While finishing up the Encore Pop-up menu for our upcoming ‘Pro Motion Menu Kit: 07 – White Wedding’, we encountered a problem with complex layers and Encore not liking them. By complex, I mean Adjustment Layers, Layers with alternate Blending Modes, Clipping Mask Layers, etc. If your layers had these attributes, they would not be interpreted by Encore when brought in as a Blu-ray Pop-up menu.
In the past, we avoided this issue by not having any layers with these complex types. This limited what we could do, and made it slightly more difficult to customize the colors, as many of the blending modes had to be pre-composited.
Well this new menu features a rose which we give you complete control over it’s color. This really presented a problem for the pop-up menu, as it absolutely required complex layers to achieve this customization (having you lasso out the rose each time you wanted to change it’s color was not an option). We thought about providing the pop-up menu with complex layers, and requiring you to merge some layers before using it in Encore… but there had to be a better way, and there is.
I then thought to myself, what if the complex layers are grouped into a smart object? I didn’t expect a smart object to be interpreted by Encore, as it couldn’t even interpret layer blending modes or adjustment layers or clipping masks. But to my surprise… it worked! Of course, it showed up in Encore, but would there be some strange error upon building a Blu-ray disc/image? We went through the entire authoring process without issues. Final disc had a perfectly functioning Pop-up menu with a smart object located in one of the button groups, which contained an adjustment layer, a vector mask, and a layer with an alternate blending mode.
So for any of you wondering how to overcome the limitations of complex layers for Encore Pop-up menus, the answer is Smart Objects.
Thanks for the heads up John!
Good info.
That’s good to know and thanks for the tips. I truly can not wait to see the wedding menu.
Please email once you have it up on the site for sale.
Thanks,
Melvin
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