Menus are the visual interface to your DVD productions. The DVD standard provides for the raw components for making menus: text and graphics, buttons and backgrounds, stills and motion, links and actions. However, it is totally up to you, as the DVD designer, to choose how to use these components to design both the look of your DVD menus and the structure of the navigational links.
Although there is no formal standard for DVD design, we can look to commercial movies and other existing titles to see conventions that are useful to follow. As discussed in Chapter 2, common conventions include first-play title screens, main contents menus for clips, scene index menus for chapters, grid layouts of video thumbnails, and linked or even hierarchically nested collections of menus of related clips or scenes.
Adobe Encore DVD provides simple tools for quickly authoring straight-forward menus, as well as more intricate tools for creating sophisticated designs. With Encore, you can take several different approaches to menu creation:
You can import prebuilt template menu designs from the Library, complete with button graphics and text. You then create links from the menu buttons to the clips in your project, and edit the text appropriately. In this way you can design the menu style for your project in Photoshop, and create a complete set of template menus in that style as needed for your navigational structure. In the Library palette, click the first Show Menus button to display the prebuilt menu designs, complete with backgrounds, graphics elements, buttons, and text.
You can create menus from clips, as in Chapter 1. Start with just a background image, drag-and-drop clips from the Project window to create thumbnail buttons, and then add title text. Encore automatically creates the buttons in the default style, adds a thumbnail image from the clip, and creates the required links between the menu button and clip timeline.
Or, you can build the entire menu yourself from scratch in Encore or Photoshop, including the background, graphics, buttons, and text. As you will see, the Encore Menu Editor is powerful enough to compose all these elements and create buttons from graphics and text elements. In the Library palette, click the middle Show Backgrounds button to display the full-screen menu background designs, then use the buttons, text, and graphics entries to construct the other elements in your menus.
This chapter describes how to use Encore’s built-in Menu Editor to create and edit simple and intermediate menus totally within Encore, including text, graphics, buttons, video thumbnails, and button highlights. The next chapter describes how to use Photoshop to create and customize your own menu and button designs. If you have never used Photoshop before, this is a good time to learn, as Photoshop integration is a key feature of Encore. (All Encore menus are stored in the full Photoshop PSD format, including layers, masks, and other effects.) This means that you can do all your menu work directly in Encore, or you can continually exchange menus back and forth with Photoshop for further manipulation, without any conversions or “flattening” of layers:
At this point, let’s take a good look at how menus work. It helps to think of an Encore DVD menu in three layers.
The background
Static elements, including any images, graphics, and title text
Active button elements
When you actually build your DVD, all these elements are composited into the final menu and recorded on the DVD, and only the button highlights are changed dynamically. However, when designing menus, remember that the typical menu background is not just a still image—the menu can also include motion video and an associated audio track—so it helps to think of it as a separate layer under the button elements and any title text.
An Encore menu is simply a Photoshop file with multiple layers. In fact, each button is also a layer set—that is, a group of layers that define the elements of the button design. All of these elements and layers are maintained in the menu’s associated Photoshop file, so you can edit them directly in the Encore Menu Editor, or refine them further in Photoshop, all with no loss of information or hidden elements between the two applications.
Just like Photoshop, Adobe Encore allows you to view the layers of an element with the Layers palette, which is located in the same window as the Library palette by default. The Layers palette is shown in Figure 5-1.
Figure 5-1. The Layers palette displays the menu elements as layers in the associated Photoshop file.
If you’re familiar with Photoshop, this should be easy to understand. You may have noticed that various layers have certain naming conventions, such as those that start with “(+)” or “(=1)”. Don’t worry about those for the moment; we’ll talk about the Layers palette later in this chapter. However, you should be aware of the ability to view the graphical layers of any selected element using the Layers palette. It’s helpful to use this palette as we introduce the internals of menus and buttons, so you can get an idea of how Encore adjusts or interprets these layers and how you can conveniently accesses a subelement within an object.
OK, let’s get to it. One way to explore how menus are authored is to import some premade templates that have been created in Photoshop and stored in the Library palette. Do the following:
Toggle the Library palette to display menus only. Start a new project, if needed, display the Library palette, and then toggle the Display Menu button so that only menus are showing (it’s the one on the far left of the seven buttons).
Select a set and menu. Next, select a set and menu in the Library palette (we’ll use Sky Up Submenu. psd from the Corporate set).
