mdkusr
27th October 2003, 05:05
I've dug all over this forum looking for how to size pan scan and wide screens in an easy fasion, but couldn't find anything on the subject, so I figured I'd past my thoughts here on this one how I figured it out.
When doing your overlay, you really only have to do one overlay for one resolution. What I did was take a screenshot of my intended title screen from a 720x480 animated menu. I then proceded to create my main menu from this screen. After finishing, you have title menu number one for wide screen and software players.
The next part is where things got tricky since I needed to create an overlay for a pan scan setting as well. After digging, I found posts stating that you shoud resize for 854x540, but how this is supposed to work, either I was reading it wrong, or it is just that, wrong. You are dealing with a 720x480 resolution clip so the idea of resizing this overlay to 540 is not a very good idea.
My simple solution for making it line up perfectly was to rescale (make sure you use the scale method since you want your overlay to increase in size by this much as well) the overlay I made for the widescreen version from 720x480 to 960x480 and then I resized the image back down to 720x480 and making sure it was perfectly centered by taking 120 pixels off of each side. The result of this is a perfect overlay that matches identically/perfectly to the original widescreen version, yet rescaled to match a pan scan type screen. Everything, including your button size rescales for the Pan Scan screen.
The program I did the overlay in, as well as the rescaling and resizing was 'The Gimp'. I have Photoshop 7 as well, but I tend to use what I'm familiar with. Besides, The Gimp is freeware anyway, and they have both Linux and Windows versions of it. You can find it here: http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/ - This is the Windows version of course. Capability wise, it is on par with Photoshop for 99% of anything you want to do, though Photoshop still has a few tricks up it's sleeve and is still slightly more capable. But, for doing anything like what I mention above or using Layers, etc., The Gimp has no problem doing it.
-M
When doing your overlay, you really only have to do one overlay for one resolution. What I did was take a screenshot of my intended title screen from a 720x480 animated menu. I then proceded to create my main menu from this screen. After finishing, you have title menu number one for wide screen and software players.
The next part is where things got tricky since I needed to create an overlay for a pan scan setting as well. After digging, I found posts stating that you shoud resize for 854x540, but how this is supposed to work, either I was reading it wrong, or it is just that, wrong. You are dealing with a 720x480 resolution clip so the idea of resizing this overlay to 540 is not a very good idea.
My simple solution for making it line up perfectly was to rescale (make sure you use the scale method since you want your overlay to increase in size by this much as well) the overlay I made for the widescreen version from 720x480 to 960x480 and then I resized the image back down to 720x480 and making sure it was perfectly centered by taking 120 pixels off of each side. The result of this is a perfect overlay that matches identically/perfectly to the original widescreen version, yet rescaled to match a pan scan type screen. Everything, including your button size rescales for the Pan Scan screen.
The program I did the overlay in, as well as the rescaling and resizing was 'The Gimp'. I have Photoshop 7 as well, but I tend to use what I'm familiar with. Besides, The Gimp is freeware anyway, and they have both Linux and Windows versions of it. You can find it here: http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/ - This is the Windows version of course. Capability wise, it is on par with Photoshop for 99% of anything you want to do, though Photoshop still has a few tricks up it's sleeve and is still slightly more capable. But, for doing anything like what I mention above or using Layers, etc., The Gimp has no problem doing it.
-M