4

Creating a Layered Menu
Layered menus can provide greater flexibility in showing a button’s selected and activated
states, compared to standard overlay menus. In addition to the background image (which
may contain the buttons in their normal states), a layered menu has two separate layers
for each button (or three, if the button’s normal states are not part of the background).
For example, a menu with 12 buttons would need 24 layers just to show the selected
and activated states of each button, plus 12 more if their normal state is not part of the
background. (A Photoshop file can have up to 99 layers.)
There are several issues to be aware of when deciding whether to use layered menus:
• You cannot add an audio stream to them.
• You cannot include a full-motion video in them.
• When viewers make selections, they will notice a slower reaction time to button presses.
• Layered menus can also use overlays in the same way that standard menus do.
Using the Photoshop Layers
When you configure a PSD file for use as a layered menu, you select the layer or layers
that provide the menu’s background. The background can include all of the buttons’
normal state, but it doesn’t have to. If the background includes the normal state, the
selected and activated states must be configured to take into account that the normal
state is always present. If you want the button to change significantly when switching to
the selected and activated states, you may need to have the normal state on its own layer
so that it can be hidden when the other states appear.
Using PSD Files to Create Layered Menus
There are some issues to be aware of when using PSD files to create layered menus:
• Each button’s active area is created the same way as it is when you work with overlays.
This means you need to be able to draw a single box around each button’s elements.
See Keeping Each Button’s Elements Together for more information.
• In addition to the layered buttons, you can use overlay-based buttons. The overlay can
be another layer in the PSD file or a separate file.
Creating Video for Motion Menus
The video used for motion menus must follow the same DVD-compliance rules as video
used in tracks. There are a few additional considerations you should be aware of:
• If you add any shapes, text items, or drop zones to a menu, the menu will be rendered
when you build the project. See About Menu Rendering for more information.
Important: If you know your menus will need to be rendered, you should avoid using
highly compressed video (MPEG-2 for example) as the background video because it
will get compressed again, potentially with visible artifacts.
106 Chapter 6 Preparing Menu Assets