Create the new menu. Click the New Menu button under the palette (or choose Create New Menu from the right-click context menu). Encore then creates a new menu in the Project tab. In addition, it will open the Menu Editor window with a tab for this new menu, as shown in Figure 5-2. The menu shown here was designed with three types of items: the background graphics, the menu title text, and four buttons. Note that these elements are actually separate layers in the Photoshop file that represents the menu—we’ll look into these layers a little later in the chapter.
You can also create a new menu using the current default for the selected set. The default is marked by a small yellow star in the lower right of the menu’s icon. Just click the New Menu button under the Project window, or choose Menu → New Menu (or use the right-click contextual menu), and Encore will create the new menu in the Project window and open the Menu Editor with a new default menu.
Alternatively, you can import a menu directly into the Project window by choosing File → Import as Menu in the Project window and opening a Photoshop file in the right format. We discussed this in Chapter 3.
Instead of starting with a full menu template, complete with titles and text, you also can begin editing a menu by starting with just a background element. This can be a Photoshop composition, or a simple still image.
Now that we’ve created a menu, let’s get familiar with the menu-editing environment. The first window we’ll discuss is the Menu Editor window. This window contains controls for viewing and editing the menus associated with the project. Figure 5-3 gives a précis of each control in the Menu Editor window. A description of each control follows.
- Menu tabs
The menu tabs, located near the top of the window, each represent a menu that is loaded into the Menu Editor. Choose the tab of the menu you want to display in the menu editing area.
- Menu editing area
This area represents the screen area for the menu. You can make various edits here, activate guides for safe areas, or toggle pixel aspect ratios to adjust the menu inside for television display.
- Zoom level
In you want to zoom the menu image, you can choose a preset from the drop-down menu, or type a value between 25% and 1600% and press Enter. Use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl-0 to zoom to fit the current window size, and Ctrl-1 to zoom to 100% within the window.
- Toggle pixel aspect ratio correction
This button toggles the pixel aspect ratio from square to nonsquare, to simulate how the menu will appear on a television display. When the button is pressed, the pixels will use nonsquare aspect ratios to simulate the broadcast type (NTSC or PAL) aspect ratio, either in fullscreen or widescreen.
- Show safe area
Clicking this button displays or hides the overlay lines that mark the action and title safe zones. The action safe zone is the outer of the two rectangles, and represents the border outside of which many televisions crop the image. The title safe zone is the inside rectangle; it’s best not to place any text or subtitles outside of this rectangle, as they will appear crowded against the edge of the screen.
- Show button routing
This button displays overlays for manually specifying the routing of the menu buttons (if Automatically Route Buttons is not checked on the menu properties). We’ll discuss buttons and button routing later in the chapter.
- Show guides
Clicking this button displays or hides guide line overlays that can be used to help align elements on your menus. When guide lines are displayed, objects that you drag on the menu will snap to the lines.
- Add guides
Use this button to add new horizontal or vertical guide lines to the menu.
- Show normal subpicture highlight
Selecting this option causes all buttons to display as they appear when not selected or activated (typically with no subpicture highlights visible).
- Show selected subpicture highlight
Selecting this option causes all buttons to display with subpicture highlights visible for the selected state.
- Show activated subpicture highlight
Selecting this option causes all buttons to display with subpicture highlights visible for the activated state.
When editing menus, you also use the Properties palette to view and edit menu and button properties. To display the Properties palette for a menu, click the Properties tab to activate it (or choose Window → Properties), and then select the menu name in the Project window, or click the background of the Menu Editor window. A default Menu Properties palette is shown in Figure 5-4.
Let’s go through each of these one by one.
This is the menu name, just as it is listed in the Project window. Note that you can change it in the Properties palette, and the change will propagate across any other Encore windows that reference it (e.g., the Project tab or the Menus tab).
This field enables you to enter an optional text description of the menu. You can use this to provide more information about the menu, which is saved with your Encore project.
The End Action specifies the menu or timeline that the DVD player will jump to if the menu is designed to time out. You can use this option to make a self-running disc that takes a default action if there is no user input. There are two ways to set this option, as described in more detail in Chapter 7 on DVD navigation.
The first is by clicking the small button with the triangle on the right side of the box. This will bring up a submenu that looks similar to Figure 5-5.
