Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 5/29/2008, 7:19 PM
highlights are all that can happen when you select a button. you can have a custom button & highlight though & they don't need to be the same. :)
LongTallTexan wrote on 5/30/2008, 7:11 AM
Yeah im just not crazy about the quality of image as a highlight.

L.T.
johnmeyer wrote on 5/30/2008, 7:29 AM
Search the help and this forum for "PSD." You can create layered files in Photoshop (or any other photo editor) and make pretty much any type of highlight you desire, including arrows that point to your buttons, etc.
LongTallTexan wrote on 5/30/2008, 4:23 PM
I figured that out with photoshop, But when the image is converted to a highlight it looses all detail and basicly becomes a colored silohuette of the image. I would rather just the image overlay.

L.T.
MPM wrote on 5/30/2008, 5:21 PM
For better or worse that's the way DVDs work - you have a simple bitmap, where pixels are either on or off, and the DVD player fills that shape with a single color & transparency you set. You have 3 shapes that can be set per button state, so max is 3 color highlights.

There have been threads in the past discussing covering up details on the background, &/or having a button activate as soon as it's selected, taking you to another menu where it *appears* the button high light is actually a full-color, perhaps animated graphic.
ECB wrote on 5/30/2008, 6:02 PM
There is more you can do with button highlight than on/off. When you create a custom mask you can choose how the mask is mapped. The default map setting is transparency but you can also choose intensity "Maps the average pixel intensity of the menu highlight mask to the four colors used in the color set selected..." and Color Channel "Maps color channels in the menu highlight mask to the four colors used in the color set ...". It.s all in the Help. Do a search on 'PSD' in this forum.
MPM wrote on 5/30/2008, 8:43 PM
FWIW, the 4 shape areas or whatever you want to call them in the final DVD are really just on or off - use DVD Sub Edit to take a look at any other DVD sub pictures. You set the color & transparency, and the DVD player fills it in on playback.

When you import your masks into DVDA, if you use transparency the break point is something like 37% black level - above goes to outline I think, while below goes to blend, with 100% black the fill shape, & white probably transparent without transparent background in png. Intensity works kind of funky last I tried it, but color's cool too. At any rate DVDA just uses those metrics to determine what pixels in your mask belong to what shape in the final sub picture. Once they're in the sub pic, how you got them there is kind of irrelevant since none of that original info is stored in the DVD.

P/Shop files are cool if you want to map a bunch of stuff at once, with one image. However, a button's graphics just get composited onto the background mpg2 anyway, so, why not composite your graphics where they'll look best, in AE or Vegas? When you're working with anamorphic vid, Vegas works out pretty cool -> keep anything you'll use for highlights on separate layers / tracks, then turn the background off and snapshot the composite to png. That way everything lines up perfectly, & you're not hassling with stretching stills this way and that, though Vegas can still get awful picky when you try to snapshot a still - render a short clip first then pop it in as a take.
bStro wrote on 5/31/2008, 7:01 AM
But when the image is converted to a highlight it looses all detail and basicly becomes a colored silohuette of the image. I would rather just the image overlay.

Sorry, but what you are discovering is simply the "way DVDs are." That's what highlights are -- pixels of color. You can finagle them into some interesting shapes, even some with multiple colors -- but the highlight cannot be a full-color image as I think you're expecting.

There are ways to fake it, but they also have their limitations.

The most common way is to use "switched menus." Limitation: The DVD player pauses between menus, so there will be a lag as the viewer navigates between menu items. (I tried searching for one of the many threads we've had describing this method, but came up with nothing. Sorry, no time to give a detailed explanation right now. Also, I'm not a fan of this one, so I never use it.)

The other method we've been calling "inverse selection." Limitation: The menu background must be a solid color -- at least in the immediate area surrounding the buttons.

Rob

PS: You initial posts were really vague about what you want to do. When asking questions, please give more detail -- or even better, an example. You will get useful answers more quickly if we have a clear understanding of what you're trying to do.
MPM wrote on 5/31/2008, 1:57 PM
If it helps at all...
It is possible to do more with sub-pics (menu highlights) than you can do in DVDA, or any other program I’ve been able to find - Anime provides some good examples. DVDA DVDs also don’t make full use of the options and colors available - you can see this in PGCEdit or DVDSubEdit - and, it doesn’t do as good a transition from imported mask to sub-pic as is possible... you can see this if you try to import a half-toned mask.

So long story short, if you want a bit more out of your button highlights, you *might* be able to manage it using other software - you’re the only one who can say if it’s worth the hassle or not.

------

In DVDA there are two ways to automatically jump from one menu page to the next: you can set a button to automatically activate when selected, and you can have the menu jump somewhere else after a set amount of time, usually the duration of the background video segment. Jumping by end action works great - that’s not always the case with auto-activating buttons, since it’s buggy on PCs, at least in Vista with PowerDVD 7... Since at the moment there are tons of PowerDVD 7 users running Vista out there, that IMHO pretty much eliminates having displayed menu page buttons set to auto.

What happens is the buttons will work - just not when you mouse over them, which is what 99% of users will do since it takes 3 steps just to display the fake remote in Power DVD 7. It doesn’t appear to be a DVDA problem, but I haven’t traced it beyond that - being pragmatic, I don’t think it really matters, since I can’t expect viewers to change their habits or software etc, it’s up to me to make sure the DVD works as expected.