TABLE OF CONTENTS Very much like their restaurant counterparts, the menus on a DVD provide the audience with a choice of selections that can be enjoyed as a whole or sampled la carte. On more complex discs, they provide access to every part of a DVD, allowing the audience to construct a satisfying experience, from appetizers all the way through to dessert. But navigation isn t the whole story behind the menus in a DVD. Menus can be used to add interactive content and special effects, and their design is how the author really personalizes the DVD, giving it a certain look and feel. Menu design and creation is the heart and soul of your DVD project. It s that important.
In this chapter, we will discuss how to add menus and menu objects to the project, but we won t talk about how to set up those objects for disc navigation just yet. That will be covered in The Project: Linking Everything Together .
First and foremost, you need to understand that an Encore menu is a Photoshop file. It is important, therefore, to establish a basic knowledge of how Photoshop files work. If you are an experienced Photoshop user, this information will be familiar and mercifully brief. If you haven t worked with Photoshop files before, this primer focuses only on the essential features of a Photoshop file that make menu creation in Encore possible.
Every Photoshop file consists of at least one layer. A simple image like a scanned...