This submenu first lists the standard clipboard options, for copying and pasting links from other timelines or menus, as well as a Delete option that will return the end action to Not Set. Below that, Encore lists all the current menus and timelines in the project (including this one). Note that if you want to jump to another menu, you have the choice of jumping to the menu itself in its default state, or jumping to the menu with the chosen button selected. The latter is useful if you want to run the user down a menu of extras or outtakes, one after another, but do not want to lump them into a single timeline. In the same manner, if you want to jump to another timeline, you must specify which chapter you want to begin playing at. Remember that Chapter 1 is always the beginning of the timeline.
The second way to set a link is to click in the pick whip icon at the left of the link entry, and then drag the pick whip (which looks like a semitransparent line) across to an element inside of the Project or Menu Editor window. Acceptable elements will be outlined in black. Once you let go of the mouse button, the pick whip will snap back to the End Action field, and the link will appear inside of the Properties dialog. The pick whip is shown in Figure 5-6.
The Override link operates the same here as it does with the Timeline properties that we discussed in the previous chapter. When Encore jumps from this menu to another menu (or timeline), the DVD player plays through that linked element and then follows that element’s end action. However, if the Override option is set here, the end action of the linked menu or timeline will be ignored. Instead, the DVD player will use the link that you specify here. This gives you the ability to reuse elements in your DVD design by defining multiple end actions for the same menu or timeline, depending on how the user arrived there in the first place.
This Video option specifies the motion video asset that is used for this menu’s background. Note that this replaces only the background layer of the menu file, not any textual elements or button layers that are on top of it. See Figure 5-7.
Figure 5-7. Setting the Video property replaces the background layer of the menu with motion video, but does not affect any other layers.
A quick way to set up a motion video clip as a menu background is to import the clip into the Project window, and then Alt-drag it onto the Menu Editor window (recall from Chapter 1 that just dragging adds the clip to the menu as a button). Encore updates the Properties palette for the menu to list the video file, and associated audio, as shown in Figure 5-8. You can also use the pick whip in the Properties palette, as described earlier, to separately select the video and audio clips. When Encore adds the background video clip to the menu, it also updates the Duration field in the Properties palette with the length of the video clip. To remove the background video, just select the clip name in the Properties palette and press Delete. The Video field will change back to Nothing.
This option specifies the audio asset in the Project tab that is used for this menu’s background audio. Note that this can just be the audio portion of the video clip specified with the Video option described earlier. However, if you want to add a separate audio clip to a menu, import the audio clip into the Project window, and then drag and drop it onto the Menu Editor window. Encore updates the Properties palette for the menu to list the audio file (see Figure 5-9). When Encore adds the background audio clip to the menu, it also updates the Duration field in the Properties palette with the length of the audio clip.
Figure 5-9. The Menu Properties palette shows that the menu includes a background audio clip, but no video.
As expected, you can also use the pick whip on the left side of the field in the Properties palette to select a clip. Just click in the pick whip and drag the pointer to the audio clip entry in the Project window to select it (see Figure 5-10).
To remove the background audio, just select the clip name in the Properties palette and press Delete. The Audio field reverts to Nothing.
This option specifies the period of time (in the standard timecode format of hours;minutes;seconds;frames) that this menu or any motion menu clips are played. After this time expires, the menu can loop, or the End Action menu is executed. The duration is set automatically if you import an audio or video clip as the menu background. However, you can reset it at any time.
Checking this option overrides the End Action, Override, and Duration settings. If this option is checked, the DVD player will display a still menu indefinitely until the viewer activates a button. If you have imported a motion menu video or audio background into the menu, this option is grayed and cannot be selected.
Loop # specifies the number of times the menu will loop. The available options are None, any number, or Forever. You can select from any of the numbers inside the drop-down menu (see Figure 5-11), or enter your own.
Figure 5-11. Adjust the playback looping behavior of the background audio in the Properties palette.
For motion menus, Loop Point allows you to adjust the playback of the motion video or audio so that after the menu loops, playback restarts at the specified timecode offset from the beginning of the clip. Note that when the menu is initially displayed, the menu buttons are disabled until this point. If you are not using motion menus, this option is grayed.
You can use both options to adjust the length of the clip and how it is looped when the menu is displayed:
To trim the length of the motion clip, type a time value in the Duration field.
To have the menu loop, pull down the Loop # drop-down menu in the Properties palette and choose a loop count, from a small number of times to Forever; or just type a number into the field.
To have the clip loop at a different starting point, type a time value in the Loop Point field.
When the menu is displayed, the video and/or audio will play from the beginning of the clip for the specified duration, and then loop the specified number of times, starting playback again at the specified Loop Point offset within the clip. Be aware, however, that DVD players can be imprecise about looping, so design your clips to fade appropriately, and don’t depend on exact start and stop times.
