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Glows for highlighted buttons?
Is there any way to use actual button states that were created in photoshop, such as glows and blurs? So far all the highlights default to the default menu colours and have no alpha channels – doesn’t look very good. I’d like to have a glow appear around a button when the user selects the button, then have the glow change colour when the user activates the button.
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5 Replies
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There is no way to do what you want by using subpictures to highlight a button. As you have noticed overlays are always hard-edged.
The effect you want requires multiple versions of your menu – literally one menu page for every glow/blur combination you desire. You then use buttons that Auto Activate and route to the appropriate menu page. (see Encore’s help files for info on auto activate)
This can get pretty tedious if you have a lot of buttons. It’s even more complex if you want to indicate that a button has been activated in addition to being in the selected state.
The hard-edge nature of subpictures is due to the nature of the DVD spec and the hardware that accomplishes the overlay in DVD players. It is not an Encore imposed limitation.
Hope this helps.
Dave
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Thanks for the info. We used to send our DVD authoring out after I had finished designing the menu. I am not sure what software that company used, but all I had to do was code the Photoshop button layers starting with a (#) and an (@) for normal, and selected. I always used glows and such for highlighted buttons. The guy told me that if I coded the layers in Photoshop, they would automatically be recognized in his software. Does anyone know what this software might be? I thought it was Encore, but I guess I was wrong.
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Your DVD Authoring company were probably using Pinnacle Impression Pro.
geo.
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Thanks for the response. How does Pinnacle compare to Adobe Encore? So far I am happy with Encore, but there seems to be a few things missing to really enhance the look of DVD menus.
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Impression is no longer in play as near as I can tell. I was able to find some discussion forums for it out on Pinnacle’s website, but otherwise it doesn’t look as if they acknowledge it as a product.
The fancy buttons looked OK, but menu performance was pretty pokey on most settop boxes I tried it on. Eventually I went back to highlight menus. You can still do cool stuff within that paradigm.
Of course you can do the same thing manually that Impression was doing automatically by using Dave Friend’s suggestion from earlier in this thread.
geo.
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