Being a retiree, I make it a point to try to catch all of the webinars. Gary does a good job, and they're greatly appreciated. There's always something to learn, no matter what your level of expertise with the software. And, you just may find that you know more about it than you thought you did!

Thanks, SCS... We're watching!

Another vote of thanks here for a very informative Webinar.
Well done SCS!

Always learning.....or trying to...Well done indeed!

I hate meetings all day. Bummed out that I missed it. I always appreciate the insight I get from the Vegas/SCS webinars.

I signed up for it, but we got hit with a snow and ice storm so I missed it.

They will post the tutorial in a week or so.

John

I waited to post until I had a chance to try out something this evening. You can't do this in DVDA alone; you *have* to use a layered PSD file (whether or not you use Photoshop to make it).

I've been wanting buttons on my menus to do something other than highlight or get underlined when selected. Specifically, I'd love for a little icon (e.g., arrow, character, widget) to appear by the button and move from button to button as I operate the DVD remote control. This is SO easy now that the webinar sparked an idea.

DVDA recognizes a PSD layer called "highlight", which the webinar depicted as a simple white stroke around a button. Boring, right? But "highlight" is nothing more than a graphic. DVDA doesn't care one whit what it looks like. So in Photoshop on the highlight layer, I made not a lame stroke around the button, but an arrow that pointed at my button. I simply copied that highlight layer into as many other layers as number of buttons that are on the menu, re-positioned the arrows accordingly, and renamed the respective highlight layers as the DVDA manual instructs.

After importing the multi-layered PSD file into DVDA, an arrow appears only when its associated button is "highlighted." Now, the arrow (or whatever graphic) appears white by default, but the color is controlled by DVDA's project-wide or custom color scheme. Easy enough to change.

In the time it took me to write this post, I threw together a single DVDA menu in Photoshop and then in DVDA with several buttons, with a little arrow bouncing from button to button showing that a particular button was highlighted. Pretty cool!

In my view, the ability to use Photoshop just makes DVDA so much more flexible. I wish I had discovered this little gem before watching the webinar.

Hope this helps someone else (unless this was so painfully obvious and I just embarrassed myself by posting a how-to!).

-Steve

I always try to catch these webinars, Gary does a great job. I missed this one yesterday unfortuanatly due to other stuff going on, but will watch it later on the re-run.
Great job SCS for doing these.

Paul.

First webinar I was able to watch. I consider myself to be fairly advanced in the DVD Architect arena. I've authored a boatload of dvds and blurays and I've always found DVD Architect to be quite easy and powerful. I've had many compliments from all over the map, from film maker clients to imovie savvy 6th graders in my wife's middle school choir. I learned quite a bit from the webinar. Designing the look in a layered photoshop file is the way to go. I'd been doing lots of prep in photoshop, text and backgrounds, easy and concise way to get sizing and proportion exact. But this takes it to a new level. I can't wait for the next project requiring DVD authoring.

I did several layered-PSD DVDs many, many years ago when DVDA first added the feature. It works well, but it is a LOT of extra work. I plan on watching the webinar to see if Gary has some shortcuts to make it go faster. Bottom line for me (and my clients): you can get a much more professional looking menu using this approach, but very few clients really care because what they really want to see is the video, not the menu.

Also, having suffered through innumerable commercial DVDs that have menu transitions with music, etc., the over-designed DVD menu can easily become a liability.

Don't get me wrong: I definitely will still do a few more PSD DVDs when I think the client really wants it, and I am very, very grateful to have this webinar, and am looking forward to watching it so that I can do the next PSD menu more quickly. However, I am driven not only by the desire to do a good job, but also by deadlines and profits. The last time I did one of these, it added close to an hour of work when a standard menu done within DVD itself would have been done in less than sixty seconds.

Now, if Sony (or a third party) would offer a few dozen PSD templates that I could use as a starting point, then I'm "all in." It takes a fraction of the time to modify an existing PSD than it does to start from scratch.

Thanks for sharing your experiences, John. In light of those, I'm curious to know your opinion on the webinar.

I'm not a paid professional, so in the past I've taken my time in putting together slick DVD/Blu-ray menus, albeit without the benefit of using layered PSD files that I should have used. I knew it was getting bad when, at one time, I was bouncing between DVDA, Photoshop, Illustrator, Cinema 4D, and After Effects. Oy!

On that note during the webinar, Gary made a (good) point that menus influence the tone of the production. I can't disagree, but there must be a line over which menus shouldn't cross, e.g., the pimped-out commercial monstrosities festooned with all manner of tchotchkes.

Steve

John,
PixelPops does offer some nice psd menus for DVD, but they are pre-named / configured for Encore. I haven't played with it in years but it was necessary to rename a lot of the layers in PS before they could be used in DVDA.

PixelPops does offer some nice psd menus for DVD, but they are pre-named / configured for Encore. I haven't played with it in years but it was necessary to rename a lot of the layers in PS before they could be used in DVDA.I'll check them out. The naming actually isn't that big a deal. I actually never could get the names to match what DVDA wanted, but I found out that you can import with the wrong names, and then "find" the things you want and assign the attributes withing DVDA. It did require a few minutes of work, but it was minutes, not hours.

To order the menus, their online store is here:
http://www.pixelpops-shop.com/

It wasn't immediately apparent from the front page.

With regard to custom menu highlights - I have been using the method detailed here for a long while now - it works a treat! Thanks Rob.

http://www.vegasvideohelp.com/custom-highlight-masks/

~Wayne

I usually catch Gary's webinars and they've been very helpful. I always learn something from them even on the more basic topics. The last webinar on DVD Architect menus was excellent. Thanks SCS and Gary.

@wayne: many thanks for that link. It shows yet another way to construct menus.

Yes it was great. Lots of info and very well done!! Thank you Sony!

I believe this is the link some of us have been waiting for

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro10webinar02

Thanks for the link. I'm watching it now.

I've been moving ahead in the video to skip much of the early part of the webinar. My recommendation for anyone planning to watch this is that, unless you are a first-time user of DVD Architect, you should skip the first twenty minutes. It is very, very basic stuff.

The webinar starts to get a little bit interesting just before the 20:00 mark, and then the really good stuff starts at 25:00. That's where I recommend most people start.

A lot of time was devoted to the use of layered PSD files to construct and animate menus.Well, I just finished the webinar, and at least in the version posted online, there is absolutely no mention of this subject, much less any tutorial. Rather disappointing. I still found it somewhat useful from the 25:00 mark, up until the questions.

So, if you are expecting a tutorial on how to create PSD files in Photoshop, name the layers correctly, and then import into DVDA, you'll need to look at something other than this webinar.

I'm not complaining: it was still a very useful tutorial.

The link does not get you to where you need to go ...wrong program!

Sorry for the mistake.

When did we get into 2012?

We must still wait, it seems.