Creating Highlight buttons

[Jeff Bellune]

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]

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]

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]

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.