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The latest version of Sony DVD Architect comes installed with over 50 themes, giving you many options for menu designs. But suppose none of them suit the project you’re working on? Fortunately, DVD Architect also gives you a few options for creating your own menu designs. Since v2.0, one of those options has been custom highlight masks.

A menu designed in this way only needs two files: a background video or image, which contains everything your menu will show, and a mask indicating all highlights. This tutorial will walk you through creating these files in a graphics application and using them in Sony DVD Architect.

Ready? Then let’s get started!

Creating the Images

The background can be either a video or a static image. For this tutorial, I will be creating an image using Adobe Photoshop. You can use any graphics application you like, but it would help if it were one that supports multiple layers such as Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or The Gimp. I’ll trust that you know your way around the graphics application you’re using. But if you’d rather skip this part of the tutorial, you can download the background image and highlight mask image that I’m creating.

Find a picture you’d like to use and open it in your graphics application. Usually, I’d begin with a still from the movie I’m putting on DVD, but here I’ll just be using a picture I found at Stock.XCHNG. Feel free to use the same image.

The first thing to do with your image is resize it so that it is the appropriate dimensions for your DVD menu. Keep in mind that your still image will have square pixels, whereas your DVD (incuding the menu) will have non-square pixels. For example, the dimensions of a standard NTSC DVD (standard meaning not widescreen, and NTSC being the format used in North America) are 720×480, but a still image for this kind of menu should be 655×480. DVD Architect will appropriately “reshape” the image as needed.

If your graphics application has the option to add guidelines, do yourself a favor and add some now to indicate the title safe area — this is the suggested region of the menu where your titles and buttons should be placed so that they are not cut off by the viewer’s television. (For more information, run “safe area overscan” in your favorite search engine.) You should allow for a “border” of around 10% for titles and buttons. For a standard NTSC project, this will be about 65 pixels from the left and right, and about 50 pixels from the top and bottom.

Figure 1: Background image

Now that you’ve got your background image opened and guidelines set up, it’s time to start turning it into a DVD menu. Using your application’s tools, create the “buttons” you want for your menu.

(I put “buttons” in quotation marks because, in truth, the background of a DVD menu is one complete video or image with hotspots (the highlights) over it. The “buttons” you see aren’t really buttons at all — they don’t do anything.)

For this tutorial, I used Photoshop’s text tool to add a Play, Scenes, and Setup “buttons” to the background as well as a title for the menu. You can use text or add images, whatever you’d like to represent the “buttons” is fine — so long as it’s clear to the viewer, of course, what will happen when they select the menu items. I like to keep each item on its own layer, but you can use as few or as many layers as you like. If you’re like me, save all of this to a multi-layered file such as PSD. Then save a copy as a single layered image that you will use as your menu background. Most any image format is fine — I like to use PNG.

Figure 2: With "buttons" and title

When your “buttons” have the look and position you want, add a new layer above all the others. This layer will contain your highlight mask. A highlight mask tells DVD Architect what the actual buttons will look like. On a DVD, the actual buttons are usually fairly simple graphics like a box, a circle, or an underline that “highlights” part of your menu background. They’re usually a single color or variations of a single color. On this highlight mask layer, you’re going to create the shapes you want to have highlight your menu background and indicate the item(s) being selected from the menu.

There are two main rules to remember about highlight masks. The first is that the mask should use only black and shades of gray. Don’t worry, these aren’t the only colors your highlight can contain, but the actual highlight color will be set in DVD Architect. This mask is simply for deciding the shape and position. The second rule is that while the highlights can be any shape, the actual hotspot will be rectanglular, and those hotspots should not overlap. So as you’re drawing your highlight mask, imagine that each shape has an invisible rectangle around it, and make sure there is space between each one.

With those rules in mind, draw the shapes for your highlights, using the “buttons” on the background image as a guide. I drew outlines around my menu items using the background as a guide, but you can do pretty much anything you want — underlines, circles, arrows, wavy lines, be creative and have fun.

Figure 3: With highlights

Now you’re ready to save your highlight mask to its own file. Hide all other layers so that only your highlights remain. The background of this image will need to be transparent, so here you must save to a format that supports alpha channels. PSD and PNG are popular such formats, with PNG resulting in a smaller file size.

Figure 4: Highlights only

That’s all we need is those two images — now let’s head over to DVD Architect and put them to use.

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Tags: DVD Architect, highlight, mask, menu