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DVD-lab Guide

If you're unhappy with the often feature limited or crippled DVD authoring tools that ship
with your DVD burner, and are looking for a cheap solution to author DVDs that contain
more than just a movie with chapters (those you can get for free on this very site), you
might have heard about DVD-lab. It's part of the sub $100 DVD authoring packages, but
considering the pricetag, its featureset is quite amazing. It doesn't support multiple
audio tracks and subtitles, but other than that it's quite complete. Unlike other tools in
that pricerange, complex navigation, motion menus with audio, 6ch AC3 or DTS audio
are no problem for DVD-lab, and it even includes a built-in menu transition builder, and
wizards to create animated menus and chapter selection menus like you can find them
on commercial DVDs. And if you're looking for a professional level solution, DVD-lab Pro
is about to be released (and considering its features and pricetag its simply a steal).

You'll need the following software for this guide

DVD-lab
MPEG-2 video encoder: CCE, TMPG, ProCoder, QuEnc
Properly encoded source material for your DVD

Step 1: Preparing the sources

That's the step that makes me not want to write DVD authoring guides. Source
preparation is going to take you longer than the whole rest of the process. And if you
want fancy menus, you should prepare a few fancy backgrounds, or videos for your
menus. I don't feel very artistic so I usually create rather ugly looking menus without a
lot of bells and whistles (as you'll be able to see, I bet you'll create much nicer menus
after reading this guide). I've set out the create the following project: I captured a movie
using my DVB-S card, and since there was space left (but not quite enough for a 2nd
movie), I've added an episode of Smallville. Since my source is MPEG-2 compressed,
there was no reason to recompress it, I just had to cut out commercials. My DVD is to
contain a "movie" selection menu without any bells and whistles (static background, no
music), then a menu for each movie using a background from publicly available image
sources that you can find on the Internet (poster sites come in handy here), and finally
animated chapter selection menus. I also got an audio background for the Smallville
menu, I simply cut out the audio during the credits which contains the theme.

Your video sources must all be DVD compatible and be of the same format (you can't mix
PAL and NTSC content on a DVD). DVD-lab does not contain an MPEG-2 encoder (well, it
does but it's not directly accessible), so you'll have to encode your video sources if they
don't have the proper format (or are too large, HDTV content comes to mind). Audio can
be MP2, WAV/PCM (it is suggested that you compress such sources to MP2 to save
space) or AC3 (note that for NTSC projects, MP2 is not officially supported in the DVD
standard), and the sampling rate must be 48 kHz.

Step 2: Movies

Having assembled your sources, let's get down to business with DVD-lab. Once you start
up DVD-lab, you'll note that the main window is divided into three parts: On the left you
have the various elements of your project: Connections (that's what defines the
navigation between content elements), Movies (video content), Menus and Slides
(slideshows). At the bottom of the window, you'll have your assets. All audio, video and
image files are assets. To the right of the assets, you have a preview window to preview
assets. The main part of the window is used to create and edit project elements.

To get started, you have to import all your assets. You can simply drag and drop all your
files into the assets window.

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You should import your assets to the Video & Audio part of the assets. Backgrounds
contain frequently used image files to be used as background for menus. Objects are
images, buttons and other graphical objects.

Images are video stills, Clips contain video clips, and Music contains music files.

If you're using an asset in multiple projects, consider importing it to another folder than
Video & Audio (that one is used only for the current project).

You can now click on an asset and preview it in the preview folder.

It is possible to import multiplexed assets, rather than separate audio and video files as
shown above. In that case, DVD-lab will ask you to demultiplex the file. It is generally a
good idea to start with elementary streams (meaning separate audio and video), so let
DVD-lab demultiplex any multiplexed sources you might have. If you import an MPEG
audio file that is not specs compatible, DVD-lab will propose to transcode it to the proper
format, which is also a good idea (alternatively transcode it to the proper format using a
tool like BeSweet).

Before you proceed, it's a good idea to configure the global project options. To do this,
select Project - Project Properties:

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In the System tab, set the TV format

for your project and the Project Size
(the resolution). You can also already
configure the disc name and the
aspect ratio for menus. Note that if
you select 16:9 menus, the disc
menus will look squeezed on 4:3 TVs
and the buttons will be out of place.

In the Palette tab, you can configure a

global color palette for your project. A
project can have 16 colors, which you
can configure right here.

Press OK to save those changes.

Having imported your assets, the first thing to do is create movies. Movie elements in
your project contain the actual video. Note that an animated menu is not a movie, even
though it contains video. Double click on Movie 1 in the project window to bring up a
window in the main part of DVD-lab where you can configure the movie.

