DVDA menu question, again

MRe wrote on 2/10/2008, 7:11 AM
This is probably asked here for thousand times already but for some reason I couldn't find the topic.

I would like to make a menu using DVDA where I could use an icon to point the selected menu item.

Example: a golf video where picture of a golfball would move using the cursor keys in remote and point the item to be selected. If item is not selected, the golfball would be invisible at that location.

I did an experiment with Photoshop using layers but did not accomplish what I was trying to do. I could get the golfballs there and get the selected one highlighted with specified highlight color but the problem is that all the golfballs were visible all the time (and the selected one was highlighted).

Anyone?

Comments

bStro wrote on 2/10/2008, 7:26 AM
Note that, in the world of DVDs, that highlight color is the real "icon" here. Everything else is just a flat image on the screen. For what you want to do, you need to hide the part of the image that's not relevant to the current selection and reveal that which is. One way to do this is to highlight the unselected items instead of the selected one.

I describe the process, which was originally suggested by RCourtney, in .

Note that the method I use requires a solid color background (not necessarily the entire background, but at least the immediate area surrounding the images you want to hide). So if your background is busy or, especially, a motion background, you'll need to make your own adjustments.

Rob
MPM wrote on 2/10/2008, 8:07 AM
In addition to what Rob's posted, a DVD highlight is made up of 3 shapes: fill, outline, and blend. Regardless their naming (which does vary), they're 3 totally separate shapes (not images), and each can be independently filled with color & have their own transparency. In addition buttons are really Hot Spots -- an invisible rectangular area -- and do not have to have visible highlights, plus, they can activate immediately when selected. Using that as a basis you have more than a few alternatives, including...

If your viewers are primarily going to be using a set-top player rather than a PC, & you want to mimic a PC cursor, you could use invisible buttons that auto-activate & are linked to a quick video (either as a video file or menu background). The effect would be: press the arrow key on the remote, and the golfball in this case travels across the screen to the next *visible* button and rests there. Pressing enter would activate that link to play a video or whatever, while pressing an arrow key would show the ball traveling to the next *visible* button.

OR, remembering that the 3 shapes are independent, and you control both visibility & color for each button state (default, selected, activated), you can have all sorts of combinations. Maybe the simplest to set up, as long as you create them in a maximum of 3 colors, you can have each highlight (golf ball) invisible until selected. DVDA is cool in letting you map your graphic shapes to highlight shapes 3 ways -- probably the easiest for something like a golf ball would be color, where the dimples would be one color, the fill another, and the shading the 3rd.
MRe wrote on 2/15/2008, 2:54 AM
Thank you for your help. I managed to do what I was trying to by following your instructions.

Appreciate.