Encore “Highlight” issue

[Daniel Ludwig]

Curt,
the button-highlights are very limited for DVD depending on the DVD-specs. it´s a 2bit RLE-grafics that containg all information.

so you have only 4 different colors that you can use for 1! menu at a time, or at least 1 color and 4 different saturations/opacities.

if you have ever seen a menu that containing more that that – that´s not possible. in most cases authoring-programms using a workarround like layered menus to give you the illusion it would work, but it wont.

layered menus have some other disadvantages, they couldn´t have audio and they are very, very slow in reaction.

so the conclusion is:
you can only use 4 colors at a time in your menus, or 1 color with 4 different opacities.

NOTE: button-highlights have NO anti-aliasing

cheers

danny

[Curt Pair]

Danny,

Thanks for your time and information. Since my original posting, I’ve spent quite a few hours researching the specs for Encore and making highlight buttons, it seems as though my search criteria was “off” for what I was looking for (or I didn’t know what to call it!).

I’ve found that Encore allows three “states” for buttons: normal, selected and activated. Most folks who author DVDs use the same “state” or color choice for selected and activated states…

This is from Encore’s documentation:

“A color set consists of a maximum of 15 colors, each with its own opacity setting. The colors are divided among one color group for the normal state and two highlight groups. Each highlight group contains up to six colors: three for the selected state and three for the activated states. Any button can reference either of the highlight groups. You can use the highlight groups to distinguish between different types of buttons on the same menu. For example, you could assign Highlight Group 1 to the main navigation buttons in the menu (such as Play Movie), while using Highlight Group 2 for the common navigation buttons (such as Next and Previous). The subpicture is limited to three colors (each represented by a layer in the button set), but you can change those three colors and their visibility for each state in the color set. (DVD regulations allow only a limited bandwidth for button subpictures and subtitles.)

Think of the subpicture as a paint-by-number image, with areas designated for colors 1, 2, or 3. The color set is the color key that determines what colors (if any) are used for colors 1, 2, and 3. In addition, all three colors can have different definitions and opacity settings in each button state. By varying the color definitions for each state, you can change the colors of each area; by varying the opacity of the colors in each state, you control whether or not that area is even visible in a particular state.

You build the image used for the subpicture by creating separate layers for each color. The layer names must include the following prefixes: (=1) for areas using color 1, (=2) for areas using color 2, and (=3) for areas using color 3.”

Currently, I’m successfully using 7 colors in my buttons. I’ve burned a few test DVDs and they work perfectly!

However, I’ve learned that the sub-pictures/highlights need to be a solid color without transparency, gradients and the like. Further you are correct in that the anti-aliasing doesn’t work for sub-pictures.

To view more in the “help menu” of Encore, I found a TON of info under “Button Subpictures,” and “Menu Color Sets.”

I hope others find this useful and don’t spent hours pulling out their hair trying to figure this out…

I hadn’t made a menu this “complicated” with Encore in quite a while… once I started reading… it all started pouring back in!

Good luck!

Curt

Curt Pair
Picture This Productions
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[Maurice Diaz]

This has always worked for me: Changing the subpicture highlight layer name prefixes from (=1) to (=2) or (=3). If it doesn’t work, and you have Photoshop, try saving the current menu (that doesn’t work) as PSD file with a different name. Then delete the current menu(s) that don’t work from your project and clean the media cache database from Edit | Preferences. In Photoshop, rename the layers with the new prefix and save the menu. Import the saved PSD file as a menu and try again.

Maurice Diaz
virtualartmedia.com