From the course: Learning Premiere Elements 2021

Adding menu markers to your movie

From the course: Learning Premiere Elements 2021

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Adding menu markers to your movie

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- [Instructor] One of the most popular ways to share your movies is by distributing them as DVDs. Nicely enough, Premier Elements has tools built right into it for creating scene and chapter markers, as well as tools for designing your own disc menus. In this session, we'll look at how to create the menu markers for your movie's timeline. We're also going to look at the different kinds of menu markers and how they interact with your movie menus. To create a menu marker or a scene marker, I'm going to drag the play head to the very beginning of the movie. And I could create a menu marker simply by clicking on the markers button here in the upper left hand corner of the timeline and selecting set menu marker. Or I could right click on the play head and select set menu marker. There are a couple of elements to a menu marker. There's this name right here. There's this marker type. And there's this thumbnail offset. Now both the name and the thumbnail here are going to appear on the scene menu of the DVD. So let's give it a name that's short, but descriptive. We'll call this one, "The Recipe". Now the thumbnail offset is going to appear as a small thumbnail on our scene menu. Now right now, the thumbnail, which is where the play head is located right on the timeline now, is kind of ambiguous. We can't really tell what this is. It's not very attractive and it's certainly not very descriptive. We can change what appears as a thumbnail without actually changing the position of the marker itself. Notice to the right of the thumbnail is a little time code. And if I click on that time code and drag, we're going to scrub through the movie here and we can pick a spot, that's a nice one right there, that we can use for our thumbnail. Notice that it doesn't change the position of the marker itself. Only what appears as the thumbnail. Below it, there's a check box. If we check that, our thumbnail will be displayed as a 30-second loop. I think that's a little distracting, to have a bunch of little thumbnails, each showing live video, but that's entirely up to you. I leave it unchecked and we'll just have a still photo thumbnail. Now there are actually three different kinds of markers you can add to your timeline. There's scene markers, which is going to be what the vast majority of them are. These will link to the scene menu of your movie menu or your DVD menu. There are main menu markers. You can have one of those in each movie, and that will link to a link that's right on the main menu of your DVD. And there's a stop marker, and a stop marker has a very specific use. We're going to talk about it later in the course here. Never put a stop marker at the end of your movie. That will kind of bug up the transcoding process. So don't do that. But a stop marker does have a specific use. And we'll talk about it, as I say, later in the course here. So we're going to leave this as a scene marker. Click OK. And when we do, there at the position of the play head, you can see, we have created a little green dot that is our scene menu marker. Now we can change the position in that menu marker by dragging it around. And if we right click on it, we can clear it completely, but let's leave it there. Click on the timeline and we'll move our play head down the timeline and create our second marker. There's a good spot. Right click on the play head, select set menu marker. And I'm going to call this one "Dipping". Leave everything else as is. Go a little further down the timeline and we'll create one more. Right click, set menu marker, and call this one, "Sweet Love". Everything looks good. Click OK. And there are the menu markers for our DVD. Now later in this course, we're going to show you how to add movie menus, but for now I've added a placeholder menu, so you can see how these markers interface with the menu itself. Just go over to the toolbar on the right, click on tools, and select movie menu. In here, in the movie menu adjustments workspace, I'm just going to drag on this scene here to expand the panels so we can see. We've got our main movie menu, a link to our scene menu, or we can click on the little thumbnail here in the lower left. There's our scene menu and there on our scene menu are our three scene movie menu markers: "The Recipe", "Dipping", and "Sweet Love", using the thumbnails that we created. And in our next session, we're going to take a look at how to actually create one of these DVD movie menus.

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