what was happening to me was the AA at the edges of the buttons was making the highlight wider then the button itself. annoying. :) The solution was to customize the highlight masks. vs using things automatically generated by Gimp (or p-shop in your case).

Hm... that may be it. The current 'button' is a picture frame with a relatively thin plain border which 'fills' the image size - that is, there is no border. I was using the inside as the highlight - which made a transparent border. The hole in the middle of the picture frame image is where the video image goes.
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Another on was text with an edge created in Boris Red. I wanted to use the 'inside' of the letters leaving the edge alone. In that one, both the main and highlight image has a transparent border, of course, the highlight image has a larger transparent border as it 'contains' the edge of the letters.
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But, that brings up the question: "Why?" the PSD is of a fixed size and DVDA knows what it is. Ok, the different 'parts' of a button (thumb nail, frame, highight and various masks) may not 'know' about each other - that is that they are from the same PSD in my case, so why ignore the transparent edges and stretch the remaining image? As you can tell, that makes lineing things up very hard.
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Also, I have been able to make the highlight layer fit the other (main) layer by sizeing it in Photoshop. So, if the transparnet area is ignored, how am I able to do that? That is unless I get rid of the outside transparent edge (which I did not in either of the above examples), I would think that anything I did would be for nought. That is, that DVDA would stretch the highlight layer to get rid of the transpart border and what I did would make no difference, but it does.
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Just trying to undersand.
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Thanks.
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Paul Masters

PS: How do I post an example? I don't have a WEB site as others apper to have.

Pictures can be posted at Photobucket.com for free and then you link to the URL they give you using the format that is described in the sticky at the top of each forum.

I have had similar problems to what you describe and have never quite figured it all out. One thing that helps is to right-click on the button and select "Make Graphic Actual Size." This isn't "the solution," but perhaps it will help.

this may help, I don't know how photoshop does this, but in The Gimp each layer can have a different size separate from every other layer & separate from the image size. When I would have my highlight mask layer in Gimp be 50 pixels wider then the actual highlight, DVDA would make the highlight button the same size as the layer, regardless of what was able to be seen. I would use the layer - auto crop tool to make the buttons no bigger then the button itself.

i've never seen what you describe. But it should be noted that once you put the psd in DVDA, each element is 100% independant of eachother. So you can move, resize, replace, etc. anything & nothing else will be effected, UNLESS you change the psd outside of DVDA. I also use Gimp to make my psd's & it saves the layer size in the psd, maybe p-shop isn't doing that & messing with everything.

Another of my “in case it helps”, FWIW... ;-)

I work differently from a lot of folks & never have liked/used the P/Shop multilayer approach where you import 1 file rather than layers individually & as needed, so I might not be able to answer why you’re having this problem - I can only offer a couple of potential solutions.

One problem with DVDA is that it likes anamorphic video, but doesn’t play well if you expect it to stretch the menu background - if you’re doing 16:9 menus, you need to use stills & highlights at the final res. If you’re talking about an offset problem where the highlights don’t line up, this can be the cause.

Another *characteristic* of DVDA is that it can feather your highlight masks for you - I assume so it looks right when users import a black/white bitmap without feathering etc. If this is what’s happening - it looks similar to adding a glow to an object in most image editing apps - there are a few ways around it.

You can of course simply size your highlight mask smaller to start with, but maybe the simplest route with rectangular shapes would be to use DVDA’s built-in highlights, creating an empty button sized to fit - I mean you have to create the button area anyway, so why not just let DVDA use the interior of that rectangular area for the highlight? Done this way in my experience the highlights seem to stay put & respect the borders. Another possibility I haven’t played much with would be to try DVDA’s highlight masks... designed to work like cookie cutters, I’d think that would limit any highlight spread. And if you’ve got the highlight area masked in your image editor, wouldn’t take much to reverse the mask & create a frame.

The method I generally use to create anything other than very simple highlights is a bit more work: I control the 3 highlight shapes by using 3 different colors or transparencies in the mask image itself.

That all said, the way highlights work in a DVD player, it can be harder (or even impossible in some designs) to distinguish what’s being highlighted if you don’t have a bit of a spread - in many design aspects DVDA tries to be fool-proof. Slightly off topic, I don’t see any advantage to using P/Shop on anything like titling that can appear in the Vegas’ time-line... In fact, I find it a bit more flexible, accurate, & higher quality soloing a track with text/graphic titling & using png snapshots for the mask. And finally, DVDA sub-pictures (button highlights & subs) are normally rendered to a DVD layout a bit differently than any other DVD or authoring app I’ve ever come across... The easiest way to *see* it might be in DVD Sub Edit, where you see a CLUT (Color LookUp Table), with different colors for each type of shape (fill, outline, blend, & transparency) for every other DVD; you only see 1 color for DVDA DVDs. But that’s only a way to visualize a difference - you can experience it with players & programs that use those subs, & while the difference is usually for the better, it’s not always so.