DVDMaestro & Menus...

[ChrissyBoy]

I have been battling with trying to get a decent, yet simple, menu together in Maestro now for a couple of days. I can do the standard stuff ok but what i'm after is glowing, highlighted text buttons. So i've been trying various subpicture techniques with colormapping & photoshop effects etc - but the all look crap. I was just about to give up when i decided to try a still sequence menu. it was very easy & works like a charm. i was led to believe that this was tricky and had downsides. Neither are true for me. Granted i am only doing two buttons but now it takes me about 2 minutes to knock something up like this:





Have i missed somehting here?

[spidey]

Looks fine. THe motion menu's can be tricky.

For fixed ones, there's a simple and excellant tool out there called DVD Menu Studio. It does your overlays and all easier than Photoshop, as it is a pre designed 4 layer template made for menu overlays. In Maestro you'd adjust your layer coloring.

A good guide to illustrate some Maestro aspects is here http://www.geocities.com/eaussie01au/photoshop.html

For DVD Menu Studio, http://www.mediachance.com/dvdmenu/index.html
Hope this helps.

[ChrissyBoy]

Spidey: Thanks for the reply. I too use DVD Menu Studio. However my goal was to have buttons which have an unselected state of 'text' and a selected state of 'text + outer glow'. This can't be done using subpictures & dvd menu studio. So i went back to photoshop & was trying this sort of thing. This looked good in theory but gave me rubbish results (probably my lack of photoshop skills).

Now because i had read in several places that still sequence menus in maestro was tricky i left them alone. Quote from DVD Menu Studio Help file:

Still sequence menu is quite a lot of work in DVDMaestro so it is recommended use the normal Subpicture menu instead.

But i decided to give it a try in DVD Menu Studio, as a multi frame button menu (which doesn't use layers like you describe) and it was EASY. Even the Maestro part.

So my questions are: Can the task be done using subpictures - i think not. And why are still sequence menus in maestro described as hard when they are not & are there any downsides to this technique?

CB