DVD Studio Pro 3 allows unprecedented access to the world of DVD creation. Here are eight great ways to make that access more efficient and user friendly. You can get more details on all of these tips in DVD Studio Pro 3: In the Studio.

Use Styles for Buttons and Shapes

Creating a new Style is fairly straightforward. You pretty much just start designing a new menu and then "save off" a piece as a style. As a quick example, take a look at Figure 1. We have a simple menu with a button defined on it. The button has a particular font and highlight shape. We can make that a Style by using the context menu (Ctrl-click on the button as shown in the figure). Select the Create Button Style option, and off you go!

Figure 1
Figure 1

To create a new button from a Button Style, just drag the style onto your menu and drop it there. This makes it a breeze to produce consistent buttons. Figure 2 shows a drop in progress.

Figure 2
Figure 2

Use Sets in Photoshop for Layered Menus

Photoshop uses function-like folders for layers. You can use them in Photoshop for organizing complex images. They are absolutely vital in the process of building your DVD layered menus. When you're done making your menu, though, you should flatten your sets and scale the image before bringing it into DVDSP. Sets don't harm anything, but they aren't useful as such in DVDSP. (If you leave sets in a layered document and import that document into DVDSP, the sets show up as empty, unnamed layers.) Figure 3 shows our "raw" version of the Photoshop document with all the buttons in their sets. Figure 4 shows the "flat" version scaled to the proper dimensions for use in the project.

Figure 3
Figure 3

Figure 4
Figure 4

Customize Your Toolbar

The toolbar is customizable and lets you keep your favorite actions close by. You can configure the toolbar by Ctrl-clicking anywhere along it and selecting Customize Toolbar from the pop-up menu (see Figure 5).

Figure 5
Figure 5

You'll get a customizer dialog with the myriad possibilities for your toolbar. You can drag items to and from the toolbar to suit your needs. Pull out the things you rarely touch, and add in the tasks more common to your projects.

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