If you watch many DVD’s one thing you will notice is that menus don’t just “pop” on the screen. The more elaborate menus actually “build” on the screen before the menu buttons actually appear. For example, the movie below is a small quicktime movie of a dvd motion menu I created in Motion. Notice that the text for the buttons do not appear until after the arrows and spheres have finished animating.

You can set a menu loop point after the build so that when your menu loops in your DVD player, the intro build will not play each time your menu loops. This is so easy to set up in Motion it’s actually scary.

Below is the timeline of the finished DVD menu in Motion. I’ve moved the playhead to the point in time where the build has finished - at 4:15 frames.

1. Make sure nothing is selected in your motion timeline, then press “m” to set a marker.

2. To edit the marker, right or control click on the marker and choose “edit marker” from the list.

3. The edit marker window will appear. From the “Type” drop down menu, choose, “DVD Menu Loop”, then click ok

In the timeline the green marker updates to reflect that it is now a DVD Menu Loop marker.

Now import your menu into DVD Studio Pro, and click on the menu to load the menu into the inspector. Make sure the general tab is selected. Notice that under the “Loop Point” thumbnail, the loop point is set at 4:15. This is exactly the place we set the loop point marker in Motion. How cool is that? We no longer need to set the loop point in DVD Studio pro, because Motion will do that for us.

If you are interested in how to build a DVD motion menu from scratch in Motion, click here