Drag and drop your first movie file from the assets window to the initially empty movie
window. Then do the same with the audio file.

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Note how DVD-lab shows a number of thumbnails from the video, a timeline above the
video and the audio track below the video thumbnails. Using your mouse, you can move
around the video. The red vertical line over the thumbnails represents the actual position
in the movie, you can move it using your mouse. The actual frame will always be shown
in the preview window, including the actual position.

If for some reason audio and video should not match up, DVD-lab can correct audio
delays. To do this, select Tools - Audio Delay...

All you have to do is enter the

desired delay value in the
Add/Remove Audio Delay field,
and press Process. DVD-lab will
graphically show the effect of
your entered delay value (it
can be negative or positive). If
you're using this function,
make sure you use the proper
mp2 audio file and add it to
your movie track.

Back to our first movie, it is time to set some chapter points. To create a chapter point,
you have to move the position marker to the appropriate point, then press on the + sign
to create a chapter point. If you like, you can use the zoom buttons to zoom into the
movie timeline to have more control over the position of your chapter point.

You can also use the left and right arrow buttons to move around the movie.

Here are three chapter points. The middle one has been
selected (hence the different color), and its position
timestamp is shown as well.

To delete a chapter point, just click on the red marker and

press the delete button on your keyboard.

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Another option to set chapters is the audiochapters function. To access it, select Movie -
Auto Chapters...

Auto chapters works via

scene detection. DVD-lab
will scan the movie for
scene changes, and
create chapters at those
positions. The Sensitivity
parameter can be used to
set how sensitive
DVD-lab is to scene
changes. The higher the
number, the more
chapters will be created.

You can use the Add X

chapters in whole movie
to control how many
chapters are going to be added in total. Alternatively, you can check Find all possible
chapters, and then enter the Minimum space in minutes (that controls the minimum
distance two chapters must have from each other).

Press OK to get started, and you can abort the process at any time pressing the Stop
button.

There is yet another option: DVD-lab supports multiple chapter list format. So, if you
have a chapter list for somewhere, you can import it into DVD-lab by right clicking in the
movie window, and selecting Import Chapters...

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There are two more options concerning chapters. The first is chapter Lag. As you might
know, chapters must start with an I-frame. The frame you've chosen for your start
position might not necessarily be an I-frame, thus the chapter won't start at the exact
position you've chosen. It might be that your chapter starts too early because DVD-lab
picks the closest I-frame to your chosen position. Now, rather than to try and move the
chapter position, you can set a chapter lag, for one or all chapters. Chapter lag allows
you to adjust the actual chapter position and advance it by ±1 second, be going to the
right click menu as before, then selecting Set Chapter Lag...

Last but not least we have the Frame_index All Chapters function. DVD-lab can index
your video file to get more accurate chapter positions. Without indexing, chapter
positions are accurate to up to 0.5 seconds, with indexing, the accuracy is improved by a
factor of two, thus to maximum 0.25 seconds different to the actual position you've set
in the movie editor. Indexing will take a while, and after it is done, your chapter
positions will now be shown as green diamonds. In addition, your video asset will have a
green diamond in the logo as well.

If during asset import you find that your project is too large, you might want to trim the
credits of a movie. To do that, you don't have to cut the video using an external cutter.
DVD-lab already includes this functionality. Just move the slider to the position where
you want the cut to start, then right click and select Trim End...

DVD-lab will show you a

graphical preview of the cut,
and you can select a name
for the trimmed file.

Also check Add the result to

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Assets and Replace Current Movie with trimmed, so that you won't accidentally forget to
replace the untrimmed movie with the trimmed one.

Having set up the first movie, let's add another movie. Right click in the project area,
and select Add Movie.

Then double click on the new movie item and repeat the procedure described above to
add video and audio, and set chapters.

Step 3: Menus

Having set up the video, it's now time to create a few menus. To create a menu, double
click on a Menu listed in the project window. This brings up the menu editor:

Initially, the window is black, and the two dotted rectangles you see represent usable

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areas on screen. TVs actually don't show you the entire picture, so the area outside of
the innermost rectangular area might not be displayed (this is no problem on PCs), so
place all important elements in that area.

As you can see, there are various design tools to the right and top of the work area, and
below you can switch between your movies and menus. You'll also note a coordinate
system relative to your screen area which can help you position elements.

As when working with movies, you can use the zoom buttons to enlarge or shrink the
menu view.

To help you position elements, you can create horizontal and vertical guidelines, that are
lines that show up during authoring, but won't be visible in your final project. To create a
guideline, just click in the area with the coordinate system, and drag and drop to the
menu are. This creates a dotted, yellowish guideline. If you right-click on a ruler, you can
configure your existing guidelines and position them pixel-accurate. To delete a
guideline, drag and drop it back to the coordinate area.

