I have spent a lot of time using DVDA to make buttons, transitions and highlights as described by people on this forum, so thank you.
I generally make my entire menu in Vegas, with the 'buttons' as part of the background. Then, in DVDA, I make the buttons 'image only' (no text), and select a null thumbnail. I then size this shape over the 'button' embedded in the background. To highlight the buttons, I've used photoshop with a menu screen capture as the bottom layer. I create the highlights over this layer, carefully (sometimes pixel-by-pixel), and then save the 'trimmed' overlays as the hightlight mask image.
So when I get back to DVDA, and I use this custom photoshop image as the custom hightlight mask. I always make sure that the button size is the exact size of the photoshop image. I've had various problems:
1) Although a mask may be two-color (transparent and white), no matter what I choose for mask mapping, the two intermediate colors from the color set end up in there.
2) Often, the image that I've carefully created, pixel-for-pixel in photoshop, gets approximated, changed, and altered.
3) Even if I create a 4-color (3+ transparency) image in photoshop, and carefully map the color regions, 'color channel' mapping doesn't keep these regions isolated, and often mixes the colors and reshapes regions.
This is really frustrating, and something I hope changes in future versions of DVDA. Has anyone else experienced these alterations or found a work-around?
I generally make my entire menu in Vegas, with the 'buttons' as part of the background. Then, in DVDA, I make the buttons 'image only' (no text), and select a null thumbnail. I then size this shape over the 'button' embedded in the background. To highlight the buttons, I've used photoshop with a menu screen capture as the bottom layer. I create the highlights over this layer, carefully (sometimes pixel-by-pixel), and then save the 'trimmed' overlays as the hightlight mask image.
So when I get back to DVDA, and I use this custom photoshop image as the custom hightlight mask. I always make sure that the button size is the exact size of the photoshop image. I've had various problems:
1) Although a mask may be two-color (transparent and white), no matter what I choose for mask mapping, the two intermediate colors from the color set end up in there.
2) Often, the image that I've carefully created, pixel-for-pixel in photoshop, gets approximated, changed, and altered.
3) Even if I create a 4-color (3+ transparency) image in photoshop, and carefully map the color regions, 'color channel' mapping doesn't keep these regions isolated, and often mixes the colors and reshapes regions.
This is really frustrating, and something I hope changes in future versions of DVDA. Has anyone else experienced these alterations or found a work-around?