Assistance with WS menus.

[Afterlife]

Looking for some help from people who make widescreen menus. I want to create a guide for others to read as I'm having a hard time doing this. So if anyone wants to help me, which will help me make a guide and thus help others, thanks.

Ok so problem is I want to make a Widescreen Menu. Only app I use to make menus is Photoshop, so I open up the pre-set for widescreen and says
NTSC DV Widescreen, 720x480

Ok so can someone explain the resolution? I know thats standard FULL D1, but how does the menu have the same specs but not be those dimensions? I hope that makes sense.

Pixel Aspect Ratio is turned on at 1.2 Widescreen.

So as most backgrounds are not made for widescreen I have to make my own background.

Now problem is I dont know the widescreen resolution. Its not 720x480 I know that for sure maybe at the pixel aspect ratio it is, but Im looking for the actual resolution for just making the menu right now.

Also, so say I make a menu, photoshop gives you the guides for the text/button safe areas, does anyone know the actual pixel lengths for these? I want to add on the FULLSCREEN guides as well, that way I can tell what part of the menu will be shown on a fs tv (as it will be P&S). Hope this makes sense.

Thanks for any help anyone can give.

[guns1inger]

Actually, it is 720 x 480. Both 16:9 and 4:3 has the same resolution. What is different is the Pixel Aspect Ratio. On a TV, pixels aren't square. To work with square pixels you can start with 854 x 540, then resize back to 720 x 480 when you are done.

If you are going to work within full screen guides then you are restricting yourself a great deal, and also may run into sub-picture problems, depending on your authoring software. I usually make widescreen only menus, but author them to display as letterboxed on 4:3 TVs. Seems to solve the problem. It does depend on what software you are using for authoring though.

Have a read of this http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/16286.html
There is also a psd file with the guides in it for downloading.

[Afterlife]

Thanks gunslinger, If I had a nickel for everytime you answered a question I couldnt find elsewhere, well id have a lot of nickels lol.

Ok so that cleared up a lot of things, I had to resize the guides to 854x480 so I can see what area im working with.

Reason I want both guides on is because with retail DVD's I notice that they dont LB the menu, they P&S it instead.

I tested this out on over a dozen retail dvds, and always the WS menu has been designed in such a way that if played on a FS tv the P&S showed area is still as functional as the original, you just cant see as much as you was intended. Which indeed does suck, but for menus I am not so sure its worse than LB.

One thing that is really annoying is the fact that making backgrouns is no longer a simple task, no backgrounds are widescreen so I have to make them myself now from existing background and just lose some of the image or add a black border, ah well lol.

Would you mind If i saw a few of the WS menus you have created in PS? Just for educational sake.

Thanks!

[guns1inger]

I'll see what I can find.

OK. I couldn't give you any client stuff, of course, and the others I had were too much effort to pull apart, so I knocked this one up quickly. The rar'd archive contains a compiled version of the menu made with DVD Lab Pro, which you can burn to disk and test. Very simple, but shows you the idea. Also included is a .psd of the menu. It was made using the NTSC Widescreen template in Photoshop CS2. DLP actually prefers 960 x 540 for widescreen, and 720 x 540 for for fullscreen, but a simple resize at the end of the design process fixes that. Also, DLP does not require any specific naming conventions when using .psd files. Some applications require very specific naming conventions be followed.

Hope this helps.