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Activity Forums Adobe Encore DVD Creating Highlight buttons

  • Jeff Bellune

    April 27, 2009 at 4:15 pm

    Subpicture highlights are 2-bit, 4-color overlays. They can’t have anti-aliasing, gradients, drop shadows or any other effects.

    You need After Effects, Premiere Pro or any other editing application to animate the boy with the text balloon. Then use the output as a video background for the menu.

    -Jeff

    The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0

  • Jon Geddes

    April 28, 2009 at 4:18 am

    If you can, separate the colors of the button highlight into different layers. For instance, all the orange in the tv will be on a layer named ‘(=1)Orange Highlight’, all the black will be on a layer named ‘(=2)Black Highlight’, and all the gray will be on a layer named ‘(=3)Gray Highlight. Then go into the ‘Edit Menu Color Set’in Encore, create a new color set, and adjust the colors to your liking.

    Jon Geddes
    Motion Graphics Designer
    http://www.precomposed.com

  • Jurgen Willocx

    April 28, 2009 at 12:10 pm

    What a limitation those 4bits colors. I’ve dropped the TV and gradient. But now the highlighted orange text is pixelated…Can I do somethins about that?

    https://i43.tinypic.com/avhk7m.jpg

  • Joe Bowden

    April 28, 2009 at 3:12 pm

    The first thing to consider is using a text highlight at all. They nearly always don’t look very good. But as you can see, a straight line renders out OK as a highlight.

    If you really must have a text highlight, consider using a simpler font. Simple sans-serif fonts will look better with a button highlight than more complex fonts.

    If you really must use that particular font, then consider creating two subpicture layers: a stroked subpicture layer and another subpicture layer for the inner part of the stroke. Set the color of the stroke to a color close to your menu background color, with less opacity than the inner part of the stroke.

    If that still doesn’t give you what you want, consider using a layered menu (which must be built by hand in Encore with buttons set to auto-activate that link to duplicate menus that have the “highlight” you want with no subpicture layer restrictions on colors/opacities). But the caveat is this is a lot of manual work linking all the menus, and that these menus will not behave as expected in a software DVD: you must click the button to advance to the next menu showing your button state.

    Myself, I tend to go for the simplest option, which is what you’ll find on most Hollywood DVDs.

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