Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 12/11/2003, 4:31 PM
You can easily resize the buttons to any size. Just click on them, so you get the handles, then drag out any away from the center on a corner to eyeball the ending size. Once you get one the way you like you can duplicate the others by looking at its X Y values or just type in whatever values you want at the bottom of the workspace or if you want a shortcut use the sizing tool. Click on one thumbnail, then while holding down the Ctrl key include the others in a group and then size as a single unit while they all are selected. I don't like that method because its hader to get them the size you want or in exactly the right position.

Another I thing I did almost immediately when I first started to use DVD-A was change the grid spacing to generate a pattern that matches the typical size of thumbnails I use. That way you can quickly use the grid system to line things up pretty quick. To do that, options/grid settings, play with the values and color of the grid to get what you want then check the 'start all projects with this setting' box.

Tip:

By default the thumbnails when you start out a project and drop one on the work area have a size of 158.4 by 115.2. To make the grid system line up nicely for that size I changed the Grid spacing to 27.2 on the width and 27.2 on the height with no offsets This yields 24 grids across.

Now that gives a nice spacing for six thumbnails of good size on one page. Line up the middle thumbnail so its center handle when selected is at the middle of the 12th cell across. Position a thumbnails at either side with its margin lining up at the third grid cell boundry on either side when its first dropped on the workspace with the orange border. Don't use the bounding box to line up. Repeat and you can get a second row. Adjust as needed to have more or less thumbnails.

GaryKleiner wrote on 12/12/2003, 11:49 AM
Resizing the buttons will not have any effect on the cropping.

This is especially problematic when using the button frames that only let a portion of the image show through. It would be nice if DVDA would let us resize or move the image area within the buttons.

Gary
TimLong wrote on 12/13/2003, 11:32 AM
Thanks for the tip, BillyBoy, but I found what Gary said to be true. What I ended up doing was copying the image over to Paint with a slightly larger background, saved that file, and then imported that for my button image. It took a few times to get just the right sizing, so I was looking for a more efficient way.
farss wrote on 12/13/2003, 5:27 PM
This issue is actually a right royal pain in the butt for me.
My material mostly comes of 8mm film, by the time it's been through the telecone a little bit gets cropped off, then DVDA crops off even more in the buttons by which time it's well nigh useless. Sure I can work around this but not within the time / cost constraints of my workflow.

Maybe I need to learn how to build my own templates, maybe in my own code I can solve this problem.

Anyone had a go at building templates for DVDA?
I know you can upload them here, so far the only ones are from Sony themselves and I know BillBoy had a play around with this some tiem ago and discovered you were so hamstrung it just plain wasn't worth the effort.