WAAAAAY OT: Things I've never had to do before....

Hi everyone,

I had a request from a customer recently, and I haven't done any of these things before, and I'm wondering if they're possible or easy to do....and how to do them as well

Oh, and don't ask me about why they want cheeseballs!

First request...they want the buttons to be little yellow cheeseballs...I know how to use a yellow circle, but this is a little not-perfectly-round circle with a gradient look to it. I actually have a photo of a cheeseball that I shrunk to fit. It looks good, but how can I make them be invisible until highlighted, and look like the cheeseball when highlighted, then have it gray out or change opacity when clicked?

Second request...they want to have a little crunch sound effect when the cheeseball is clicked. I have a sound effect, but don't know how to apply it to the button so it sounds off when clicked.

Thanks!
Casey

Uh...I believe this is WAY OT for a Final Cut Pro forum You are now in the realm of DVD / Web Design. You haven't mentioned which it is. I will leave it up for a little while to see if you get a reply, then move it to the DVD Studio Pro forum.

FWIW...I do what you are asking in Dreamweaver CS4. Final Cut Studio isn't even close to that.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Oops! I thought I did post it in the DVDSP forum! You can move it there...I'm not sure how, myself.

Casey

Even in DVDSP sounds attached to buttons are nearly impossible to pull off due to limitations in the DVD spec. It can be done sorta but you'll be waiting an eternity on each button press for the actual sound to be loaded as another track and played. Not worth it. That's Flash design- which is a common perception of clients who are unfamiliar with DVD design limitations. Easy to do on a website (or a Blu-ray which also supports precaching of sounds and images) but pretty much impossible on a DVD. So let 'em know, can't be done as a DVD.

Noah

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Okay...I'm okay with losing the sound...actually this button thing was a bit speculative anyways, but I still would like to know if it is possible to do this graphically.

Worst case scenario, I make a solid color orange dot button, but I would like to know if I can up my graphics game a little bit by having something other than solid color buttons (regardless of shape).

Thanks!
Casey

Sure check your manual about making menus using complex photoshop layers. However this has the same issue- each layer must be loaded from disc one at a time. So the performance is dismal and this is way most pro DVDs you'll see use a single simple highlight layer instead. Remember DVD video has been around for an eternity in terms of technology (circa 1996) so they really are not capable of doing a lot of the sort of little visual tricks we take for granted on the web today.

Noah

Final Cut Studio Training, featuring the HVX200, EX1, EX3, DVX100, DVDSP and Color at [www.callboxlive.com]!
Author, RED: The Ultimate Guide to Using the Revolutionary Camera available now at: [www.amazon.com].
Editors Store- Gifts and Gear for Editors: [www.editorsstore.com]

There is one way to do this without using Photoshop layers, and that is to use an overlay masking technique.

Whereas in a normal overlay you work to create highlights that will show when selected, ina masked overlay you create highlights that cover over an area of the background layer, and set the opacity to zero when they are selected. This is the reverse of the usual use of highlights.

You need to have a pretty flat colour for the menu, with the cheeseballs on the background layer. You then create the overlay as blocks that will cover the graphics. These blocks need to be the exact same colour as the background... or at least fit into the background design so that they are imperceptible when in the normal state.

You then set the normal state to be 100% opaque and selected state to be zero opacity of the highlight layer.

What you can't do is change the colour of the cheeseballs when activated. All that is possible is to change the opacity of the overlay shape so that they appear to be a different hue. If your overlay shapes are the same dimensions as the cheeseballs this could look quite effective.

But now for the bad news...

This kind of menu has some limitations when in use in some players, in that when you activate a button on a menu ALL of the highlights will momentarily disappear as the sub-picture stream is stopped a fraction of a second before the navigation moves out of the menu. The effect will be that a lot of cheeseballs will appear for that time! Similarly, if you navigate to a menu it takes a similar fraction of a second for the sub-picture stream to re-engage and thus all of the cheeseballs will be in view and then all but one will disappear.

The length of time involved will vary from player to player, and in some players you won't even see it.

The second frustration is that it will be tricky to match colours with the overlay shapes and the background precisely. It will be annoyingly close, but not exact. For this reason, you need to think carefully about your menu design. For example, if the design includes a lot of slightly different circular shapes arranged seemingly at random across the background then you could possibly get away with the overlay shapes being perceptible.

The benefit of this system is two-fold - the speed of the menu will be the same as a standard overlay, and you can have background audio (though not on a per button basis which has already been pointed out). Whether or not the benefits are worthwhile is for you to decide, but what you have described is one of the more difficult things to achieve in a standard def DVD menu, and not something I'd be encouraging the client to believe is possible.

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