Newbie Question - Multiple tracks before Menu

[AOwald]

Hello.

I'm hoping someone can give me some guidance on what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to produce a DVD where before I have my main menu, I have little clips play; something similar to the format of how some movie studios makes their DVDs with previews of other films, like Disney DVDs for example.

I have my first play video set, then I would like 4 more little videos to play before the menu appears. However, I'm finding it difficult to alter this arrangement as the menu appears right after the first play video. I'm not able to see my preview clips before the menu.

Is it possible to have my first play video, followed by 4 individual video files, then my menu? So basically, it would look something like this:

Title 1, Chapter 1 - First play video - video.mpg
Title 2, Chapter 1 - video01.mpg
Title 3, Chapter 1 - video02.mpg
Title 4, Chapter 1 - video03.mpg
Title 5, Chapter 1 - video04.mpg
Menu

Presently, my production is looking like this:

Title 1, Chapter 1 - First play video - video.mpg
Menu

I'm very new to DVD authoring, so I'm thinking there is a way to make this work, however I'm just not seeing it. So far, the only way to make this happen is to not include a menu at all, but I'd really like to have a menu for sake of moving around the DVD.

Do I need to use another program to join up the video files before the menu starts?

Please help.

[GeorgeW]

One thing you can try:

1) insert a black background menu with an invisible button, and have the menu auto timeout after one second.
2) add you regular menu that you want to show after everything plays
3) the invisible button from step #1 should have a playlist of whatever titles you want to play when the disc is inserted, and then at the end of the playlist should be the regular menu in step #2

[Devil]

An alternative is to make a new "first start" file by using any editor, putting in your original "first start", with all your other ones butted up to it and each other, render it and use this rendered file.

[AOwald]

Great ideas both of you! I had originally thought about merging the videos into one, but that just seemed like a lot of work trying to make the video come out right. I think I'm going to try George's idea first, that seems pretty clever and a bit less editing required on my part, just arranging. And once more, adding to that black auto-time out menu idea, I could even make that into a useful screen, displaying a logo or even a disclaimer about the video, time out into actual videos, then proceeding with the real useful menu. BRILLIANT! Thanks both of you!