In the top menubar, you can configure how DVD-lab helps you align menu elements. By
default, it aligns to guidelines:

Click the other button shown above, to enable the snap-to-grid mode. DVD-lab will now
show an additional grid in the menu area, helping you to align objects.

In order to set up a background, drag and drop one of your image assets, or backgrounds
to the menu area. You can also use a frame from one of your video assets: make the
video visible in the preview window, go to the appropriate position in the video, then
press the Shift key, and while pressing it, drag and drop from the preview area to the
menu area. This will set the currently shown video frame as your menu background
image.

You have a variety of tools at your disposal to make your menus more interesting as
shown on the left. The Aa button allows you to create a text area and write some text
on top of the background. This can be used to create simple button links. Then you
can create filled rectangles, non-filled rectangles or polygon objects. The next button
allows you to group elements together (we'll get back to that). If you have DVD Menu
Studio or Real-DRAW Pro (both products from the makers of DVD-lab) installed, you
can import vector objects from those tools using the 3rd button from the button.

Finally, the lensflare button allows you to create a lensflare effect:

Unlike other elements, note the LOCKED text in the lensflare area.
This means you cannot move the position of this element, or change
its size.

The last button allows you to insert a frame from one of your
movies. Note that the first two tools are only active if the proper
object is selected. The first one allows you to edit a polygon object,
the 2nd one allows 3d rotation of any object. Just select an object, then click on that
button and you can move the object using your mouse (don't be afraid to try, you'll get
the hang of it).

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Okay, let's add some text so that we can select one of the two movies. Click on the Aa
button, then draw an area on the menu background.

Here you can select a few

basic font properties just
like you would in a word
processing software.

Having written and positioned the text for our selection, let's configure how the selection
buttons will act. To do that, we use the Color properties to the right of the menu area:

Fill Color is the color of the element you're adding. To create

blue text, just set the fill color to blue, then create a text item.

By default, each item has a shadow. You can change the

intensity of the shadow using the Drop Shadow controls, as well
as its color. In our example, I've created a red shadow of normal
size. The next two sliders are used to control the position of the
shadow (distance between the actual text and the shadow) and
its intensity. Finally, you can merge text and background using
the Transparency options. The slider controls the transparency
(left means opaque, the more to the right you move it the more
transparent the element becomes) and the selection allows you
to control how the transparency effect is applied.

The Map options are also very interesting:

You can have up to three group of colors (so you could create menus
having different colors when they're active). If you select
antialiased, DVD-lab will use all three groups together and create
antialiased (objects having smoother edges) edges.

A button can have 3 states: Normal, Selected and Activated (just

like in a webbrowser, normal is a normal hyperlink, selected means
you're hovering over the link with your mouse - on this page the
color of the link will slightly change - and activated means you've
clicked on the link). As buttons use color 3 by default, you should
only move the 3rd slider to achieve whatever effect you desire. As you can see, by
default, selected buttons are pink.

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When working with menu backgrounds it can be quite difficult to select an element.
That's where the Layers menu (Lyrs) comes in handy:

All elements on the menu page are shown, and clicking on one will
select it in the preview area.

As you can put multiple objects on top of each other, the 4 layer buttons also come in
handy. They'll allow you to bring an object to the front, push it back, and bring change
its layer:

The last two buttons shown above also allow you to align objects. For more alignment
options, select Menu - Align:

With that in mind I think you're ready to create any kind of basic menu. But DVD-lab
doesn't stop here. In the Menu menu, you'll find the Effects submenu which has some
interesting entries:

I won't go into detail here but feel free to

experiment with those functions.

If you've created a nice looking menu that you might want to use for later on, the Export
menu might come in handy.

Here you can export a menu in a format that

Mediachance's menu creator can process.
Alternatively, you can export a menu as a
template and add it to DVD-lab. Similarly, you can
import menus using the import menu and load an

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exported menu using the Load Menu... function

Merge to background will merge all menu items

you have added to the background (thus removing
any button programming).

External S-Picture allows you to import a subtitle

overlay image defining the buttons. You'd then have to create buttons using the group
hotspot feature (draw a hotspot around the area that you want a button to be, then link
it as any regular button).

Here is my 2nd menu. Now let's link one of those buttons to an

To link a button to another menu page, or a position in the movie, select the button,
right click and select the appropriate element from the menu. Shown below is how I
linked the play movie button:

A linked button will be shown with a orange rectangle around it, and the name of the
item it links to just below in red. In addition, all linked buttons get a number (shown in
yellow). The number indicates how the buttons can be navigated (you'll jump from
button 1 to button 2 to button 3 etc.).

