Using After Effects To Enhance Menus - Adobe ENCORE 2 Manual

Using After Effects to enhance menus

Using After Effects to create Adobe Encore DVD menus
Adobe Encore DVD and After Effects 6.5 (or later) contain several integrated features to help you create dynamic
motion menus. Using After Effects, you can animate elements of a menu so that, for example, the button images fly
into position or fade in over an image or video. The composition you create can then act as a video background to
the actual menu in the project. This advanced technique requires an understanding of After Effects, video
backgrounds, and the use of the Loop Point to initially disable buttons.
In After Effects you can also create a menu from a composition and then import it as a menu into Adobe Encore
DVD. The After Effects Create Button command lets you assign button subpicture layers and a video thumbnail layer
for each button set. It adds the appropriate layer name prefixes to them. The Save Frame As command lets you save
a frame as a layered Photoshop file. For information on creating buttons or layered Photoshop files in After Effects,
see After Effects Help.
For a tutorial on using After Effects to create a motion menu, visit Resource Center on the Adobe website.
Overview of animating a menu
If you have After Effects 6.5 or later, you can use the Create After Effects Composition command in Adobe Encore
DVD to quickly start a menu animation. This command converts a menu into an After Effects composition and
opens it in After Effects.
The basic steps to animate a menu using this command are as follows:
1. Create a complete version of the menu.
Using either Adobe Encore DVD or Photoshop, design the menu that contains the elements you want to animate, as
well as the final resting position of the text and button images. You use this menu as the basis for both the animation
and the final menu. Place each element on its own layer so that you can animate the elements separately. Creating
the composition from a complete version of the menu ensures that the button subpictures correctly overlay the
buttons.
2. Create an After Effects composition from the menu.
If you created the menu in Photoshop, import it as a menu. Choose Menu > Create After Effects Composition in
Adobe Encore DVD to start After Effects and automatically convert the menu into a layered composition.
Each button set becomes a nested composition within the master menu composition. Because it is based on the
actual menu, the composition contains the elements you want to animate and their correct ending position on the
screen. If you animate the button images or delay their display initially, it is important to keep them visible for the
remainder of the composition, because the image of the menu in the movie file acts as the visual menu in the DVD.
In other words, the background video you create, not the menu, contains the button images. When the animation is
complete, you create an AVI file from the composition.
A good practice is to create a layer marker in After Effects at the frame where you want the animation to end and
the menu looping to begin. Name this marker "Loop Point, " and set an ending keyframe at this same location for
each attribute you plan to animate. Doing this ensures that your button highlights line up correctly when you bring the
finished animation into Adobe Encore DVD.
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