Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 5/22/2009, 7:47 PM
I cover this pretty extensively in my book, available on Amazon. It makes much more sense with the illustrations.

Basically, the color sets determine the colors for the overlays (highlights) you see over your menu buttons as you navigate your menu page. This is the reason the color sets used for the individual buttons are really the only ones you need to worry about pretty much. They appear in the property sets for other elements -- but how they are set up on the individual buttons takes priority and determines how the button will behave.

The Fill Color is the main color for the overlay. It's the one your viewers will most notice. (That's why you have the option of just setting the Fill Color and letting the program generate the others automatically.)

The Outline/Background Color is for the outlines and black areas, like drop shadows. The Anti-Alias Color is for the areas in between the Fills and the Outlines

The Transparent Color is usually left transparent. It's for the areas that, depending on which Mask you have set, would normally be transparent (although you can color them if you want.)
bsuratt wrote on 11/5/2009, 10:21 PM
Cannot get drop shadow color on 'text only' buttons to go black to match normal text drop shadow. It is a pale darker shade of the text color. Any suggestions?
Steve Grisetti wrote on 11/6/2009, 5:45 AM
Are you talking about color sets and overlays, b?

I'm not sure why you're tagging this question onto this thread.
MPM wrote on 11/6/2009, 11:50 AM
>"can anyone explain how to use color sets in DVDA."

Maybe this will help?...

DVDs can have sub-pictures -- you can think of these as the transparencies you use with an overhead projector. The way it works is these sub-pictures are stored in separate tracks in the VOB files -- if you look at &/or export/save them [try DVDSubEdit from videohelp.com] you can see shapes rather than regular images. If you look at a sub-title, you can see letters divided up into 3 parts [fill, outline, & blend (Sony calls it Anti-Aliasing)], each of which is a different color [there's a 4th color, which normally is set to be transparent so the video shows through].

DVDA lets you assign assign colors to those sub-picture shapes, & you do that using DVDA's color sets -- in a nutshell that's why each color set has 4 values, 1 for each of the 3 parts & what's normally the background. When you play the DVD the player reads the values for each color & generates it [assuming that sub-pic is turned on], so colors used can be changed regardless the shapes stored in the sub-pic track or file -- it works similar to colors on an HTML page. Why 4 possible color sets? Menu Button Highlights are sub-pictures too, & there are 3 button states [off or deselected, selected, & activated or pressed or on], each with it's own color-set. A color-set can be Global, the same everywhere, or not.

Tip:
When you set the top color in a color set, you can add it to the custom color palette [each color in a set has a small drop-down display as well as a regular palette sort of display when double clicked]. Once on/in the palette, it's quick & easy to use that same color for the outline & blend without having to alter the default transparency levels.
MPM wrote on 11/6/2009, 12:00 PM
>"Cannot get drop shadow color on 'text only' buttons to go black to match
>normal text drop shadow. It is a pale darker shade of the text color. Any
>suggestions? "

When you use text, same as when you use text buttons, DVDA is just going to composite those onto the background & render an mpg2 video. That's fairly easy & a good quick & dirty approach, but for best results do the compositing somewhere else, like in your image editor or Vegas.

Any difference between the text & button text shadows might be just the way DVDA works, assuming you still get a difference when the shadow settings like Blur, position, & color are identical .
bsuratt wrote on 11/8/2009, 9:00 PM
Thanks, MPM.