Here we are in chapter three, this is going to be a fun chapter because we are mainly going to focus on designing menus. Designing is fun but it is really important on a DVD. Menus are the first impression users will have of the content and features you are providing on your disk. Your menus should be designed so that your user will know how to interact with them and get to the content they want to see at first glance. Let us get started by putting in a background and then designing some buttons to put on that background.

I will open a new project, let us call this chapter three, we are going for an NTSC DVD hit okay, and let us import those backgrounds. I will go to the project panel, I will right click and I will import as menu. What this will do is import the file we choose as the menu and not just an asset. Only two file types can be imported as a menu and that is a PSD file or an EN file. Navigate your desktop, go to your project file folder. In the media files in your menu folder, I have two menus for you. Menu 480a and menu 480b. I want you to select both of them, I am going to shift click them and hit open and here they go. Just in case you are wondering why Photoshop PSD files are importable, it is because the encore menu system is practically based on Photoshop layers. We will be going over this interaction soon.

When importing menus, in order to make designing simpler try to use files with all of the same resolutions sizes. In this case since we are building a standard DEF NTSC disk, I have prepared two 720x40 menus in the point 9-pixel aspect ratio from Photoshop. Encore does the visual aspect conversion for us so we can work with the menus as we would see them on an NTSC monitor. Let us open these up in the menu panel, I will open A first and then I will open B. let us take a look at our backgrounds, this 480b. this is going to be our scene index. And if you double click 480a, this is going to be our main title menu.

All I included in these Photoshop files was the background only. We will be putting everything else on top of our back grounds.