DVD Menu Challenge

[John Rich]

One way to do it might be to make eight different menus and use auto-activate to connect them. Check out a tutorial by Dave Garrett (google “Doogs” ) called “full color subpicture highlights” under the Encore 1.5 section, for a nice discussion.
I never used the second menu that Dave uses here for the “activated” state” and it seems to work ok.

John

JOHNR

[All-missouri]

The red boxes that are showing up are because the buttons are too close together, as you know. I way to get around this is to not include the entire snapshot as a button. What might be the best way to keep most of the picture in the button “area” is to create an “empty” layer for each button in Photoshop and not include the actual polaroid in the layer set. With the “empty” layer, create a box and set the fill to zero. In Encore, resize that layer to take up how big you want the actual clickable area for the button to be. If you have problems understanding this let me know and I should be able to send you a PSD that shows the technique a little bit more.

[All-missouri]

Nevermind most of what I said in that post. Take the white part of the polaroid out of the layerset though. Leave the layer that takes the video and the highlight. That should make the button small enough so that it doesn’t interfere with it’s neighbors.

[Carlos Sanchez]

I appreciate your help, would you be able to send me that psd, please.

Thanx alot

[All-missouri]

https://www.freewebs.com/pilotdvd/Polaroid%5FMenu.psd

Hopefully clicking on that will let you download a sample I did pretty quickly. Hopefully that gives you some guidance.

[Carlos Sanchez]

Still doesn’t work, what I am most interested in is when highliting a button the text will appear on the bottom left corner with a title of what the polaroid is. See link for an example menu, check towards the end were you hoover the mouse over a polaroid text appears down below in the bottom left corner and the text in the polaroid disapears, i now how to make it disapear, but i need help in making the other text appear. I watch the tutorail and have tried the psd file but i am still strugling. please help

Thank you

[All-missouri]

Okay, I wasn’t quite sure which aspect you were going for, but now that I know.. here’s what you do.

As John pointed out, the best approach is to create a separate menu for each button that is selected. For instance, if you have 8 polaroids, then you will have 8 menus.

In each menu, the text in the lower left will not be in any layer sets and it will reflect which button is selected.
Also on each buttons menu, set it up so that it will have a moving video in the picture while the others are all stills.

[George Wing]

[carlos sanchez] “See link for an example menu, check towards the end were you hoover the mouse over a polaroid text appears down below in the bottom left corner and the text in the polaroid disapears”

If you are using auto-activate buttons to do a “switched menu” technique, then don’t hover your mouse pointer over a button. Use the navigational arrows instead (up/down/left/right).

Regards,
George

[John Rich]

I

[John Rich]

I was just messing around with this, and to me it appears that one cannot have a video button on either side of the menu with the ” selected button” as the button link has to go to another menu with autoactivate selected. However, if you have eight buttons, then 6 of them could have button motion.

YOu might be able to get around this, by creating short clips of your destination movie for the two contiguous buttons, and then shrinking them in Preiere or AE and using this as a motion background. I think I’ll put this together as a screen capture, and if you want to see it let me know.
John

JOHNR