Help decipher error msg from ReelDVD!

[walter4h]

Hi, guys:
I have a problem importing a still menu into ReelDVD.
The menu is a .PSD with six layers - transparent background 720x480, a picture, plus four buttons. The picture is composed of 4 clips, ea occupying one quadrant of the total bkg image. Ea button is in its own layer, in the r-h part of ea respective quadrant.
Reel says "1 file accepted...", and then the following row of error msgs:
Info Accepted F:\Images\Menu.psd
Info 1 file(s) accepted, 0 file(s) rejected
Info Accepted F:\Images\Menu_sp.bmp
Info 1 file(s) accepted, 0 file(s) rejected
Error The right coordinate, currently set to 720, should be between 0 and 719.
Error The top coordinate, currently set to 0, should be between 2 and 479.
Error The bottom coordinate, currently set to 480, should be between 2 and 479.
Error The right coordinate, currently set to 720, should be between 0 and 719.
Error The top coordinate, currently set to 0, should be between 2 and 479.
Error The bottom coordinate, currently set to 480, should be between 2 and 479.
Error The right coordinate, currently set to 720, should be between 0 and 719.
Error The top coordinate, currently set to 0, should be between 2 and 479.
Error The bottom coordinate, currently set to 480, should be between 2 and 479.
Info Accepted F:\Images\Menu.psd
Info 1 file(s) accepted, 0 file(s) rejected
Info Encoding subpicture "F:\Images\Menu_sp.bmp"
---------------
The bmp file which is produced as a result is just a black field.
I did not set up any button areas up to that point, I have only imported a menu as a still menu with subpicture, and yet I am getting the messages that some coord are set incorrectly.
Can someone please tell me what is happening?
Thx: walter

[Arky]

I'm only going by the description you posted, but presumably, ReelDVD does not like subpictures which extend to the full limits of the canvas.

Seems pretty weird, but that's what the errors appear to suggest. By the way, why are you trying to import so many layers?

You only need one subpic layer and one background layer. The deliniation between the button highlights grouped into one subpic layer can be set using the button fields and highlight sets. Therefore, you may merge all your buttons to one layer. The only seperation required is your button highlight subpic from your background image.


Arky ;o)

[walter4h]

Thanks, Arky:
I have not been on the net for 24 hrs, only now getting to see your reply.
This was my first real menu, I am a total newbie with menus at this point.
My buttons were tall, thin rectangles at the r-h side of the pic. And yes, I can see now that they must have extended a little too far. The reason I made them this way was because the bkg for ea movie was a picture captured from that movie. Placing a real button there would have obstructed the pic.
With regard to the layers, I followed the ReelDVD help, as well as tutorials from CrazyPants.com and www.daileycreative.com/ReelDVD/Tutorial/
My understanding was that you need a layer for ea button. But from what you are saying, the button control is set in ReelDVD. Now, as I rehash the process of menu design in Reel, I can see that you have a point.
Unfortunately, the earliest I'll be able to try it, will probably be Friday evening.
Thanks again for your help! if I stumble upon smth interesting, I'll post it.
walter

[Arky]

I think you appear to be gaining a fuller understanding of how Subpics work in menus. However, you do not appear (yet) to have grasped that no matter how opaque a subpicture is, it can be made to appear transparent (or any of 14 grades between the extremes of opacity and transparency - equalling 16 total possible values) by carefully adjusting its display settings in ReelDVD's menu editor. This is fundamental to the DVD spec.


Just make sure that when you make your subpic it does not contain more than 4 colours (or shades of grey). The commonest 4 colours used for subpics are Blue, Red, White and Black. The precise colour choices are arbitrary, but these colours are simply used as a convention, because they are very different from each other, and a DVD authoring program (ReelDVD being no exception) will categorise all subpic colours into 4 categories, and map them to subpic colour 'channels' accordingly. This is known as Chroma mapping. You could also use Luminance mapping (if you had created a subpic using 4 distinct shades of grey rather than 4 distinct colours). Once the colours (or greys, in the case of the luminance mapping approach) have been mapped (assigned) to the 4 available subpic display channels, you can individually assign a level of transparency/opacity to each layer, as well as alternative colours (for example, red components in your original Photoshop subpic can actually be made to display as any colour you like! The same goes for any colours used - remember the only reason we had different colours was to dissociate some components of the subpic from others, during the subsequent mapping procedure).

