The main benefit of creating highlight menus instead of Layered Photoshop Menus is one of speed for the user. The DVD spec has to actually go to another place on the DVD with the Layered PS Menus, which takes time. With highlights, it doesn’t need to do this and therefore it’s much quicker.

You also need to use highlight menus if you want to add sound to your menu or if you want to create a motion menu by adding an MPEG stream.

Create a Basic Highlight menu in DVDSP
1. Create your menu by going to the Outline view and choosing the Menu>Add option.

2. In the Inspector box, go to background and choose the asset that is correct for your menu.

3. Next you’re going to add an overlay to your menu. This will define the shape that the highlight colors take on when you define a button. Go to the Overlay dropdown and choose the Photoshop file that you've created for your overlay.

4. Now you have to define your Highlight Set, which creates colors that make up your highlights.

5. Go to the Color Settings tab in the Inspector.

6. Go to Overlay Colors>Simple at the top of the dialogue box. Next to Set:, choose 1. This will define selection state for Set 1. You can define up to three different sets for your menu highlight colors.

7. Choose a color for each state: Normal, Selected and Activated. This will be the color of your menu’s selected highlights. After choosing a color, you need to select an opacity. By default, it’s set to 0, which can’t be seen. You need to select a number to make the color visible.

8. You will select an opacity value for each state.

9. Open up your menu in the Menu Editor and add buttons as described in the previous lesson.

10. Control+Click on the Menu and choose Simulate to see what your buttons' different states look like. Use the arrows to navigate around the menu. When you hit OK, the Activated State should be visible. You can also revolve through the different states by hitting "w" on your keyboard.

11. Adjust your menu hotspots so that they completely cover the shapes define in the overlay image.

12. Set your jump actions as you would in any menu.

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