Chapter 5. Encore Menu Design
Menus are the visual interface to your DVD productions. The DVD standard provides for the raw components for making menus: text and graphics, buttons and backgrounds, stills and motion, links and actions. However, it is totally up to you, as the DVD designer, to choose how to use these components to design both the look of your DVD menus and the structure of the navigational links.
Although there is no formal standard for DVD design, we can look to commercial movies and other existing titles to see conventions that are useful to follow. As discussed in Chapter 2, common conventions include first-play title screens, main contents menus for clips, scene index menus for chapters, grid layouts of video thumbnails, and linked or even hierarchically nested collections of menus of related clips or scenes.
Adobe Encore DVD provides simple tools for quickly authoring straight-forward menus, as well as more intricate tools for creating sophisticated designs. With Encore, you can take several different approaches to menu creation:
You can import prebuilt template menu designs from the Library, complete with button graphics and text. You then create links from the menu buttons to the clips in your project, and edit the text appropriately. In this way you can design the menu style for your project in Photoshop, and create a complete ...
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