Safe Menu Hightlight Colours help!

Robert W wrote on 11/5/2008, 2:39 PM

OK guys, last minute hitch with our DVD here. We've noticed that on a few TV and DVD setups the colours we have selected for highlighting menu options look very bad. Can anybody suggest values suitable for colour set 1 and 2 for a menu such as this:

This is not quite a crisis yet, but fairly urgent as we are due to supply the master to the duplication house imminently. If anybody can get us rock steady values here I will be very grateful.

Cheers

Rob

Comments

PeterWright wrote on 11/5/2008, 11:32 PM

Are you using text highlighting or something else? - the graphic doesn't show.

I tend to go for underline, but whichever choice, the highlight colour can be softened by making it partially transparent in the Color Set. The anti-alias colours can also help - I usually make them similar to the main highlight colour, but slightly different, and again use a touch of transparency.

bStro wrote on 11/6/2008, 6:30 AM

It's more about which colors look good together than about which look good on screen. (With some exceptions -- pure red usually looks awful no matter what it's next to.) But you usually can't go wrong with with low saturation.

Also depends on what kind of highlighting you're doing. Text mask overlay is always kind of difficult to get right in DVDA -- the edges always seem to require tweaking in order to maintain good anti-aliasing. Just play around with the color and opacity for the anti-alias color. You might get lucky.

My recommendations for this menu would be either a custom highlight mask that makes the selected item black with a white outline (like your "Union Chapel" text) or a gray underline to match that dark figure you have on the left. For the underline, maybe use a custom highlight mask and make your own underlines -- give them the same "sketchy" look as the figures.

Rob

Robert W wrote on 11/6/2008, 9:18 AM

Thanks for the tips gentleman. Yes, it was text overlay masks I was using. I tried to tweak them a bit, but in the end compromised I was not going to be able to get a super smooth finish. So in the end, I switched the colour set mode to blend, which seemed to make a slight improvement, and sent the master off to the replication house.

I don't think is an issue that will give me bunches of returns, it is probably due to me being set to look for every tiny detail that I think it is an issue in the first place. I think I'll add "Authoring DVD menus" to my list of firsts and lasts for this project :)

Thanks again,

Rob

Terry Esslinger wrote on 11/7/2008, 8:35 AM

I have seen some DVDs made with a highlight that outlines the choice - sort of like a glow effect around the text. Can this be done with DVDA and if so how?

bStro wrote on 11/7/2008, 8:48 AM

That is similar to one of the methods I suggested above using custom highlight masks. <- That's a link to a tutorial I recently wrote. (Sorry if it seems like spam that I've been plugging that tut a lot lately -- the subject just keeps coming up. ;) In the example I give there, the highlight is a outline drawn "around" the text. You could create a similar outline that more closely follows the text's shape.

For more info on custom highlight masks, see the DVD Architect 2 New Features document published by Sony when custom highlight masks were first introduced.

The other option would be to create your own individual button graphics. Make one with the "outline" and use that for the button's highlight mask and make another with the text and use that for the button's thumbnail. For more info on that, check the DVDA manual / online help.

Rob