|
|
OCTOBER 24, 2003 DVD Studio Pro 2: Highlights and Overlays
Color mapping an overlay If you read through our previous tutorial on button highlights, you'll recall that DVD Studio Pro has two ways of interpreting data to generate a button's highlight. The first way--the way we previous discussed--involves interpreting the opacity of the highlight layer within a button shape. It's sort of a pain to work with, since it's more of a hack than a supported feature. But with overlay files, the process is much easier. DVD Studio Pro interprets the actual grayscale or color values of your overlay file and generates a color map from those. Here's how it works.[an error occurred while processing this directive]Let's say, for example, that in Photoshop, I create an overlay that's a simple black to white linear radient. When I use it in DVD Studio Pro, the program essentially posterizes the gradient into four distinct grayscale zones: black, dark gray, light gray and white/transparent--and then maps your selected highlight colors to those zones. For this example, I'll use red, blue, yellow and green for my highlight colors, which will be mapped to the black, dark gray, light gray and white/transparent portions of the overlay image. Here's the original gradient in Photoshop:  and here's the highlight interpretation within DVD Studio Pro.  Using this information, you can then begin to map your highlights intelligently, understanding that these four grayscale shades will then be interpreted by DVD Studio Pro and replaced by your selected highlight colors. (More on the actual highlight colors below.) By selecting the right source colors, you could take--as a dumb example--a bunch of buttons made up of apples:  and an overlay containing grayscale bites (doesn't look like much):  And combine them so that a button, when selected, will look as if a bite had been taken out of it.  There I mapped the overlay's black value to white and the dark and light grays to two different shades of greenish yellow to produce the white effect. As I say, that's just one dumb example. But you get the idea that you can do more than just highlight a shape using this method. Note also that in that example I not only placed highlight elements over the original apple button but also hid a portion of the button by making one of my highlight colors match the background color of my DVD menu. This is one of the advantages I mentioned earlier. With a motion background or with a background that uses more than one or two colors, obviously this wouldn't be an option. But, if you have simple, single-color background, this trick is simple. Let's just do a quick walkthrough. First, of course, you need to have a pretty solid idea of the arrangement of your buttons in the menu before you can produce your overlay. While any individual button can fill just a small portion of the screen, an overlay fills the entire screen. So you'll have to plan your layout in advance. There are two or three ways you could do this. The first would be to lay everything out in Photoshop beforehand, then bring your buttons and overlays into DVDSP and recreate the layout on the stage manually. Another would be to fudge the whole thing by using a background image to represent your buttons, then using asset-free actual buttons to define the highlight areas. (This could also be a motion file with a fixed duration that settles on a still frame.) I'm sure you can think of a few other ways as well. I'm going to use the fudge method for this example. Prev 1 2 3 4 5 Next Related sites: • AV Video • Creative Mac • Digital Media Designer • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Digital Video Editing • DV Format • DVD Creation • Film and Video Magazine • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
|