creating menus with macromedia director

Hi, I wanted to create an animated menu with MM Director8, which shows some scenes of the movie in a little "window". I made the backround with Photoshop and imported an .avi, created with Dvd2avi an Vdub. The problem appears when I export the result from MM: The movie plays to fast and stutters, even if I don`t use any compression, it looks awful. Does anybody know a solution for this? Thanks in advance, TB

Is the movie file imported into the director file? Or is it a seperate file that the director file calls... Are you using sorenson squeeze? Are you planning to use this as a dvd menu?

Yes I want to import the menu into Maestro. Sorry, what`s sorenson squeeze, is it anything in Director? And yes, I imported the .avi into Director and added it to the Photoshop backround.Then tried to export everything from there.. Thanks, TB

I was interested in in sorenson squeeze becuase that is something that Flash uses to import video clips (at varying quality settings), and i think it has been at some point been implemented into director... I assume you viewed your original video clip and it looks fine. It seems the problem might be the codec you are using to compress the video and or lack thereof. Uncompressed video will play off your harddrive very chopply. From what you are saying it sounds like the problem lies in the speed at which the video plays, and not in the image quatity itself. Am I wrong? If this is the case, I would try using a different codec, or if you want to keep the video uncompressed, encode this video to mpeg using tmpg and then try viewing it (you have to anyway for maestro). I hope this is of some help. B

I tried both: Exporting with different codecs (windowsintern ones and huffyuv) and exporting uncompressed and then used CCE. But even when I choose uncompressed in Director the output is much smaller than the original movie.. Strange program.. But I don`t care anymore, because I`m going to get AfterEffects soon and as I hear in the forum here, that`s a very cool prog..;) Thanks anyway, greetings, TB

Yah... After Effects is a great program and after you initally learn it you shouldn't have any problems with it. I must say though that using Director seemed like a good idea in order to get by with what you allready had, but video is really not what it is made for. Good Choice B