These four levels of colour mapping can further be subdivided between Inactive, Selected, and Activated 'Button States'. Therefore, addressing your concerns that your subpic (remember you only have one subpic, which combines all your individual button overlays into one layer) would potentially obscure the detailed background, you can see that you need not be concerned about this, because you can make any channel of your subpic display as transparently as you like. So, if you liked, you could set the area of your subpic that lies above button 1 to display completely transparently when it is not selected, then turn translucent yellow when it is Selected, and finally, opaque yellow (or any other colour you like) when it is Activated with the Enter button on your remote (or your mouse).

I hope this makes a little sense. Play around with the controls in ReelDVD's menu editor and you should be able to make some sense of what I have written, perticularly if you combine this with what is written in the other tutorials you have read on the topic.

In summary:

* Your subpic elements should all exist in the same layer, with all subpic elements then being seperable from each other by two fundamental means:

1) Colour Mapping:- the use of different colours while 'drawing' them in Photoshop - ideally a maximum of four (clearly distinct from each other) colours. Any more will be wasted and probably cause problems because there are only four possible channels to be assigned to, and if you use 5 colours, then 2 of them will be assigned to the channel which is closest to their chroma specification (or luminance specification, if you are using luminance mapping instead of chroma mapping).

This does not mean use a different colour for every button (although you could, technically do that). It means that you could create text highlights in your subpic that use a different colour from the areas that will highlight the buttons themselves.

2) Defined Fields:- Once you have imported the subpic layer into ReelDVD's menu editor, you can define seperate fields which will mean that when one 'button' subpic is selected, the others won't all be selected simultaneously because they will have their own activation fields which cannot be activated at the same time as each other (never allow activation fields to overlap each other or you will violate the DVD spec and crash either on compile, or during playback).


* And all mapped channels can subsequently have their display properties adjusted by:

1) Colour Adjustment:- So that they display an alternative colour-per channel, of your choosing. These choices can be different for each menu, but cannot vary within each menu, by which I mean that if you decide to display the red-mapped channel as pink, this setting will mean that ALL red-mapped channel elements, regardless of their differring field defintions, will have to be the same chosen pink colour.

2) Transparency / Opacity adjustment:- So that they vary (according to your choice) in their level of transparency or opacity. Again, as with alternative colour display settings, the transparency you set for a given mapped colour channel will have to be identical for all elements within that same menu which belong to that mapped channel, even if they exist in seperate defined fields.


Good luck!


Arky ;o)



P.S.:

* DVD Studio Pro and DVD Maestro (essentially the same core program as each other) allow greater complexity by allowing three colour 'sets' instead of just the standard 1 colour set, but this really need not concern you for the timebeing. Just learn the standard method that I have described, before you investigate greater complexities (which are not strictly necessary, anyway - they're really just an extravagant luxury).

* You should be aware that if you author your subpic in Photoshop with a white (instead of transparent) background, then this can be made transparent within your DVD menu editor, as I described, but this will only leave you with 3 other colour channels for the visible parts of your menu. Therefore, it is a good idea to learn how to create subpics with transparent backgrounds, so you don't waste a mapped colour channel unecessarily.

* Pinnacle DVD Impression Pro can accept multi-layered photoshop images, but this is not what it first seems. The program is specially designed to interpret multi-layered Photoshop files in a very unique and unorthodox manner - it actually recognises what is happening and interprets such files as meaning you wish to create a selection-dependent ('auto-advancing' sequential) menu. The thing is, these are an illusion! Such menus are, in reality, several linked menus. Every time you move the cursor, the next button (as an example) appears to depress, but there is a slight pause as another menu is jumped to, which has the desired depressed button appearance drawn into its graphics. There are several disadvantages to such a menu design approach. For one, there is no audio buffer in the current DVD spec - this means that each time you move the cursor and the menu advances to the next menu, the audio (if any) will stop and start with the new stream (if any) and thus sound very unprofessional, quite apart from giving the game away that you are using multiple menus, thus spoiling the illusion.

Also, if you have more than one instance of such a 'nested' menu, then the number of menu replications expands at such a rate that navigation between all the numerous elements slows down dramatically (and is compounded even more if you use an abstraction layer system like DVD Maestro, which places all the menus in one area of the disk) and some players may even choke completely when playing back such a DVD. You could use a program other than DVD Impression Pro to achieve this type of menu design, but not through the use of multi-layered Photoshop files - you'd have to manually create the 'replicated' menus, subtly altering the graphics in each instance, to suit the required button state appearance. So, you can see that although DVD Impression Pro is a notable exception to the general rule of having only two layers per Photoshop file, it does not technically undermine the rule, because Impression is unique in the way it interprets such files. Consequently, you should not allow any discussions of the program, that you might find lurking on the net, to undermine your understanding of the conventional structure of subpics and menu construction in general, which I described in the main body of my post. This has turned into a long post, but understanding menu layers and construction is really easy, so don't be intimidated!