DVD Studio Pro 3: In the Studio

Multicolor Buttons

Let's take a look at one more quick project with 2-bit overlays. Instead of gaining access to six effective colors for buttons, let's make one interesting, multicolor overlay button. We'll head back to our Hawaii tour over the volcano and turn out a quick menu with fancy buttons.

The mask of the red death

Well, this isn't as horrific as Poe's mask, but we're going to use our mask to produce some nice red lava on a volcano. And for a change, we're going to use the mask for the button text as well. Figure 4-51 shows the grayscale version of the mask.

Figure 4-51. A 2-bit mask for a multicolored button and some text

We intend to use the mask for all the menu options here. This isn't common, but it enables us to be remarkably flexible in our background choices. We can use a layered menu, a standard menu, a standard menu with music, or even a full-video background. In fact, let's go the full-video route.

Note

One other thing to remember when building your mask is that fonts should not be antialiased if you're using your shades of gray for distinct colors. Having the occasional red pixel show up around the edges of your light-blue text is not often a desirable thing!

Multicolor button demonstration

Start a new project in DVDSP and import the following files from the projects/ch04 folder:

• overlay_scaled.gif

• volcano.m2v

• volcano.AC3

Notice that we didn't include any menu files ...