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Something rather essential is the First Button. On each page, one button has to be
selected by default: the first button. You can set a button to be the first button by
selecting it, then right clicking in the preview area and selecting Set as First Button.

Besides the colors, there's yet another button property you can configure. Click on the
Link tab in the properties to access it:

If the selected button had a link defined, the dropdown list would
not show a NOP (NOP means the button isn't linked). Alternatively to
the right click menu, you could select a button and assign a link to it
using this menu.

Button Visibility is interesting. You could define buttons that are

invisible by default, but become visible if they are selected. A good
example of that is text underlines that are often used on commercial
DVDs. To create a text underline, draw a rectangle below a text
item, then set its visibility to Invisible Normal so that it will only
become visible when selected. Invisible Selected means the element
would be invisible when selected, and Invisible All creates an item
that is always invisible (but can still be selected - that's how you
create hidden extras ;).

Finally, if you want to prevent accidental moving of the button, check Lock Position.

In the PBC options, you can configure even more:

Every menu can have a Timeout. This means that after a certain
amount of time, an action automatically happens. You might have
noted that many commercial DVDs start playing the main movie
without you doing anything - all you have to do is wait for a minute
or so. If you set a timeout, you can create the same effect.

Force-Select Btn: selects the button that is active by default (this is

where you use the numbers assigned to buttons when you link
them), and Force Activate Btn: is the button that is activated after
the menu time-outs.

If you want to add an audio track to the menu, you can simply drag
& drop it from the assets to the menu window. And in here, you

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could delete it again. The same goes for a video background. If you've added a
background audio / video, the following two tracks are shown below the menu preview:

Clicking on the x will also remove the track.

Now there's one last thing to be done: Be default DVD-lab auto routes the buttons. Every
menu needs programming that tells the player how the user can get from one button to
the next. By default, Auto-Route is selected, and it creates useful navigation (when
buttons are ordered vertically, you can use the up and down buttons to navigate, when
buttons are ordered horizontally, you can use the left and right buttons to switch
between them). If you prefer to link buttons on your own, uncheck this option, and the 4
link buttons become active.

In order to link buttons on your own, you'll first have to make the links visible. You do
this by clicking on the navigation button, then selecting one of the options:

Show from Selected Object only shows the links from the
currently selected menu item, or you can show them for all
items on a menu page.

Here's an example how one of my menus was automatically linked by DVD-lab:

Links using the up button are red, down is green, left would be
blue and right would be yellow.

Last but not least, the group hotspot feature. Look at the following image containing a
regular text button, and a rectangular area that is set to be invisible by default.

Then you can group those two items together by drawing a

group hotspot area around them (the currently active area).
Now, if the button is selected, both elements become active
in the color that you have selected. While not selected,
Chapters is not underlined but still visible. When selected,
Chapters will be underlined.

Now you are perfectly capable to create a complex menu system. At some point you'll
want to verify if your menus really work. That's where the simulator comes in. On top of
every menu page, you have three buttons. A blue one with a play sign, a red one

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(currently gray as it's inactive) to stop the simulation, and finally one to activate menu
links. You can start the simulation pressing the play button. DVD-lab will then show you
the regular navigational buttons you have on your DVD player remote:

By default, the simulator only works for one page and links are not active. However, if
you press the Follow Links button, you can jump in between menus.

Now it's perhaps time to have a look at the navigation programming overview. Double
click on Connections in the project window:

As you can see, the disc

starts out with the root
menu, where you get to
choose from my two
movies. Then there's one
main menu for each
movie, with the Smallville
one having an audio
track. Both movie menus
allow you to play the
movie.

As it is now, playing a
movie is a dead end. The
user has to press the Title button to get back to the main menu and there's no automatic
return to a menu after the movie has played. We'll change that in a bit.

Wouldn't it be nice to have some kind of motion transition between the menus? DVD-lab
has a bunch of built-in templates to achieve this. To get to these templates, press the
wizard wand button, then select Menu Transition...

Then you can select the effect and the menus affected.

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This
example
shows how a
transition
between the
main menu
and the
main menu
for the
movie
Phantoms is
achieved.

There are 38
different
transition
templates,
and you can additional determine the speed of the transition using the Hold A, Transition
and Hold B parameters. Hold A indicates how long the original menu is shown before the
transition starts, Transition indicates the length of the transition effect, and Hold B
indicates how long the new menu is shown in the transition, before the player actually
switches to the menu page.

When you press Proceed, DVD-lab will encode the transition, import the movie asset and
automatically create the proper links if a link between the From and To menu already
exists.

