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View Full Version : Tying several hotspots together in Maestro


Richard Iredale
5th June 2003, 17:24
I am building a dynamic menu in Maestro. On the subpicture, I have little rectangular boxes that will serve to "frame" the selected motion video, and next to the boxes I have some text describing the title of that selected motion video destination.

I want the box and text to go into "selection mode" when the user hovers the mouse over that part of the menu. I could, of course, do this by simply painting a "highlight" box (using Maestro's terminology; I prefer to think of it as a "hotspot") big enough to enclose both the rectangular box graphic and the text graphic on the subpicture.

The problem is that, if I do so, the highlight box will overlap other highlight boxes on the menu. Instead of redesigning the subpicture graphics layout, I could do it a different way: I could define a highlight area for just the rectangular box graphic and a second, smaller highlight area for just the text graphic. But how do I "group" the two highlight areas together so that when one is selected the other one is selected also?

auenf
6th June 2003, 14:22
this is where you have to use all the 3 colours that are available to you in the subpic.

if you are using black for the current button in the subpic, and its overlapping to the adjacent ones, then you need to make them a different colour (eg red). you should only need to use 2 buttons, and if you need an example, and have LOTR SEE, then rip the menu subs (using subrip or such) and see how they've done it.

Enf...

Richard Iredale
7th June 2003, 00:05
What a clever idea; I would have never thought of that. Maestro is one remarkable program, and I am amazed Jobs did not see fit to drop the price to $995 and just FLOOD the PC market with this product. I guess it points how just how hard he is trying to lock the Mac into the authoring business...

Thanks again.

Richard Iredale
7th June 2003, 02:30
Okay, I've thought about what you've said for a couple of hours now (haven't had a chance to play with Maestro today), and I'm now more confused than ever. Perhaps I did not state my case accurately in the first place:

What I have is a menu subpicture where the elements are arranged in a way that there is no easy way to select individual items with a rectangular "hotspot" box without having adjacent hotspot boxes overlap. In other words, if I draw hotspot rectangles large enough to contain the graphics I want highlighted, there will be overlaps. I assume Maestro will flag this error as soon as I try to build the files; after all, if it was allowed, then how would a PC DVD player know which box the user wanted if the mouseover was in an area where the two hotspot boxed overlapped?

The simplest solution would be to redesign the menu, but that's too easy (!). Now I'm just curious if one could do it another way. For example, if there was some way for me to draw several smaller rectangles and somehow "group" them together, then I could define hotspots that didn't overlap. I guess your answer made me wonder just how using an additional color channel in Maestro would make things any different.

In reading the help files for the new $80 program DVD Lab, I recall he said something about grouping several hotspots together so that selection of one of them turned them all on. But I don't see yet how to do something similar in Maestro.

auenf
9th June 2003, 12:19
DVDMaestro doesnt care about overlapping button areas, dvdlab does. thats where your getting confused ;)

Enf...