Operation Manual

Chapter 9: Disc menus 165
Using menus from the Album
The Disc Menus section of the Album contains a
collection of menus that have been designed for
particular occasions, authoring styles and chapter
counts. Each menu provides a background picture, a
title, a set of chapter buttons (generally with spaces for
thumbnail frames), and a pair of Next page and
Previous page buttons.
The number of chapter buttons per page varies from
one menu design to another, so one criterion for
selecting a menu is the number of clips you want it to
handle. It is generally more convenient for the viewer
to browse a few menu pages with many buttons per
page than many pages of a few buttons each.
During editing, you see all the buttons that the menu
provides. During playback, the only buttons visible are
those to which you have assigned links.
Menus with fewer buttons have more space for
captions; those with many buttons will have abbrevi-
ated captions or none at all. Whether you need captions,
and if so whether they should be simple (“Chapter 1”)
or descriptive (“Cutting the cake”) is a matter of your
authoring style and the content of your movie.
In the VCD and S-VCD formats, the viewer must select
chapters numerically (by keying numbers on the remote
control), so it is usual to provide button captions that
include the chapter number when authoring for these
formats.