Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 12/11/2003, 9:51 PM
You can sort of... if you don't mind doing some extra work.
Will be subject of a future tutorial maybe.

Before I give you quickie tip, lets be sure we're talking the same thing. If you mean a frame as in a border of any width or design like a picture frame in the real world that surrounds a thumbnail and allows you to see throght it and also click on the thumbnail inside, yes you can do that.

DVD-A like Vegas supports Photoshop's native file type. If other graphics applications do or not I don't know, haven't tried. For Photoshop its is rather simple.

Assuming a standard NTSC DVD, using Photoshop make a new blank project of 655x480 pixels and be sure it has a transparent background (the old black and white checkerboard pattern).

Next note the size of the thumbnails you're goiong to use for your DVD. In Photoshop, File/new make another transparent project a tad bigger than your thumbnails are going to be. How much bigger depends on what clearance if any your want between your thumbnail and the border you're going to make. When I just tried it I just made it 200 x 170 so I had some wiggle room to work with as I was drawing the borders.

Since I was just messing around I wasn't that fancy. I just took the brush tool in Photoshop, set it to 15 pixels wide and quickly drew a freehand frame.

Next I used the crop tool to trim it down. When done I had a little image about 160 x 140. I then used Select/All/Copy and positioned the first one on the larger 655x480 blank. I then repeated copying several more and positioned them where I wanted the thumbnails to be. I now had 4 placeholders, or "empty" picture frames.

I saved as a Photoshop file after doing a merge visible to make it all on one layer. Since you only need the space inside the frames to be transparent, you may want to apply some background patten or a gradient while still in photoshop to the areas that don't need to be transparent and before you merge. If you don't want to get too fancy you can use the paint bucket afterwards to just add a splash of color.

Opened DVD-A

Just dragged and dropped the just created Photoshop file on to the work space. Bingo, 4 frames each with a transparent center. I then quickly dropped 4 videos inside, the thumbails showed through. I then tested by clicking on preview. I used the "frameless" border choice in DVD-A. Works fine.
GaryKleiner wrote on 12/12/2003, 10:41 AM
>Just dragged and dropped the just created Photoshop file on to the work space. Bingo, 4 frames each with a transparent center. I then quickly dropped 4 videos inside, the thumbails showed through. I then tested by clicking on preview. I used the "frameless" border choice in DVD-A. Works fine. <

BillyBoy,

If I am reading your method correctly, you are using your .psd file as the background image for the menu page, yes?

If so, aren't the menu thumbnails being dropped ON TOP of the background image? I don't see how the transparency comes into play.

Gary
BillyBoy wrote on 12/12/2003, 8:07 PM
Actually I goofed on the transparent comment. Not necessary. Was pretty late when I wrote it. was tired and got ahead of myself. I was actually thinking about using a picture frame image as a template which I will explain more in a tutorial since you only want the frame I was trying to make the point do in on a transparent background. Silly me I got the two mixed up. ;-)

What I was trying to get at is you can make custom frames then in effect use a image as a guide to drop the thumbnails inside of. That way if you want you can create some extra fancy frames beyond what DVD-A does. I still hope they improve the choices, right now most of the presets I never would use and I doubt many others do either.
williamconifer wrote on 12/13/2003, 2:04 PM
What I was trying to do is to actually make the frame it self and have it appear in the drop down frame menu in the object properties page.

I like your approach also. I'm thinking about laying out graphically complex menu's using Fireworks since it's native file format is PNG and you don't have to merge layers to have it work with DVD-A. Since all my web graphics are made in FW it's real easy to reuse them in DVD-A.

I thought by creating the actual frames I could also make the matching mask for highlighting.

Let me know what you come up with.

thanks
jdck