A little help with scenarist...

[Beat]

Hello.
Guide for Scenarist on doom9 is full of many intresting things, but ...
The thing is : I'm trying to make "advanced" menu similar to main menu of Matrix. (Ofcourse I saw a guide on doom9 about Scenarist... Too bad, that guide doesn't tells more about advanced buttons...) So, my pitfall is in buttons, that located over motion background (Mpeg video). I want to make' em look nice (gradient colours). But first I've tryed to rip original Matrix's menu with Menuedit and remaster it, just for practice. But I'm getting BMP file with rectangles instead of letters. Is it like words (in menu: main, scenes, extras etc) encoded in videotrack and above it just "zone of reaction"? And what if I wish to make letters that looked like complex texture (mozaic for example)? How to make that (in general)?
May be there's a gude about buttons for Scenarist?

[McPoodle]

It's like you said--most of the menu is burned into the background video (you can see that background video using DVD2AVI and examining the VTS_XX_0.VOB files). The only part that goes into the highlight layer is the part that lights up when you move around on the menu. Usually this is a box, or an underline, or maybe a little two-color icon that appears in front of the selected item.

As far as creating this yourself, there's a shareware program out there called DVDMenu that will help you with all this, but here's the solution using the software you already have:

1. Put together a neat-looking video with soundtrack that loops well (using Premiere + AfterEffects or your favorite NLE).

2. Grab one frame from this video to work with.

3. Bring that frame into Photoshop (or whatever graphics program you're using). Create a transparent layer on top of the frame and draw in the buttons. Save the file at this point.

4. Delete the frame layer so you're just left with buttons floating in space, and save that as a new PSD (Photoshop file).

5. Go back to Premiere, bring in the video, then put the PSD on top as a seperate track, then save out the video (this burns the buttons into the video).

6. Encode the new video into M2V and MP2 formats (or as M2V and WAV, then encode the WAV to AC3).

7. Go back to the file you saved in Step 3 and add another layer on top of the only two. Turn off anti-aliasing, then draw in your highlights using only black, red, and blue. When you're done (you might want to save at this point in case you want to change the menu at some point in the future), delete the two bottom layers, fill in all of the transparent parts of the image with white, and save as a bitmap.

8. Import the video, audio, and bitmap into Scenarist, then create the menu.

[Beat]

Thank you very much. Your answer was very helpful to me.