Other tips and background uses for the tutorial will also be addressed throughout this topic. Stay tuned.

Creating a Hit Area for Menu Buttons:
When creating buttons for an Encore menu inside Photoshop certain layer hints, such as (=1) Highlight as demonstrated through the tutorial, take on various actions. The Highlight hint (which Andrew shows during the the DVD Authoring tutorial) indicates the graphic/shape which will be presented once a button's rollover is active, in other words a highlight shows the viewer which particular button is 'highlighted' or in-selection for chosing.
A quick example:

As you can see, the red text indicates the graphic which will be displayed once the button is highlighted or in-selection within the menu, so once the PLAY MOVIE text button is highlighted it will change to a red text of PLAY MOVIE. Seems simple enough?
For computing viewing this means that when highlighting the button your cursor must be within the complete shape of the highlight layer, but what if you want to make a certain 'hit area' for your button? What if you want to make a custom area which indicates when the button's highlight will be active? This is particulary useful for computer viewing and can, in most cases, compensate for certain menu designs.
To achieve a custom hit area you simply create a vector shape layer of the area which you want to act as the hit boundaries. For example the vector shape rectangle, as shown in orange below, will be the hit area for the play button. Once the cursor enters the orange area the button's highlight will be activated.

After creating your shape which you wish to be your hit area, rename the shape layer with a prefix of (%) followed by another name of your liking, for example (%) Hit as seen below:

Note: This layer will not be shown on the menu - It is hidden!
Once you save the Photoshop document of the Encore menu and test your DVD the menu button's highlight should active within the hit area you provided.











), and I decided against countless hours of research and wanted to do something different and fun; namely a video. Now, I had just gotten After Effects and Encore and such, and played around with it a few days prior, but I'm still really new to it and my problem is probably really stupid and has an easy solution that I just can't see, and I apologize for wasting your time, but I'm just going to put it out there.
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but keep coming to a snag at the Rendering point and is face with the following two never ending messages