DVD Menu

I am now well into the creation of my DVD menus, focusing at the moment on Photoshop files, using the Encore Codecs which link the two programmes. After having some trouble with these in the past, i decided to just simplify everything, using just the traditional "blob selection tool". This involves creating a new Photoshop Group for each future button and assigning it the "(+)" codec. This tells encore that the layers in this folder make up a button.

So in each folder I have the word of the option (in this case, to get a better font, I have screen printed one from dafont.com) and a blob, positioned next to the word  option with the codec "(=2)" which tells Enore it is an image rollover. A seperate folder is also created for the background, to both onfuse Encore less and to make it easier when compiling layers into gorups.

I have put a couple of menus together with a few animations, so my Menu is starting to build up, with it's already working Menus and Transitions.

The transitions and opening animations were created using Photoshop Animation. As I explained in my previous post, this can be a time consuming process. The extra difficulty factor here was added by the changing illumination of the room from my flickering light. Now on each layer the lighting effects had to be altered to make a convincing effect.

The image below shows an animation reel from Photoshop:

Once this was completed, using CS3 I rendered the finished .mov files to be imported into Encore