How Do I Control Viewer Navigation?

Menu structure is a major issue, but there are other factors involved in controlling how your viewers navigate through the content on the disc. When planning a DVD, ask yourself the following questions to fine-tune the user experience.

(Note that while most $300-plus authoring programs include the features discussed here, playlists and many other sophisticated navigational capabilities are simply not available authoring program under $100.)

What Happens When the Viewer Inserts the Disc (First Play Video)?

When you play a Hollywood DVD, the first thing you typically see is the friendly FBI warning describing the penalties for copying the DVD. The technical term for this is the First Play video, and many authoring programs allow you to add a First Play video to the DVD. This is a completely artistic decision, with one caveat if you insert a First Play video, it's usually best to keep it short, generally around a minute or so, since your viewers will be forced to watch it every time they play the disc.

If you opt not to include a First Play video, the first menu in the project (also called the Top menu) should appear after the viewer inserts the disc. Some programs automatically assign Top menu status to the first menu in the project; with others, you'll specifically have to identify a menu as the Top menu.

If you do insert a First Play video into your project, you may have to designate what happens after the video finishes playing. Typically, you accomplish this by assigning the Top menu as the "end action" for the First Play video. I'll explain this further two questions down.

What Happens if No One Clicks Anything (Menu Timeout)?

OK, the viewer is now at the Top menu, either because there was no First Play video, or because it's already played through. Now you have to plan what happens if no buttons are clicked. This is often a concern for discs produced for trade shows, kiosks, or other unattended uses (not to mention inexperienced DVD viewers). In the event of a power outage at the show, or a nontechnical user running the computer or player, you want the DVD to start playing the desired content automatically after a few moments.

The mechanism used to start the content playing is typically a menu timeout. You set duration, as shown in Figure 8.8, and then enter an End Action to tell the DVD where to go after the timeout period. In Figure 8.8, I'm telling the DVD to wait one minute, then jump to the menu Current State and activate the DV Camcorders button, which will start that video playing.

Figure 8.8. Setting a menu duration and End Action so the content on the DVD automatically starts playing.

If we didn't assign the menu a duration and End Action, the menu would remain onscreen until a viewer clicked a button, which is also acceptable for many applications. If you include a video background or audio file, you can typically have these files play again and again (called looping) until the viewer interrupts by clicking.

What Happens Next (End Action)?

I've mentioned end actions twice, so let's explore the subject more fully. Basically, the End Action is where the viewer goes next, either after a video or slideshow finishes playing, or if viewer interrupts playback, or a menu simply times out. For example, in Figure 8.8, after the one-minute menu timeout, the DVD will play the DV Camcorders video in the Current State menu. If you check Figure 8.3, you'll see that this is the first video in the first menu with content.

Even though your flexibility regarding end actions is very limited in consumer programs, with most prosumer packages you can create an End Action that jumps to any menu or other content in the DVD. If the primary application for the DVD is unattended operation, you'd link all videos via sequential end actions, and then link the last video to the first video to start the loop anew.

With most other DVDs, you may want to choose a different behavior. For example, in my interview DVD, which is not really intended for unattended operation, I wanted the viewer to play through all the videos on each content menu and then return to the Top menu. I accomplish this by setting a return-to-menu flag after the video from the fourth chapter point finishes as shown in Figure 8.9.

Figure 8.9. Setting a return-to-menu flag to go back to the menu after the video from the fourth chapter point stops playing.

The basic rule of thumb is, you ask the same question "what happens next?" for each menu and video or slideshow included in the project, going from button to button, menu to menu. When the end action is to send your viewer to a menu, you of course must revisit the question "what happens if no one clicks anything?" and then deal with the timeout issue.

What About Menu-to-Menu Links?

If you look at Figure 8.3, you'll notice that all three content menus have little home buttons on the bottom right, which the viewer clicks to return to the Top menu. In addition, I could have inserted links on each menu with videos to the other menu with videos just as most Web pages contain links to other pages on the site. I chose not to, forcing the viewer to return to the main menu to view other content pages. However, if you feel the inclusion of menu-to-menu links would enhance the viewing experience for your viewers, by all means include them.