Blinking Cursor for a button in Encore 1.5
by g12750
on
Feb 7, 2006 at 4:47:26 am
I am trying to have an animation of a blinking cursor be the button for many of assets in my menu. For instance if you pressed the right button on your DVD remote the blinking cursor would move from "play movie" to "chapters" etc. Is there any creative way of dooing this or any other program that will allow me to do so?
Re: Blinking Cursor for a button in Encore 1.5 by g12750 on Feb 7, 2006 at 9:44:22 pm
To elaborate, it is an animated button highlight. Instead of highlighting the text I want the cursor to blink next to the text. I didn't really know how to explain it before but that's the best I can come up with.
Re: Blinking Cursor for a button in Encore 1.5 by Johnny on Feb 8, 2006 at 9:21:53 pm
No, the highlight, to my knowledge, can't be animated, it's a still image. With only one button, you could animate a blinking cursor on the BKG movie, but that's about it.
Re: Blinking Cursor for a button in Encore 1.5 by Jeff Bellune on Feb 9, 2006 at 9:11:59 am
There is kind of a "back door" way to do this, and it involves multiple motion menus. The blinking cursor will have to be part of the menu's background video, not part of the subpicture highlight. Once you have decided on a menu to use in Encore:
1. Create a looping video in After Effects, Premiere, or another NLE or compositing app. This video will contain an exact representation of the menu with a blinking cursor that you create flashing next to one of the buttons.
2. Make more copies of this video, changing which button the cursor is next to in each copy. You need one video for each button.
3. Back in Encore, make as many copies of the original, static menu as there are buttons.
4. Import all of the blinking cursor videos to Encore as assets.
5. Make the blinking cursor videos the background video for each of the duplicate menus.
6. In the Layers palette, poke out the eyeball for all of the menu layers in each menu to turn off the visibility of everything except the background video layer.
7. Open the Menu Color Set for one of the menus and create a new color set right away from the current color set. Give it a useful name.
8. The Normal state should already be transparent; make the Selected state transparent (0% opacity) as well. Click OK.
9. Apply this new color set to each of the menus. Now, when the audience navigates to a button, they won't get any feedback from the subpicture highlights as to what button is selected. That's OK because you're going to use the blinking cursor menus to give them feedback.
10. In the first menu, set the default button to be the button next to the cursor. Link that button to proper program content. Set up the button routing as desired. You may only need one other button on that first menu, depending on how you want the audience to navigate.
11. Set each of the buttons that can be routed to from the default button to Auto Activate.
12. Set the link for each of those buttons to go to the next menu (the one that has the blinking cursor next to the appropriate button).
13. On the target menus, make the default button the one that the blinking cursor will be next to and link that button to the proper program content.
14. Link the other buttons on the menu back to their appropriate menus.
Continue in this way until all buttons on all menus are linked. If you have chapter sub-menus, there's going to be a lot menus and a lot of linking. You may bump up against the 1 GB space limit for menus.
