Apple DVD Studio Pro 4 - Manual (Page 243)

About Menu Rendering
Depending on how you create your standard menus, they may have to be rendered
into an MPEG-2 video asset when you build your project. The menu must be rendered
if it uses any of the following:
• Assets assigned to a button
• Shapes
• Drop zones
• Text objects
• SIF (MPEG-1 or MPEG-2), 1/2 D1, or cropped D1 video
Standard menus that only use a background (whether still or video), an overlay, and
one or more audio files do not get rendered.
Whether the menu gets rendered or not can be important for a couple of reasons:
• The time it takes: Rendering menus is a process that composites all of the menu
elements, one frame at a time, and creates an MPEG-2 file out of these composited
frames. Depending on your system and the length of your menus, this can take a
significant amount of time to process. See
Menu Preferences for more information.
• Extra processing can affect video: If your menu background video must be rendered,
the extra processing has the potential to change the video a small amount. Anytime
you decode compressed video, process it (such as by compositing shapes or text over
it), then recompress it, you can expect some subtle changes to the background video.
In those cases where you have meticulously encoded your background video before
assigning it to a menu, this extra processing could noticeably change the video.
When SD menus are rendered, they are encoded at 7 Mbps using the one-pass VBR
method. HD menus are rendered at 21 Mbps using the one-pass VBR method.
Choosing the Menu’s Background
The first step in creating a menu is to choose its background. The menu background can
be a still image or a video clip.
Still Images for Backgrounds
You can use a wide variety of graphic formats as still backgrounds in DVD Studio Pro. See
Using Your Graphics Program for a list of supported formats.
243 Chapter 13 Creating Menus Using the Standard Method