Tutorial 2.A. - A Quick Overview of the Menu Elements for DoStudio

• The Basic Menu elements of a Blu-ray pop-up menu in DoStudio

Before we jump into the Photoshop importing process, let’s examine some important concepts about designing Blu-ray pop-up menus in DoStudio. When building menus in DSA, you will be working with three basic elements: Menu Blocks, Sets and Buttons.

Menu Blocks
Menu blocks are rectangular areas of the screen, defined by you, the author, that contain a menu such as your Main Menu, or a Submenu such as a menu for chapter selection or bonus features. Menu blocks can animate on and off screen. Unlike DVD menus, Blu-ray pop-up menus float, or “pop-up” over your video while it is playing.

DSA can accommodate 32-bit graphics for your menus (HDMV-only tools can only accept 8-bit graphics). When designing your menus in Adobe Photoshop, you can use the built in templates for 1080i Hd video (1920×1080 pixels). 32-bit means 8-bits per channel. Do not attempt to create a 32-bit per channel Photoshop file! This is not valid for Blu-ray!

DSA defines the Main Menu Block as a special type of menu block which is different from a Submenu Block. You can only have one Main Menu Block in a project. The Main Menu Block is what appears when the viewer presses the Pop-up menu button on the BD Player’s remote control. No other menus can overlap your main menu block.

You can have as many Submenu Blocks as your project requires. The demo project has three submenu blocks: a chapters selection submenu, a bonus video submenu and a setup submenu. You can not overlap submenu blocks if they will be visible on screen at the same time. But if they will be displayed one-at-a-time, then it is OK for them to take up the same area of the screen. You will see that the demo project’s submenu blocks overlap, but they are only visible one at a time so they are OK.

Menu blocks can animate on and off screen. They can float, or “pop-up” over your video while it is playing. Menu blocks are the “parent” element of a menu. This means that any other menu elements live inside them and are attached to them. When you delete a menu block any sets or buttons contained in that menu block are also deleted. If you animate a menu block all of the sets or buttons contained in that menu block also animate.

Sets
Sets are visual layers of a menu block. Every menu block by default must have at least one set. A good way to think of Sets is as visual layers of your menu block that are stacked on top of each other. Each Set contains its own set of buttons (hence the name “Set”) and each Set can contain its own background image or it can be transparent. Only one Set can be visible at a time. A practical example is best to illustrate this concept:

Imagine you have a movie with 10 chapters and you would like to create a chapter menu that allows the viewer to select any of the 10 chapters for viewing. Simple enough, right? One way to do this is to create a Menu block and add 10 buttons to it (we’ll discuss buttons below).

But what if your graphic designer wants to include nice icons for each chapter and group the icons 5 at a time on the menu block for the sake of visual appeal. This is where sets come in. You can create 2 sets in your menu block, each with 5 buttons on it.

(hint: this is how we will construct the demo project throughout the course of these tutorials.)

Sets can each have their own background image, or they can be transparent. Only one set in each menu block can be visible on screen at a time.

Buttons
Buttons are a pretty straightforward concept if you have ever authored a DVD. A button is an area on a menu block that is selectable and clickable with a remote control. Buttons are used to play video or to display new menu items.

In Blu-ray and in DSA, buttons have three images associated with them. Each image corresponds to a state that the button can have: Normal, Selected and Activated. The Normal state is what the button looks like when the viewer has not selected it with the remote control. The Selected state is what the button looks like when the viewer has navigated to that button using the remote control. And the Activated state is what the button looks like when the viewer has clicked enter on the remote control. The Activated state is usually only seen for the brief amount of time after the viewer has click enter and before either a video is played or another menu item appears.