To preview your looping video and/or audio, right-click in the Menu Editor window and choose Preview From Here from the pop-up contextual menu. Encore displays the Project Preview window, and you can watch the menu play time at the bottom of the window field. If you only have audio to preview and no video, you’ll get a blank screen, as shown in Figure 5-12.
As we saw in Chapter 1, adding buttons to a menu is as easy as dragging a clip from the Project window to the Menu Editor. Encore creates a button using the default button design in the Library palette, and links the button to the timeline and back. If the button was designed with a video thumbnail, Encore also inserts a thumbnail image of the first frame of the clip in the button.
By default, the button uses a still image, so the menu remains a still menu (if it does not have background video or audio). Encore, however, provides a single control in the Menu Properties palette to turn a menu with video clip buttons into motion video buttons: just check the Animate Buttons checkbox (see Figure 5-13). This causes Encore to create a motion menu, using the specified Loop and Duration options.
Figure 5-13. Select Animate Buttons in the Properties palette of the enclosing menu to create motion video buttons.
Each button with a video thumbnail then displays a segment from the linked clip, starting at the associated chapter point (or poster frame), and continuing for the menu’s duration. Again, it’s up to you to make sure all the video button segments are designed to play and loop together, along with any background video and audio.
This option specifies the default menu button (if any) that is selected automatically when the menu is displayed. Note that this default can be overridden by a navigational link from another object to this menu.
This option adds an offset to the button numbers for selection using the number buttons on a remote control (i.e., to match chapter numbers). This is useful in the event that you have more than one submenu that lists chapters in a timeline. We discuss buttons and button numbering later in this chapter.
This option specifies which menu color set is used for the button highlights. We discussed color sets briefly in the previous chapter in conjunction with subtitles. The same principles apply here for the button highlights, which we’ll discuss later in this chapter.
Checking this option instructs Encore to automatically generate the button routing path for the remote control through the menu buttons, as discussed later.
This option enables you to set the screen aspect ratio for the menu to either fullscreen (4:3) or widescreen (16:9).
This button specifies whether you wish to enable or lock out any specific DVD remote user operations while this menu is playing, such as pressing the Title button or the Menu button. If you press the Set button, you’ll see a small dialog that demonstrates the individual user operations that are allowed during a menu (see Figure 5-14).
You have the choice of allowing all the operations, none of them, or anything in between. If you want to allow some and not others, choose the Custom option at the top of the dialog box and check or uncheck the necessary operations in the dialog. Figure 5-15 shows how each checkmark option maps to a standard DVD remote control.
Although you can view the project menus by sorting with the Type column in the Project tab, Encore offers a better way to review, access, and check the menus in your project. Click the Menus tab in the Project window (or choose Window → Menus, or just press F10) to view a list with just the menus in your project. Then, select a menu to view its associated buttons in the bottom half of the window, as shown in Figure 5-16. Much like the columns in the Project tab, you can click the heading tabs to reorganize the buttons however you want. And, you can select more than one menu to check that their associated buttons are set consistently.
Figure 5-16. Use the Menus tab in the Project window to view and access the buttons in your project.
Like the Timelines tab, the Menus tab is a great tool for accessing the various elements (in this case, the buttons) in your project. Not only does this dialog help to quickly view all the links you have set for your buttons, but it also is essential for reviewing the structure and targets in your project to ensure that they are correct and consistent.
To help design your menus so that they look good when the final DVD is played on a television display, Encore provides the option to preview the menus on an attached video display through a DV camcorder. Of course, you should take advantage of the Encore options to adjust the menu display to simulate the television aspect ratio and to display a safe area overlay to avoid placing elements too close to the edge of the screen. But previewing your menus on a TV display provides an even better method of checking for other issues, such as colors that are too bright or text that is too small to read.
Much like Adobe Premiere Pro provides the ability to preview your clips as you edit, Encore also can display the Menu Editor screen over a FireWire (IEEE 1394) interface to an attached DV device. If you connect your DV camcorder, for example, and then connect the camcorder’s video output connectors to a television display, you can preview your menu designs on the TV screen.
To enable the external video display from the Menu Editor, choose Edit → Preferences → Video Out to display the Preferences dialog, as shown in Figure 5-17. Then click to enable Show Menu Editor on DV Hardware, and select the attached DV device.
