Creating Photoshop buttons for motion menus and photoshop menus

Question

Hi I need to create buttons in photoshop for both a photoshop menu and a motion menu on DVD studio pro program
Can someone tell me how to do it on both different menus?
I really need some DETAILS on how to do it. Thanks for your time and responses ahead of time

Answer 1

OK, here's what I recommend you try...
Create the footage for your motion menu background. In that footage fade in the button shapes and text for the buttons exactly as you want them to appear. Hold the final position of these buttons for at least 30 seconds. save an image of the still portion to act as a guide in photoshop. Encode that footage to MPEG2 using Compressor and import it in to DVDSP.
Take the still image in to photoshop and add a single layer to the file. On the new layer, create a shape of some kind (an underline, tick, circle, cross, box around, arrow, etc) next to the background button text. Make these shapes (for each piece of background text) black, and leave the rest of the layer white. Hide or delete the background layer and save the result as a .pict image. Import it in to DVDSP.
Take the motion footage and drop it in to a menu. use the loop point in the property inspector to define where the 'still' portion of that footage begins. Now drag the .pict overlay image in to the same menu, but hold it a second until the contextual menu appears... set it as the overlay. Drag out button rectangles around the background text and position for the shapes in the overlay. Make sure the rectangles don't overlap, and set up the target for these buttons as well as the navigation between them.
Use the property inspector to adjust the colours for the overlay - set it to be a simple overlay and in grayscale. What should happen is that when the menu plays the animated sequence starts first but as soon as the loop point is reached the overlay becomes active. The first button defined will be set as selected. You should now see the menu with the buttons faded in to position and the buttons should be clickable.
When returning to this menu you may not want the viewer to sit through the animated sequence each time. Use a script (in DVDSP4) to specify that they return to the loop point only (the bit where the buttons are) or create a second menu that is identical to the loop point and send the viewer there instead.
As you can see, there are several steps involved and I have made assumptions that you know something about menus and constructing buttons. It is all in the manual, but you will need to be familiar with Photoshop (or whatever image editor you prefer) to do this properly.
You do not need to try to make four layer shapes and bring them in to the menu, and if you attempt to add anything else from the templates panel to this menu then the image quality will suffer as DVDSP builds the disc. If you do want to add other shapes and text to the menu then don't do the export to MPEG2... keep it as a simple QT .mov file.
Please let us know how you get on after trying this method, and after reading up on those manuals