Actually, it's even easier than that. Just drag the video to a menu and let DVDA create a button. Then change the button style and change the Thumbnail property to the graphic you want to use.

Rob

Rob, is there a way to make the buttons only show when they are the "active" button? I have to recreate someone else's menu. There are no source files, just the DVD to work with. They have decided they need to have subtitles which means redoing the project. The menu simply listes the titles of the different chapters, and has graphic that appears next to the chapter title that will be selected: i.e. there are five text titles on the menu always visible, but only one graphic appears at any time.

No, I haven't taken time to try any experimentation yet. I'm thinking highlighting won't work. Masking maybe? Put in a little square over the background and when it's active the square graphic could show. Seems like it shouldn't be that hard. Suggestions?

Jim

You might take a look at Vol 2 #6 of my newsletters at jetdv.com

Well, there's no way around using highlights -- that's how the DVD player knows what the viewer is selecting. But by using highlights a little differently than normal (in fact, as a mask, just like you suggest), what you want can be achieved.

See my tutorial on Full-Color DVD Menu Highlights for details.

Rob

"The menu simply listes the titles of the different chapters, and has graphic that appears next to the chapter title that will be selected: i.e. there are five text titles on the menu always visible, but only one graphic appears at any time."

This should be easier than it is, because DVDA won't use a text highlight without the text being visible -- in my experience anyway. The way I'd do it is with the background open in P/Shop, create a 2nd layer, paste black, feathered shapes on that layer, then turning off the 1st layer visibility, save visible as .png with transparency. Import that into DVDA as a highlight mask, locate your button boxes as necessary, check routing, & there ya go. Using a Symbol Font should take just a couple of minutes.

Edit: Add...
"I have to recreate someone else's menu. There are no source files, just the DVD to work with."

So take it apart? If you can get away with it [i.e. don't need a sub menu], can fairly easily add the sub track to the existing DVD... Create your sub track, possibly rendering it in DVDA, then render the title video, audio, & subs in Muxman, then swap out VOBs (with/without subs) using VOBBlanker. [Swapping like that is the only way I'm aware of to use non-text subs with DVDA].

If you need menu components, several demuxers for the menu VOB, or VOBBlanker can export bitmaps, or capture a still. PGCEdit can export menus. DVDSubEdit can export button highlights. You could probably insert a sub menu using PGCEdit, but I'm hesitant to suggest that not knowing how the original was created -- some authoring software can create a real mess when you look at the underlying scripting.

"How do I insert a Photoshop graphic and make it a button so when you press the graphic, the attached video runs?"

FWIW & all... The quick answer is, as in the manual & help files, you set whatever image you want to use, along with what you want the button to trigger in the button's properties. That quick answer's not very interesting though -- so in hopes that it might help (or interest) one or two folks...

* * *

A DVD *Button* is really just an invisible rectangle. Size it, move it around, whatever. You use graphics &/or text because otherwise the viewer would have no idea what happens when they press enter/play on the remote -- remember that those graphics &/or images are not necessary for a DVD to work, and you only need those invisible rectanges to have a button. Every DVD menu background, everything the viewer sees, is video. Any separate, individual image (or video/motion sprite) you use for a button (including rendered text) is made part of that video (composited). Many of the tools & options DVDA gives you for creating buttons, in reality are just helping you modify & paste graphics and images on what will become a menu's background video.

If you give the viewer visual hints on what each button does, it makes basic sense to give them hints on which button is selected -- just showing the viewer a list of what might happen when they press enter/play is at best hardly an improvement over telling them nothing at all. These hints are accomplished through Button Highlights. Much simplified, Button Highlights can be thought of as added, monochrome video tracks, like subtitles (& Button Over Video, & Anime sprites). Just like any audio tracks, these tracks run right alongside the video. When a DVD player displays these special, black & white (not grayscale) tracks it does one thing: it colors the graphics [shapes rather than images], using an assigned solid color & transparency.

If I haven't lost you yet, please bear with me as this gets more complex... Again simplified, imagine a transparent layer covering DVD menus, with shapes for all of the button highlights on it. Now remember up above when I said that the buttons were just these invisible rectangles? Only the shapes within a button's rectangle will get displayed -- anything outside that rectangle is ignored. That's why selecting one button won't set off every highlight on the menu. On top of that, every button can be in 1 of 3 states: Unselected, Selected, & Depressed/Activated. For each of those three states, you can have 4 types of graphics shapes, & each type of shape can have it's own color & level of transparency (1 is normally used for background transparency). In DVDA you can import that entire transparent layer (or rather what DVDA will use to create it) in a frame sized .png file as a highlight mask.

Knowing all that (basically how it works), you can start to figure out what works best for your project at the quality level you hope to achieve -- or IOW, what makes the most sense for you & your project. And you can experiment with whatever methods, software, & tricks you can dream up.

Graphics apps that let you use layers work very well for creating & placing the shapes you'll use for button highlights -- just export all those shapes in a .png file with transparency, & import into DVDA. Vegas works very well -- actually better than P/Shop -- for compositing text & graphics, but placement's not as easy as in a graphics app. Virtual Dub is better & faster at resizing video, so it can be great for motion thumbnails/buttons. And there are loads of apps for simple 3D FX -- for buttons that look like buttons, something like eCover Engineer can map an image to a 3D rectangle in seconds... vary the box thickness to create pressed & un-pressed versions, using them on 2 otherwise identical menu pages.

Before creating & importing your button highlight shapes, DVDA offers a few options on how it translates your imported images into the different kinds or types of shapes used -- considering those options can help you decide how you want the highlights to look, & where/how you'll create them. It doesn't have to be hard -- I've used single, black characters from various dingbat or symbol type fonts & simply set DVDA to detect the shapes using transparency -- but it can be -- like importing separate shapes in different colors, or all in black with different transparency levels in a single .png file. While the trend seems to be towards the symbol font approach, crafting your individual shapes to hide &/or alter the underlying background is very doable (remember, everything but highlights is background)... the main limitation is just having a single color per shape type, where every pixel is either that color (on) or nothing (off).

So [finally] back to the original question: how to use a P/Shop created button? There are so many ways... so many paths that image can take before being burned to DVD. When the DVD's finished, that image will have been overlaid on, will be part of a video file. What you, the author has to decide is when, where, & how.