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Okay, so you want your DVD menu to have an icon that moves as the viewer navigates between items. You’ve looked and looked in the DVD Architect manual, and all you can find is stuff about color sets, subpictures, and highlights — nothing about how to move an image around the screen. I’ve got good news and bad news for you.

Bad news first: That ain’t how DVD menus work.

Good news: You can fake it.

What many people don’t realize about DVD menus is that they are very, very simplistic. A DVD menu has an image or video as a background and a single layer of three colors. In most menus, the layer of colors is used to highlight the currently selected or active item. The highlight can’t be more complex than that, and images on the screen can’t be controlled individually by the viewer. So, how does one achieve this often sought style of menu where a full color image is used to indicate the selected item?

Figure 1: Default Theme

By using what I have begun calling the “inverse selection” method. To follow along with this tutorial, you’ll need the Wedding 3 theme that comes with DVD Architect Pro 4.0 and above (it may be included with DVD Architect Studio as well) and this image of a bell. Feel free to use a different theme / background and images, but keep one thing in mind: The “icon” must be over a solid color for this method. You’ll see why later. To get started, create a new DVD Architect project, add your media buttons as normal, and edit the button text and menu title as needed.

Figure 2: The Icons

If you’re following along exactly, now apply the Wedding 3 theme. This background image is white and has a flower arrangement on the right side. Buttons are laid out on the left side, and text is a light blue using the font Arial. Like most DVD Architect themes, the button for each item consists of a thumbnail from its linked video and a frame around that thumbnail. Let’s get rid of those. Choose the Selection Tool from the set of icons to the left of the menu workspace and select all of the menu buttons. This will switch the Menu Page Properties window to the Button Properties window where you can now edit the settings for all selected buttons. Select the Media tab of that window and cancel out all the settings we don’t need. You can do this by highlighting a setting, clicking the down arrow to its right, and choosing Remove. Do this for Mask (beneath Thumbnail Properties), Frame Media, and Mask (these last two under Frame Properties). Then click the down arrow to the right of Thumbnail Media and choose Replace. DVD Architect will present you with the Open Media dialog where you can browse for the image you want to use as an “icon.” In my case, I’m going to locate this picture of a bell and click Open.

So, now your menu items all have the same image next to them acting as a button. The menu also has the default behavior of highlighting the selected item with a semitransparent color. What we really want to do, though, is to hide all the other items on the menu while letting the selected item show through. This is where the “inverse selection” comes in. First, with all of the buttons still selected, go to the Highlight tab of the Button Properties window. For the Style setting, choose Image Rectangle. Then click an empty area of the menu so that no buttons are selected. This switches the Button Properties window back to the Menu Page Properties window. On the General tab, we’ll need to change the color sets that are applied to the menu’s buttons. Adjust the settings as follows:

Selected Button Colors: None (all transparent)
Active Button Colors: None (all transparent)
Inactive Button Colors: Color Set 1

(Really, you can use whichever color set you want for Inactive Button Colors — just make sure you edit that color set in the next step.)

Figure 3: Color sets

To hide the inactive buttons (the ones that the viewer does not currently have selected), we “highlight” them with a solid color that will blend into the background image. In this example, the background immediately behind the “icons” is white. So, we’ll go to the Color Sets tab of the Menu Page Properties window and change the Fill color for Color Set 1 to white. Expand Color Set 1 if it’s not already, select the Fill Color setting, and click the down arrow to its right. This gives us tools for adjusting this color — including a color picker. To get this color just right, let’s click the eye dropper icon and then select a color on our menu that is in close proximity to the “icon” we’re trying to hide. This will give us a highlight that is that same color, but it will probably also be semi transparent — which means the “icon” will still be partially visible To remedy that, let’s raise the Alpha Channel setting all the way up to 255, thereby making the color opaque. We can do this by typing 255 into the “A” textbox or by dragging the Alpha channel slider all the way up.

Figure 4: Previewing the Results

Preview your menu by hitting F9 on the keyboard or clicking the Preview button above the menu workspace. You should see the image next to one of your menu items, and nothing but empty space next to the others. As you use the navigation buttons on the remote, you should see the image “move” from one item to the next.

Addendum: There is one hazard in using this method. Most DVD players stop displaying all of a menu’s highlights as they switch to another menu or piece media. This isn’t much of an issue when you’re simply using a single highlight to indicate the chosen menu item — it just returns to its usual deselected state. But when you’re using those highlights to hide one or more items that you don’t want the viewer to see, suddenly they see them all! It’s only for a moment (depending on how long the player takes to change media), but it can interrupt the illusion. I don’t know of a way to prevent this from happening, but this brief peek behind the curtain looks more intentional, I think, if each of the “icons” is different.

Thank you, Paul L, for pointing out this issue in the comments.

Tags: DVD Architect, highlight, menu