| We already covered Switched Menu trick and that show us how we can create interesting highlighting effect without staying within the DVD specifications for 4 color highlight overlay.
The switching from menu to menu produces nice visual effect, but it is not exactly instant. There is a slight pause which may make the menu harder to navigate and confuse user.
There is another trick that we can use to produce interesting effect, yet all will be done on one menu and the switching will be instant. Well, there will be no switching in fact.
On the menu above we want the double-circle to move with the arrow buttons to the text that is highlighted. The circle is obviously not a 4 color overlay, but image of many colors:
How we can do it in just one menu?
The trick is simple. We don't have background image, so all we need to do is to actually block the circle we don't want to see by a rectangular black overlay.
Here is what we design:
We used only the effect supplied in DVD-lab (Studio and PRO) to spice up the text and double-circles with texture and bevel.
Now draw a simple rectangle over each double-circle:
This will be our mask. Select each rectangle and in tab "link" change the Visibility to Invisible Normal:
That will simply hide the rectangles, but make them visible as overlay. Do this for each rectangle.
Now add link to each of the now invisible rectangle to make it button. Here we used 3 movies, so obviously each rectangle will link to different movie.
Now we have to make sure we have BLACK color in the palette for overlays. Go to Project - Properties and click on Palette tab.
Check if you have black color and if the Black color is indeed 0,0,0. If you have here few black-like colors, change the others so it is not confusing which one is pitch black.
OK, close the Properties.
Let's go back to menu. Click on Map tab.What we are going to do here is set the Normal color of overlay full opaque black and selected state to full transparent.
Check the selector displays Normal (1)
Then select the well (2) on line three and choose the black color from our palette. Move the slider (3) to far right to make it fully opaque. Don't worry about other sliders.
Let's switch to Selected. Here we will make it fully transparent by moving the third slider to the very left.
The color doesn't matter. We will do the same for Activated - to make it fully transparent.
And that's it. The Normal state will mask non-selected circles and the Selected state will actually make the circle underneath visible.
Obviously this works only on a solid background.
And that's the Inverse Selection Trick.
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