TIPS: How to Create Custom Toast Menu Styles

During my day job as a commercial recording engineer, I often make DVDs of video projects for clients. iDVD is nice, but it doesn't support 5.1 audio streams. DVD Studio Pro is powerful, but setup can be complicated and time consuming. Toast Titanium 8 fits in the middle quit nicely: easy to use with enough options for all but the most complicated projects.

Unfortunately, the DVD Menu Styles that are included with the application are for the vacation crowd and not the business community. If you're comfortable in Photoshop, this tutorial will walk you through the steps to create a Toast DVD Menu Style for your project - in my case, tying the theme to the company website. Click Read More below to continue...

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We will use one of the Menu Styles that ships with Toast as a temple. Locate the application and Control-Click on its icon. From the popup menu select Show Package Contents.

Navigate to Contents->Resources->Toast DVD Menu Styles. Inside are the 11 layered Photoshop files used to build the Menu Style. For this example, we will modify Corporate.psd. Make a copy of this file to your Desktop and open it with Photoshop.

All these Photoshop layers can be intimidating, but after breaking it down, I hope you'll agree it's manageable, especially since this tutorial will only concentrate on the DVD Menu, not the Slideshow, Music, or Photo options.

Let's start by changing the overall background of the Menu Style. Look for the Layered group called DEFAULT and open it. By clicking on the eyeball you can hide the navigation arrows, we won't be changing them. Click to highlight the background, select all of it (Command-A) and paste in your new 1024x768 image.

Under the MAIN MENU layer group is where all the action takes place! Each Toast DVD Menu Style has 4 sub-templates for a single video, a pair of videos, 3 to 4 videos, and 5 to 6 videos. All of these have the similar layouts as we'll see below. Open the LAYOUT 1 group.

We are not interested in the ARTISTS, ALBUMS or SONGS. Let's take a look at the BUTTON 1 group. The vcd number isn't used on DVDs, so we can ignore it.

frame selected is a highlight image for when the user navigates from one video to another. Transparency is supported and the highlight color can be user selected from within Toast when burning a DVD.

frame is the border around the video. When creating your artwork, you should work in one of the common 4:3 size ratios: 320x240, 240x180, etc.

The layer titled image is the 'screen' where Toast will place the video preview.

These three images (frame selected, frame, and image) are present in every button and are the core animation components for selecting which video to play.

Let's look at the text layers. TITLE appears in every layout and represents the user set Menu Title from the application.

text 1, text 2, and text 3 represent the user defined descriptions of the video. By default, LAYOUT 1 and LAYOUT 2 show all three lines of text. LAYOUT 4 shows the first two, and LAYOUT 6 only shows text 1 due to space limitations.

As long as you maintain the original layer names, you have a large degree of freedom positioning elements within the Menu Style. To make sure the positioning choices are visible on a wide range to televisions, periodically view the IGNORE layer group. It will show you the TITLESAFE AREA and VIEWABLE AREA. For the sake of good karma, you should also change the copyright notice.

The Toast Titanium.app doesn't display the file name in drop down menu that selects a Menu Theme. It grabs the Photoshop File Info instead. To set the name of your DVD Menu Style, in Photoshop select File->File Info. When the File Info window opens, select Description and set the title of your DVD Menu Theme.

Other than your artwork, you now have all the information you need to create your own DVD Menu Theme. To test your creation as you build it, create a new folder next to the Toast Titanium application and name it: Toast DVD Menu Styles. Place your layered Photoshop file in there.

You won't have to waste a blank DVD every time you want to test the Menu Style! Toast Titanium lets you burn a disk image of the DVD which you can then mount and play with Apple's DVD Player.