DVD Menu with Premiere Pro
 

I have 24 different clips that Im editing, around 40 min, how can I make a DVD menu on Premiere pro cs3 that will break down my movie into two different option menus... for example... the two subjects are boys and girls. can I make a picture that if you click on it it shows all the girl scenes and if you click another picture, you see the boy scenes.
Also, today is the first time I edited with allot of clips on Premiere pro. At first I loaded 24 clips, totaling 40 min. and it said low on memory to save and proceed with caution. then I loaded 4 clips at a time and edited them. after 30 min or so it freezes and shuts down. What is the big problem? am I doing something wrong? what can I do? I have a Dell XPS 420, 3 gig ram, Intel 2 Quad 2.40 GHz processor

You can't actually do this in Premier. You'll build the DVD and menus in Encore. Yes, it can be done, probably most easily by creating menu images in Photoshop. It's not hard, but you might want to look at the Encore documentation to get some ideas on how to build it. An extremely basic menu using your example might function like this:
__________
| BOYS | - - - Boys footage
| |
| GIRLS | - - - Girls footage
__________

This is not uncommon. But if these were SD clips it sounds like your system might be underpowered. Check the Adobe Web site for system configuration guidelines. If your system doesn't meet minimum specs, expect to run into these kinds of problems.

thanks for response tripp

Is a message about low memory really common? I haven't ever seen it, and I've done a lot of work on older laptop with 1 GB RAM and Vista (!). I have exactly opposite problem: I have 4 gigs of RAM and have hard time making Premiere use more than, say, 600-800 megs. It's constantly refreshing thumbnails from disk and looks like it could use more memory, but it doesn't :-/

Ive noticed that it does it when I load allot of clips, like the other day I loaded 25 clips(total 40 min) and it shut down on me within 5 min of editing.

Victor,

The low memory problem should not be happening for you on the machine you are working on. 25 clips and 40 min is not a lot. I have a quad core machine with 2 gigs ram and just finished a project with over 500 clips totalling over 5 hours plus about 100 still photographs. My project took a while to open and was a little slow to respond as it grew, but I never got the low memory message.

Edit->Preferences->General-> Optimize Rendering for:

Perfornce or Memory.

If you are getting the errors change it to memory and they should stop. I did not notice and performance hits but I stopped getting the warning.

Awesome!!! hopefully this works

Here is the problem I keep having!!! I have tried solutions suggested, please help. I loaded about 20 min of clips.

I had a computer that would do that all the time.... it ended up being too many programs
were being loaded in the background...

Here is a way to tweek your computer so it wont happen when you edit the footage....

Videoguys Advanced WinXP Tweaks for Non-Linear Video Editing

To the original question.... some programs let you drag the video onto the DVD menu button(s) and then you can scan the video to a shot that would work as a button that
visually describes the video associated with that button...

for example, you take footage of Disney Land.... the edited footage starts out with the entry of Disney Land with the signage saying " Disney Land " . When you place a button
on the DVD menu you scan the footage until you see the "Disney Land " sign and you use that for the button, the software just grabs that frame and creates a still for you...

Check out the software you plan on using as a DVD menu generator, I think most if not all
do this for you.

And of course like the post above, you can also create custom buttons in programs like Photoshop.

Yeah, that is the error I used to get which stopped when I changed the setting to Memory instead of Performance. Ray has a good point. If you press Ctrl. Alt. Delete and goto the processes tab at the bottom it should show you a count of total processes. I try to keep my Windows XP machine in the low 30s. Often I find people are closer to 60 or 70!

here's some more info/help on background programs and how to get them in check...

Killing programs that start automatically to improve speed - CNET Community Newsletter: Q&A Forums

thank you, by the way, might it be because I load abot 15 clips at one time?