If you go back to the connections, you'll see a circle symbol in the link from the main
menu to the movie menus.

As you can see, the

chapter menu is already
there, but pay no
attention to this, we'll
create that shortly.

Also note how the movie

now has a link (the black
one) back to the menu.
You can create such a
link by selecting the
Draw Links button, then
drag and drop from the
circle on the right side of
the movie to the menu
page.

In case you did not have a menu link defined when creating the transition video, you'll
have to insert a blank menu page, add the drag and drop the transition video item to the

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menu, link the menu button in the start menu to go to the transition menu, and create
an end of play link to the motion menu to go to the menu page you want the transition
to lead to, using the same mechanism as when linking from the movie back to the menu.

If you change your menus, the transition menus become outdated. To save you some
work, you can simply right click on the transition symbol and select Rebuild Transition.

To finalize our menus, let's create a nice animated chapter selection menu:

As
previously
explained,
you can add
thumbnails
from the
actual
movie using
the
thumbnails
button
(that's the
lowermost
button to
the left of a
menu page)
and
selecting
the
appropriate
chapter.
Then you
link the
thumbnails
to the
appropriate chapters as you'd link any other button.

A note on that: Doing it that way will make the entire thumbnail a button. If you'd prefer
to have a border around the thumbnail, which constitutes the button (so the area around
a thumbnail would be selected rather than the image itself), you should create a non
filled rectangle and use it as button.

Okay, so far we have a standard non animated menu. Now this is where the magic

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begins. From the wizard menu select Render Motion Menu...

In this
screen,
you
once
again
see a

preview of what you're getting. Motion Objects are all items that can be animated. In our
case, we have 4 movie thumbnails representing the first frame of a chapter.

In Global Settings you can indicate how long the menu animation lasts. As it is
configured now, the menu will loop after 10 seconds.

If you were to uncheck Render this object in the final clip, then the currently selected
object (also shown with a red border in the preview area), would not be animated.

Using the slider and the fine scrub area, you can fine-tune the start position of the
animation. Repeat if Shorter would be useful if not all Motion Objects have the same
playlength. Those with a shorter length would then be looped before the entire menu
loops. Shuffle loop point means that not every item would loop at the same time.

Once you're done configuring, make sure there's enough space in the Temporary Folder,
then press Render.

DVD-lab will now export the motion menu as an AVI file, that you have to encode to a
DVD compliant MPEG-2 file before you import the encoded motion menu. After importing,
drag and drop the asset to the appropriate menu page. The following warning will
appear.

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There is an alternative to creating motion menus. If you can live with one of the chapter
selection templates DVD-lab offers, you can use DVD-lab's automatic chapter menu
selection feature. To access it, press the wizard button and select Add Scene Selection
menus...

Here you
have to
select for
which
movie
(Movie)
you want
to
generate
a chapter
selection
menu,
and you
also have
to
indicate
which
menu
links to this chapter selection menu (Parent menu). Then select a template and press OK
to get started.

This will insert the appropriate menus, but you'll still have to go through the Render
Motion Menu wizard and encode the menus.

Now we're basically done, but before we compile our project, let's review:

We have a main menu

linking to the two movie
menu via a transition
video. Each movie menu
links to the first chapter
of the movie, back to the
main menu, and to a
chapter selection menu.
This in turn links to the
appropriate chapters in
the movie, back to the
movie menu, and it's an
animated looping menu.

The configuration for the

2nd movie would be the
same.

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Now it's time to compile the project so press the Compile button.

In the

compilation window, configure the Output Folder and Temporary Folder (if you can put
them on two different harddisks, it will greatly speed up the process).

When using DVB content, you might have to select the Alternative Multiplexer Engine,
but try the Main engine first. The alternative engine is less sensitive to possible problems
in the MPEG-2 stream and accepts streams that are not 100% specs compliant (but then
don't expect every player to handle such streams perfectly).

If you have not created a frame index before, Create/Use Frame-Index for better Chapter
accuracy should be checked now.

If you want to continue working on the project during compilation, or start working on a
new project, select Run on Background. If you check Test Compile, a project with dummy
video data will be created. This allows you to quickly get a project for testing the menu
navigation and features. If you check Automatically Start Recording, DVD-lab will write
the output to a DVD after compilation. I suggest that you first check the compiled output
in a software DVD player before burning.

Once compilation is over and you have checked out the project, you can burn the project.

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Select your burner (Device) if

you have multiple burners. In
the Options, you can also select
a name for the disc.

If you press on Hybrid DVD

Writing, you can add data files
to your project.

Press Write to start burning.

This document was last updated on February 4, 2007

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