When you are linking menu chapters to video clips (or other menus), you can replace "Chapter #" with text of your own choosing.

Currently you can only enter titles that are short enough to fit in the text entry box.

If you want longer titles, you have to EDIT the menu and type the text in the "Button" text box in the menu itself.  That actually works, and you can make very long titles.

The Title text entry box should allow for horizontal scrolling so you can type in longer titles.

For example, I had a simple menu that was just a "Table of Contents" type of listing, but some of the titles were quite long:
     >  "With a Little Bit O' Luck" - Reprise (Doolittle & Ensemble)
     >  "I could have Danced all Night" (Eliza, Mrs. Pearce)

Doing the workaround I suggested (above) is not obvious, and might not work well with "multi-page" menus.

This also has problems in that it will "unlink" any chapter links that might already point to this menu, as noted in this "Feature Request" posting.

Of course, if you make custom menus you don't have this problem.

jsheldon:

Of course, if you make custom menus you don't have this problem.

Only true if you know exactly what chapter text you want at the time of creating the menu in the title editor - and never have to change it using the text entry box in the "menu properties toolbox.

I have complained about that behaviour of the text entry box in Studio 9 and Studio 10 - there are several postings (bug reports and feature requests) on the old web board.

FYI - In Studio 8 the problem did not exist; the caption entry box in the menu properties toolbox was scrollable; you could type as much text as you wanted. In Studio 9 the caption entry teext box became non-scrollable - but if you observe closely the amount of text depends upon the mix of wide/narrow letters in the Windows screen display font and on the display resolution!! Run a high resolution (say 1600 x 1200) and you can type in much more text than on a lower resolution (say 1024 x 768). That is a right PITA if you set the captions on a desktop PC (with a nice large display) and later want to edit them on a laptop PC with a much smaller display.

 IMO it would be an easy change to make the box scrollable again - and set some constant value "cap" on the maximum number of characters if necessary to avoid things overflowing.

Regards,
Richard

Richard - 

You might, in the meantime till it's "fixed" (since it might be forever with Pinnacle), use the workaround (actually it's a technique and works well so you can edit the button titles directly as you wish) in post #61586 on this thread:

http://forums.pinnaclesys.com/forums/thread/58518.aspx

jsheldon:

Richard - 

You might, in the meantime till it's "fixed" (since it might be forever with Pinnacle), use the workaround

I already do   But I still have to be careful to "get it right" first time so I don't need to go back into the title editor to correct something (and thereby get bitten by that PITA bug that deletes all the links and RTMs pointing at that menu).

Regards,
Richard

I know this is an older thread, but I hope someone is still looking at this.

This "workaround" simply will not work for my latest project. I am trying to archive approximately 1000 music videos that I have recorded over the years. On my multi-page menus, I would like to list the artist as well as the song title (i.e. Morrissey - We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful. However, all you can fit is Morrissey - We Hate It When Our Friends Become).

As mentioned earlier in this thread, you can edit the first menu page with the menu editor. If you have 3 or 4 menu pages like this project does, you are stuck using the text box for the subsequent pages which only allow about 31 characters. This works for about 80% of the songs, but definitely not all of them.

I'm not looking for 10 billion characters, but I think 64 characters should cover it.

Hopefully, someone will hear my plea for help and put this on the next list of Studio improvements.

BTW, I'm using Studio 11.1.2.

 

Until such time as the problem (IMO a bug) is resolved you do have a viable workaround:

(a) Edit the menu template; turn the "Previous" and "Next" buttons into "Normal" buttons
(b) Put one copy of this modified menu template on the timeline for every page of the "multi page menu" that you require

You now have absolute freedom in what you put in the button captions on each page - and freedom to control which menu each "Previous" and "Next" button jumps to (so you're not restricted to stepping forward and back by one "page" at a time - you can include "go to first page" and "go to last page", make the navigation go round in a loop or whatever.

HTH
Richard

You are absolutely right. This workaround does work, but it is very messy. I had done that at first, but since I had a "Return to main menu" option, it made my storyboard all funky: It added blank spaces between menu pages and between movie clips. At that point, some of my links became inoperative. I'm not sure if anyone else has run into it, but it was enough of a problem for me to give up the project for now.

I sincerely hope they can fix this problem.

I have seen the "storyboard going funky" as you described:-
It only happens only when the project becomes complex (not sure exactly how complex)
It can be triggered by setting RTMs or by adding music soundtracks under the menus (there may be other triggers too but those are the two that bite me)

In my case the "funkiness" appears to be harmless - affecting the storyboard (and, to a lesser extent, the timeline) display only; I can switch to timeline view and carrry on working (the only thing I see wrong there is that the menu numbers get changed and are no longer in a nice progression adding 1 each time (so for example you might see M1, M2, M4, M6, M7, M11 instead of y#the nice sequence of M1. M2, M3, M4, M5, M6 above the menus.

The problem goes away (temporarily) by saving and reloading the project, and can sometimes go away as a result of making an edit.

To minimise confusion when making a complex project I will add all of the clips and menus and set all of the chapter and inter-menu links, then the very last things I do are to add the background music to the menus and set the RTMs.

Regards,
Richard