Hide and Seek

Posted by admin on February 10th, 2010 filed in Uncategorized

First off thanks to Igor B. we have now a Russian translation for QDVDAuthor. Please let me know if there are any other liguists out there wanting to help translate QDVDAuthor.

So we got some more snow today and broke the century old record for most snow in this area from 1899.

That’s why I took the time to create a DVD for my ever growing selection. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with regard to the buttons but I could not find a way to do this in QDVDAuthor.

So I put everything aside for an hour and implemented a new checkbox for Image, and Movie objects in the ButtonDialog.

If the box is checked, then the image will not be drawn onto the background. You are now probably thinking now why would I want to do this. Well Here is why:

If you have a background image which has already indications of buttons ( E.g. the head of a person ) and all you want to do is to create a highlighted, and selected mask for the shape, then you will like this check box.

Create a png image which has the shape of the head ( the rest is transparent ), then put it in place and define it as a button. Now in the ButtonDialog you want to
1) Specify your target video
2) Go to the Normal tab and check the new ‘hide’ checkbox
3) Go to the Highighted tab and change the type to Mask ( semi transparent colors look real good here )
4) Go to the Selected tab and change the type to Mask ( semi transparent colors look real good here too )
5) Create the DVD.

What you have now is a button which will properly highlight the shape of the persons head when you highlight or select the button.

Because you use the ImageObject to create the mask you can now create an unlimited variety of button shapes which you can mix and match with masks and shadows as you please.