Sony DVDArchitect menu: making inactive buttons invisible?

[ucdawg12]

Hey guys, as the subject states I am working with Sony DVDArchitect 2.0 and I am trying to make my menu so that buttons that are inactive arent visible. What I do is I make a menu with all my labels and such on it in one psd file, and then I create a button in png format that I place next to all the labels in my menu. Usually my menu has a solid background color and for an inactive button I would set it so the inactive button was filled with the background color of the menu, this way it would look like the button is moving when I go up and down through my labels. However this time my background is not something I made in photoshop with a solid background its a picture from my digital scanner so I cant just set it so the inactive button is filled with a solid color, it needs to become invisible somehow or else this wont work. I hope what I wrote down can be understood by someone other than me I tried hard but I guess what I'm trying to do is hard to put into words.

Thanks

[Cunhambebe]

May I suggest you do something? Update to Vegas 6 and DVDA 3.0. Anyway, why don't you make this menu in DVDA instead of PS? I guess there's an option in DVDA 2.0 to insert empty buttons (version 3.0a can do it).
Cheers!

[bobogs]

Not sure if this is available in DVDA3 only, but you might want to check the help file to see if 2.0 recognizes the DVDA-specific layer naming conventions in your PSD file.

For what it's worth, here's how I did it in DVDA3...

A simple button scheme would be a Play button and a Scenes button on the menu. The background can be anything at all, but for DVDA3, all the background stuff should be merged in one layer.

The Play button would consist of two layers. One layer would be the text "Play," while the second layer would be the png image. The text layer should be named button-01-thumbnail, and the png layer should be named button-01-highlight. The two Scenes layers would use exactly the same naming convention, but use 02 instead of 01. The highlight layers should be made invisible (click the little eye icon on the layer tab) while in photoshop.

Import this 5 layer (2/play + 2/scenes + 1/background) psd into DVDA, and when you preview it, the selected button will be invisible until you mouse or remote to that button.

The inactive/selected/activated subpicture colors will be driven by the ColorSet for the menu or button object.

Using this scheme, you won't have to worry about filling the subpicture images with the background color to "force" the button to be invisible.

Hope this helps.

Gary