By and large, I like the the Blu-ray "sharing" in Compressor 3.5. However, I think the three motion menus provided will get old quite soon. Has anyone discovered how to make their own, as advertised?
Another issue is file size. A 30 minute sequence produced a .264 file that was 4.94 GB. I know that the menu is in there somewhere, but that seems like a large file for H.264. Toast 10 lets me fit 30 minutes of HD on a regular DVD5.
Anyway, what the hell is an XML template?

Another issue is file size. A 30 minute sequence produced a .264 file that was 4.94 GB. I know that the menu is in there somewhere, but that seems like a large file for H.264. Toast 10 lets me fit 30 minutes of HD on a regular DVD5A regular DVD5 is around 4.38GB so there is not that much difference in size.

The only customization you can do are the Background, Logo and title Graphic, just make 1920 x 1080/ 1280 x 720 videos or PSD's I think. Use named chapter markers as chapters.

This is very limited but it is a start. I still mostly use Toast.

Bluray burners are cheap. I got one and then you can put about 45GB or 2+ hrs of video on a disc. They are also great for backing up.

Nigel: I failed to mention that I was comparing an MPEG2/Toast disc to the H.264/Compressor disc. I was under the impression that an H.264 file would be smaller than an MPEG2 file. Apparently not always. Anyway, back to my actual question. How do we create custom templates?

Olof: From the Apple site:
You can now easily burn a Blu-ray disc or a DVD directly from Compressor. Quickly add a menu to your disc by choosing one of the beautiful Apple-designed HD or SD templates included in Compressor. Because Compressor uses an open XML-based template format, you can import third-party or custom templates for a specific look.

Hey Fred

No word on the supposed Open XML template support yet .. as you note, its certainly on the cards but nothing has come to light at the time of writing.

Andy

I used a PSD file and it worked great (when the encoding worked). Just be sure not to put anything important (title, logo) in the lower third, as the big gray bar will blot it out.

I'm much happier with these menus than with Toast. The two things I would like would be a less obtrusive bar at the bottom, and the ability to turn off the time in the chapter listings.

here you go kids, you heard it here first:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleApplications/Conceptual/CustomizingFinalCutStudioBlu-rayDiscTemplates20090629.pdf

Hmmm user friendly.

LOL! Soon enough it will have a nice GUI wrapped around it Olof ... the question is whether a third party dev will manage to do it before Apple does

For someone used to working with Scenarist or even fully customizing images in DVDSP4 this would be a relatively easy task. However if you've never gotten under the hood with any abstraction-layer editor (something based on WYSIWYG drag-n-drop interfaces) then don't even attempt this workflow as shown in the ADC document; I can guarantee you'll spend more hours scratching your head and trying to fix problems than it's worth.

Thank you, Andy.