Concise Guide of Movie Menu DIY (1)

Thank Brian Harbaugh for the excellent tutorial about the movie menu DIY. The official tutorial will come soon.

This document is to create your own template with Sothink Movie DVD Maker. Creating your own templates, besides the ones that are already given, is a relatively easy thing to do. I use to use version 3.5 and it accepted new entries without problems with Windows XP. In my example I am using Windows 7. This can be done with any other version of Windows, but the paths to the directories may change.

In C:\Program Files(x86)\SourceTec\Sothink Movie DVD Maker\Templates?the directory where the program is placed? right click NEW and FOLDER and name it MINE. There MUST be 9 (nine) files created for the process to work. You may cut and paste from existing templates you pasted to Temp if needed. Size of files is important, names are not so important!

Nine files are needed will be shown at Tab.1:

Tab.1 Files needed to be prepared

The first file is by default is named background.jpg. It can be any jpeg picture you have, but the smaller the better. It will automatically stretch to fit the background menu. The bigger the jpeg, the less space for video quality! You can change the name in the DVD Menu section by changing BG image path to whatever you have your selected picture named, (flower.jpg). It still must be copied into this directory.

The second file is background.mp3. You also may want an mp3 to play during video selection. Once again size is important, but this file is not really necessary. This file is about 15-180 seconds in length at 128 kbps/44 kHz. The path can be also changed in DVD Menu BG audio.

The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth files are also not that important unless you are planning to have multiple menu screens for your videos. They are next.png, next.wmf, prev.png, and prev.wmf. These files are basically just pictures to click on to go to the next screen or backtrack to the previous screen.

These can be created with Microsoft Paint or copied from other templates if you like the pictures. You may need a WMF editor.

The next two files are video.png and video.wmf. They are used to frame your file that you ADD and as a menu selector. They also can be created with Microsoft Paint or your favorite WMF editor. The size of these files will be discussed in the TEMPLATE.XML which is the most important part of your template creation which I reserved for last as it will be the most detailed.

Most exciting part about the edition of xml file will be explained in “Concise Guide of Movie Menu DIY (2)”.

DIY really brings much fun, why not try this Free Movie Maker–Sothink Movie DVD Maker to DIY your own stylish movie menu?