevent that?  The format of my elements can be anything--I'll just make the content fit the format. I really don't want to mess with de-compression/re-compression issues, but I haven't been able to find any guidance on that sort of thing on the net; most probably because I don't know what to look for.

I've babbled on way too long already (can you tell I was an engineer when I was working)? But one thing JohnEB suggested about reduced capabilities somehow resonated. I did figure out how to create a Dropbox account, and took screenshots of the various views I've been confronting for quite a while (although without the tools I'm accustomed to on the workstation I use for graphics and general work, the screen captures took quite a while to figure out on Win8.1). I hope this works because this is also totally new territory for me. I hope someone can say for sure that the Plus version might be a worthwhile investment for this project (which may be my last).

This link shows the latest overall disc project arranger screen.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/km6e5akrwf6tdzn/DVDproject.PNG?dl=0

This link shows the display when I've clicked the "disc burning interface" control and the "Edit" control on that page:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/83zzu7yu7qnaowd/DiscEditModeScrn.PNG?dl=0

This link shows the display when I check the "Design Page" "Video" control

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0only4kizw521a8/DsgnPgVideoDia.PNG?dl=0

Finally, this link shows the display when I select the "Hilites" movie button and click the "Design Button" "Edit" control (NB: I have NOT installed the Magix Photo Designer Ap invoked with the "In an External Editor" control because I don't do image editing functions on this workstation--it's basically audio--so I don't know what "additional features" might be provided by that particular option--anyone have an opinion on that?)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5evxdimq9k3zwrf/ButtonEditDia.PNG?dl=0

Again, my sincerest thanks to anyone who has had the stamina to slog through my systems analyst's attempt at brevity.

Hi Ray

Thanks for the clarification - from the images you have posted you are just about there.

What I do not undertstand is why the Hilites text is right aligned when it is clearly centred both horizontally and vertically according to the Menu entry properties dialog.

It may be the starting template you are using.

If I read your post correctly you want text only links and I am assuming the background is static.

Here is a short video - on Dropbox to preserve resolution and quality - of how I created big buttons using a different template.

Hopefully you have this template - if you do not have this any text button only template with no user video will work - you can add a background video if required to a 'text only' template.

HTH

John EB

@John EB:   BRILLIANT!!!! That worked perfectly. Well almost, but certainly close enough to suit my purposes. To get the text centered vertically I had to select bottom justification, but after the problems was I was encountering this is nothing.

Thank you all so much for the effort.

@tlwebb,

About adding in the Photo Designer app, install it and try it. I haven't used it much, needs some learning. You can modify the buttons and background with it.

I noticed that you are using StoryBoard mode. Is this because you only have one object and there is no sense seeing it in timeline mode, or is there another reason?

Other things in the Plus/Premium version that may interest you are the audio features. I don't know how far they go in basic. Open the mixer (M) and take a look. In Plus you can add in VST plugins, so many that you probably have for Sam can be used here. Take a look at the audio cleaning features as well. Plus also comes with Music Editor 3, which you may have see with Sam. In MEP, you mixdown the audio and the external audio editor becomes available.

As for remastering the wedding video, you may want to create a more condensed version to send to those who were not there, especially if the original contains the entire wedding ceremony. One could easily cut out 50-70% with no loss and the audience would appreciate the shorter version.