As you saw in the previous chapter, you can create and design menus completely within Adobe Encore DVD, working in the Menu Editor window to compose buttons on menus with images, graphics, text, and even motion video. This chapter describes how to take the next step; taking advantage of Encore’s tight integration with Photoshop to design your own menu elements and to enhance the work you do within Encore.
Encore’s integration with Photoshop comes in two forms: Encore uses the Photoshop file format for menus and buttons, and it also supports round-trip editing with Photoshop. This means that by using the Photoshop PSD file format for storing menus and buttons, Encore can exchange designs directly with Photoshop, complete with layers, and without requiring you to flatten the image or perform other conversions between the different applications. It also means that Encore can export a menu directly to Photoshop for editing, and then return directly to Encore with the modified menu, all without requiring you to export and import, or even keep track of any changed files (Encore manages temporary files for you).
As a result, you can adopt a working style that’s best for you, your organization, and your DVD authoring process. You may want to have a graphics designer create a complete series of DVD menu and button styles for a specific project, in which case you can do the design work in Photoshop and then import the templates into Encore to perform the final authoring and lay out the button navigation. Or, at the other extreme, you could do a preliminary DVD design in Encore, and then import the menus into Photoshop to polish the final design. Encore’s round-trip editing with Photoshop means you can use whatever approach and tools are best for your project.
As you have seen in the previous chapters, you can import predesigned menu layouts into Encore, complete with background, titles, and buttons. For example, to edit an existing menu template, open the Library palette (click the Library tab, or choose Window → Library), click the bottom left Show Menus button, click to select a menu with a scene index design (i.e., Sky Up Submenu.psd in the Corporate menu set, so named because it uses the Sky Up design theme, with submenu buttons, at NTSC resolution and aspect ratio), and then click the New Menu button under the list (or choose Create New Menu from the right-click context menu). Encore opens the selected menu design in the Menu Editor window.
To view the structure of the menu design, open the Layers palette (see Figure 6-1).
As we saw in the previous chapter, a menu includes several different kinds of elements:
The menu title is a text element.
The main menu button (to navigate back to the main menu) is a button layer set: it has a simple text element with a highlight subpicture element. This layer set is identified as a button by the (+) prefix on the layer name, and also marked with a button icon in the column to the left of the name.
The four chapter buttons are button layer sets, and include graphics, text, video thumbnails, and highlights.
The background details layer set contains individual graphics elements that were composed into the menu background.
The bottom Background layer is a plain white rectangle. All the other layers, solid and translucent, are blended on top of it.
First, let’s take a look at the background elements. Click the disclosure triangle in the Layers palette to view the elements within the background details layer set. Note that this is just an image layer set (not a button layer set—there is no “rounded rectangle” icon in the center column next to it), used to help logically organize the graphical elements in the design, but without any special meaning to Encore.
The designer of this menu has composed the menu graphics from a variety of graphical elements, each accessible in an individual layer. To explore the menu design, click the individual element names in the Layers palette to highlight the corresponding graphics element in the Menu Editor window, or click the eye icon in the left column of the Layers palette to make individual elements visible or hidden (see Figure 6-2).
