For the format, it depends what you are going to use the video for. Are you going to burn it to a DVD and share it with others, or is it just for you to look at on your computer? And with the menu, a lot of burning software have okay menus that you can choose from. Just look through the menus on your software.
I'm making a short film at the moment too and I've run into many of the same problems as you. Adobe Premier Pro is amazing for editing raw footage and Adobe After Effects is great for special effects. Now to get a professional looking menu, you can't use the crap that burning softwares offer. You have to use something like TMPGEnc DVD Author. Mostly any DVD authoring program will create proffessional looking menus, but Nero's menu's are horrible so don't think of using that. Also, I'd advise you burning it on a DVD because I mean, you must have worked hard on that so you want people to see. Hope it works out for you.
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
Asus K8V-SE Deluxe Motherboard
200 gb Western Digital HD (7200rpm)
LG 16x DVD ROM
LG GSA-4160B 16x DVD Burner
ATI Radeon 9600 SE Gold Edition 256mb
1 gig DDR 400 OCZ Dual Channel RAM
oh it is deffinately going to be on DVD that is why I want to create a nice menu....i have used some sonicDVD softare in the past that came with my dvd burner....it works and is VERY easy to use, but that is it...nothing special or nice looking. So I am going to try that AUTHOR program you speak of above...
It is going to be a "music DVD" for a band...so I want it to look very nice, so I get more jobs in the future. And I would like to be able to split it up in chapters for each song(about 15).
Thank you for all the help, Ill play around with it.
You may even want to look into DVD Lab. It has a bit of a learning curve to it but you can make some very nice menus with it.
I figured out a couple tricks with Nero so you are not really stuck with their templates or frames, just import what you want for a background and use your graphics app to make an overlay on the menu frames then export it into the folder.
They still have their numbers on the buttons though. Like a person can't figure out there are four buttons on the menu page. They are supposed to fix that eventually.
