Help!!

BFT wrote on 7/1/2004, 8:50 PM
does anybody know if you can use a animated GIF as a menu button and be able to make the GIF only animated when selected?instead of having to use the lame color block highlight to be able to see what chapter or button you have highlighted on the screen.if you have a bunch of scene select buttons the only way i can find to tell which one i have selected is by hightlighting them with color,which is cheesy and by no means professional looking.is there anyway around this at all?if not is there gonna be a update in the future to make this possible?

Comments

bStro wrote on 7/2/2004, 7:37 AM
Could you be more specific, what it is you want to do? What you've seen on "professinal" looking DVDs that you want to emulate?

There's a lot of more creative highlighting you can do in DVDA other than just block highlighting. The simplest is to change the highlighting style from rectangle to image mask overlay (more interesting if you use frames and masks to give your image a non-square shape) or text mask overlay.

You can use glyphs by creating transparent images in your paint program. Add your thumbnails or chapter titles as regular text and put the the transparent images next to them as the actual buttons.

You can do the same thing as above, but use text buttons with the font set to Wingdings or some other picto-font. Try out different "characters" until you find ones that you like.

Check the DVDA2 manual for the section on custom highlighting. Using your menu as a template, you can create have a differently shaped highlight for every item on your menu. In this way, the shape of the hightight can be completely customized by you because you're the one designing it.

Or, similar to the above, you can make individual highlight masks and add them to each button. One idea I've had, but haven't sat down and made yet, is to have the thumbnail frame look like a window and the highlighting mask would be thick vertical lines. Then the thumbnail that's selected would have "bars" over it like a jail cell.

The bottom line is, be creative. That's what the "professionals" do. :)

Rob
BFT wrote on 7/2/2004, 2:45 PM
im just having trouble trying to figure out(that is if it can be done)when i use a animated gif as a button you can set the setting to either still or animated and if set to animated on the preview the gif is animated,is there anyway to have a animated gif only be animated when that button is selected and when not selected the animated gif just be a still image.lets say i have a animated gif of a spinning star and i have 4 buttons on a page and each button is a still image of the star and when i select a button is there anyway to make the star spin.
bStro wrote on 7/2/2004, 3:21 PM
There may be some other way to do what you want (I can't think of one, but maybe someone can), but I seriously doubt it has anything to do with using an animated GIF. The animation is inherent to the file -- it's not something that DVDA can start or stop.

Rob