Wedding DVD layout.
 

I've just completed my first wedding job and am curious as to how you experienced professional wedding videographers present your DVD.
I was thinking of the following menus on one DVD:

Highlights
Wedding Preperation
Wedding Ceremony
Reception.

How do you organise your footage on a DVD?

It all depends on how the final edit is presented. If it's one long continuous "documentary" flow then there really aren't any chapters. In this case I use something like:

Play Movie
Scenes
Highlights

The "Scenes" Menu is just a quick index to specific events of the day and might include things like, Vows, Entrance, First Kiss, Ring Exchange, Toasts, Bouquet Toss, etc.

But footage with a cinematic edit might contain a distinctive seperation of each event so you could use something like above as well but add one more menu:

Play Movie
Chapters
Highlights
Scenes

The "Chapters" menu might apply to things you cite in your post.

Again, it all depends on how convenient you want your DVD to be for your client. I've also skipped menus entirely and just put chapter marks every 5 minutes.

dvd layout
 

also fo rus it depends on which package they purchase. If they want honeymoon picture story then this is on the DVD a its own section. And also if we film the reception then this to is a part of the DVD as its own section.

Hi Dennis,

I have a main page that lists Play Movie, Chapters (leads to menu #2) and Special Features (leads to the last chapter) which has the highlights, bloopers, or extended scenes from longer toasts or the receiving line. There are usually 5 or 6 total pages with 20 - 30 chapter markers. Final Cut Studio makes it very easy to place markers on the Final Cut Pro timeline that are then imported automatically to DVD Studio Pro when you encode the MPEG2 file. You can then just drag the DVD assets to the Chapters button on the main page and specify Create Chapter Index. That brings up a theme menu so you can select the design that matches your main page. The name of the chapters, that navigation and the order is all automatic. Pretty nifty. I just tweak the poster frame for each chapter marker and add custom text to each page. Clients can select their own theme as well:

http://tinyurl.com/2ygadj

I have a similar DVD structure

Main Menu
- Play all
- Scene Selection submenu
- Bonus Feature submenu

Scene Selection
- a list of all major chapter points

Bonus Features
- Highlights video
- Preparation

I have a lot of other stuff that goes to the bonus features such as bloopers, dedications, photo session. Usually the bloopers is the big hit.

I also have a forth menu called Playback Settings. I do multi-lingual menus display (English, SPanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean .. depends on the needs of the client). And sometmies I have an option for background audio settings since I usually have 2 audio tracks for the entire DVD.

Do a search on this forum for a thread which offered a few options... I believe it was almost or over a year ago now but there were some good responses

I do a 30-40 minute main feature (almost like an extended highlights in terms of shooting and editing) as well as the 3-5 minute highlights and then full length speeches/toasts and the ceremony. The menu would therefore have: highlights, main feature, and special features or chapters depending on the wedding. That is also where I would put love stories, same-day edits etc.

Patrick

Thanks for the feedback y'all!

I authored a DVD using Encore and output to Flash format. You can take a look to see the layout.

I removed all the video (FLV) files as I don't want to disclose too much of my client's video. So if you clicked a link to see a video, there will be no response.

http://lacolor.com/video/TracyChuckFlash/
(Click the "Next" button on the company logo screen.)

Limited time only. I will remove this link later.