Ulead 1.0 - Manual (Page 89)

SpruceUp User’s Guide 4—17
Background Assets
Background assets, together with buttons, are stored in Style Galleries. Changing to a
different Style Gallery replaces the current backgrounds and buttons with the ones from the
new gallery. Since you can switch Style Galleries as often as you want while creating a
project, there is no reason to have duplicate assets.
When you import a background, it is placed in the current Style Gallery. When you delete a
background by right-clicking on it and selecting Delete Background, its file is deleted from
the drive. See the Assets and Style Gallery topics for more information.
Supported Formats
You can import a wide range of still image formats for use as background images in DVD
Menus:
• Bitmapped images (.bmp)
• TIFF images (.tif — Tagged Image File Format)
Note: Compressed TIFF files (e.g. LZW) are not supported.
• JPEG images (.jpg — Joint Photographic Experts Group)
• Targa images (.tga files)
Note: Adobe Photoshop files (.PSD extension) are assumed to be
buttons. To use a Photoshop file as a background you need to use its Save
a Copy function and save as a flattened (single layer) TIFF, BMP, or JPEG
file. See the Creating Photoshop Buttons topic for more information.
Note that due to the nature of JPEG, highly compressed JPEG images may suffer from
unwanted artifacts when imported. Since SpruceUp scales images that do not fit the
selected TV standard, these artifacts can be made worse. JPEG files also take longer to
import since they must be decompressed first.
You also have the ability to grab background stills from any of the loaded movies using the
Clip Properties dialog. See the Clip Properties topic for details.
What Happens When Importing?
SpruceUp menus conform to standard video resolutions:
NTSC: 720 pixels x 480 lines
PAL: 720 pixels x 576 lines
Any image imported as a background is scaled to fit within these constraints. If you import
a bitmap that is 600 pixels wide by 100 lines high, SpruceUp stretches the width by 120
pixels and the height by 380 (assuming NTSC/525). Things are going to look tall and
skinny, and probably very pixilated.
It is a good idea to make sure your images are the correct size when you create them,
assuring they will look as you had intended.
Backgrounds must be converted to an MPEG-2 format to be useful for SpruceUp. When you
select a background as an asset, SpruceUp copies it to the current Style Gallery and creates
two files. Both files have the same name as the original file. The MPEG-2 file has a ".m2v"
extension, and its companion parsed file has a ".m2v.PRV" extension.