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SEPTEMBER 04, 2003 DVD for Designers
There are also buttons, which are the menu items themselves, linking either to a sub-menu (such as audio or caption options) or to the movie or chapters of the movie. Buttons incorporate three elements, each of which is typically represented as a separate layer in a Photoshop file--the button shape, such as a picture frame; the highlight mask, which determines the contents of the highlight when a button is selected or activated; and the thumbnail mask, which determines which portions of the asset's thumbnail will be visible. (The asset's thumbnail is a preview--still or video--of the content that the button is linked to. The thumbnail itself is not a part of the button creation process. Only the mask that reveals the thumbnail is part of the button design.) Of course, buttons don't always work this way. Sometimes buttons are graphics by themselves with no thumbnail preview; they may be text-only; or they may have neither a recognizable shape nor any text elements.  [an error occurred while processing this directive]Buttons can be simple text and iconographic images, as in the example above, or can contain video and stills within a predefined shape, as in the example below (shown within the authoring environment in DVD Studio Pro.) Like buttons on the Web, buttons in DVD presentations also have normal, selected and activated states. We'll get to these in a future tutorial. And then there are also drop zones, which are like buttons in many ways except that they don't actually link to any content and can't be selected, so they have no highlight. But they do have a shape (frame) and a mask for whatever content will be displayed in the drop zone. But they can be used to enhance the background (or foreground, as we'll see in the next article) and are incredibly useful for templates, allowing you to switch graphics easily for multiple projects based around the same design. I have previously posted an article on this topic here, which should help to clear things up a little bit regarding buttons and drop zones. And then, of course, there's the overall menu/interface design, which clearly most DVD producers need professional help with. Just as with Web, Flash and Shockwave design, this includes the primary menu/interface, transitions/effects and sub-menus. Prev 1 2 3 Next Related sites: • AV Video • Creative Mac • Digital Media Designer • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Digital Video Editing • DVD Creation • Film and Video Magazine • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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