I usually hate using DVD Studio Pro. It's fairly unintuitive in terms of functionality, but I found a method that works excellently and very easily. I hate using Photoshop for similar reasons. They're just too big of hammers for such stupidly simple jobs. iDVD is the opposite problem. All of themes look like they're from iDVD, and they are all watermarked with the Apple logo.

Here's a real easy way to create a professional-looking DVD menu using a few simple tools in conjunction with DVD Studio Pro. Use Keynote to create the neutral version of your DVD menu, what it's going to look like with nothing selected. Make sure to use the custom slide size of 640x480. This is 4:3 square pixel version of the NTSC television standard. If you don't know what that means. Then just remember to use the custom slide size. Then, duplicate that slide. Modify each of the menu options to their selected form. Export both slides as high-quality PNG images from Keynote. Import them both into DVD Studio Pro.

Set your neutral image as the background. Set your selected image as the overlay. Go to the settings menu, and select "square pixels." This will make your image not look stretched. Next, create the buttons you're using and place them. The buttons here function as a little window into the overlay, the other slide you created. So, only make them in the places where you want the selection modifier to show up. In my case, I used an underline. So, I made the buttons only as big as the underline underneath each menu item. Finally, go to the colors tab in the inspector for your menu. Choose advanced, and then set them custom so that only the colors you want to show through, show through. My text was white. So I told iDVD to let white show through as white.

I know that this is a very brief look into how I created my menu, but I don't really have the time right now to write a full simple DVD Studio Pro/Keynote tutorial.

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