DVD Studio Pro 3: In the Studio

Overlays

Motion menus can feel restrictive when you get to the point where you're creating the buttons that show up on the screen. Highlighting rectangles on the screen just isn't as fancy as you might want to get. The Apple-supplied shapes help, but even those can be a bit repetitive. Although you are restricted to using overlays when you have a motion menu, you can make some pretty creative custom overlays.

Figure 4-34. Our full-motion video in Preview mode

At its heart, an overlay is just a Photoshop layer that tells DVDSP what to draw when you select the rectangle that defines a button. The default overlay is a solid layer, so the highlighted rectangle shows up as just that: a rectangle. But you can make fancier overlays.

1-bit (black-and-white) overlays

If you want a shape other than a rectangle to show up, you can create a Photoshop document to aid in this endeavor. Start with the standard NTSC-DV size document. Make the background completely white (or transparent). Now draw shapes in black wherever you want a custom-shaped button to appear. We often start with a still image of the video we'll be overlaying as the background. Then we make the overlay layer partially transparent so that we can see where to draw our shapes. Check out Figure 4-35 for an example of creating skiff-shaped buttons.

Figure 4-35. A 1-bit button mask (left), and the same mask laid over our menu image (right, ...