Adobe Encore DVD: In the Studio

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Adobe Encore DVD: In the Studio

By Doug Dixon
Price: $39.95 USD
£28.50 GBP

Cover | Table of Contents | Colophon

Chapter 1: Introducing Adobe Encore

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So, you're interested in using Adobe's Encore DVD to design your own DVDs? Well, you've come to the right place—this book is all about Version 1.5 of Adobe Encore DVD.

Before we go any further, let's answer the first question you may have: what exactly is Adobe Encore DVD? Well, Adobe Encore DVD—or just Encore for short—is Adobe's new tool for creating and burning professional-looking DVDs. Encore contains some impressive capabilities, including a streamlined workflow for quickly creating great-looking DVDs. Plus, it features tight integration with other Adobe products, especially Photoshop CS for advanced menu design, as well as Premiere Pro, Audition, and After Effects. However, there is one thing that you really must have before you can use the product: a DVD-recordable drive for your PC so you can burn your own DVD discs.

If you're reading this book, I'm going to assume you have some experience with DVDs, including playing with menus and other interactive features. However, I'm also going to assume you haven't done much DVD authoring. After all, that's why you're here! So, let's get started by meeting Adobe Encore DVD and taking a quick look at how it works. Then, in the next chapter, we'll step back and explore some commercial DVDs that provide examples of different approaches to DVD design, before exploring DVD authoring with Encore in more detail. So, if you haven't succumbed to the temptation yet, install Encore from the product installation disc according to Adobe's instructions, and launch the application.

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The Encore Window

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Compared to other Adobe applications, Encore starts up with a very sparse layout: after seeing the splash screen, you'll be presented with the main window and three supporting tool and palette windows for working on projects:

The tools window (or toolbox) is, by default, positioned at the top left of the main Encore window.
A palette window, containing a Properties tab, is positioned in the top right of the window. Each tab is known as a palette, so this window contains the Properties palette.
A second palette window is placed below (if there is room) or next to the window with the Properties palette. It contains nested tabs for the Library, Layers, Character, and Styles palettes. The Styles palette is selected by default.

These windows are shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1: The rather empty Encore DVD window with no project open. This is what you will see when you first start Adobe Encore DVD.

Before starting a project, try tinkering with these windows to see how they work. Don't worry if you don't understand everything you see yet. Note that the tools window and the palette windows all float above the main Encore window and are not constrained by its borders—as shown in Figure 1-2.

Figure 1-2: The Encore palettes float above the main window.

This feature is both good and bad: it's helpful to move windows out of the way when working on a project, but it also can be disconcerting when you adjust the main window position and size while the palette windows stay floating in the same location.

You'll also notice that the palette windows are relatively fixed in size: you can change the height of the Library, Layers, and Styles palettes, but you cannot arbitrarily resize them. You can free up more space on your display by closing these windows. To do this, click the close box (the one with the "x") at the top right of the palette windows, or use the Window menu (see Figure 1-3) to show and hide the various windows. Window names in the menu with a check mark next to them are open and are listed above the main project window.

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Starting a DVD Project

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Encore is a great tool for banging out a quick project by transferring a bunch of video files to DVD. In this way, you can create a quick prototype of a DVD design, then come back and refine it later. Usually, DVD authors will design a great deal of the interface before actually creating it with the computer. In this chapter, however, we'll dive into learning Encore and take advantage of the ability to experiment.

Another way to learn a new application is to explore a prebuilt project to see how it is constructed. For those of you who like to learn in this way, Adobe has provided a sample project on the Encore DVD product disc under the Getting Started Exercises folder. The disc includes a tutorial document (in Adobe Acrobat PDF format), as well as several versions of the project as it is built.

If you would like some sample material to use while working through this book, the Encore-Assets folder on the product disc also contains some fun menu designs and video and audio clips.

So, without any further delay, let's do the following:

Create an opening menu page for our DVD
Add buttons, with thumbnail images, to our opening menu
Create links between the buttons and video clips

Just to make it a little more interesting, we'll also customize the design with some text and graphics images. This level of customization is already more than you can do in most entry-level DVD authoring tools, but is still wonderfully straightforward in Encore.

The first step in using Encore DVD is to start a new project. Although you can have only one project open at a time in Encore, you can have many windows open to provide different views of the project.

Create a new project. Select the New Project menu item from the File menu at the upper left (File → New Project), or just press Ctrl-N).
Choose the TV standard. Encore first displays the New Project Settings dialog, shown in Figure 1-5, to prompt for the television standard to be used for this project: NTSC or PAL. Choose the TV format compatible with your DVD player, and click OK. In the New Project Settings dialog, you can disable this prompt so that it uses the default setting and doesn't continue to nag you each time you start a new project. To set the default or enable this prompt again, use the Preferences dialog, accessed by selecting Edit

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Creating the Main Menu

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Now that we have imported the clips, it's time to create a main menu, which the DVD user can use to link to and play those clips. There are three ways to do this:

You can build a menu from scratch in Encore.
You can import a complete menu design created in Photoshop.
You can use some of the predesigned menu templates provided.

For our first project, we'll use the third option and choose a nice background from Encore's built-in Library palette, and then add buttons to link our video clips to the menu.

The Library palette, in the second palette window, is a convenient storage place for graphical menus, buttons, images, and other elements that you can share among all your projects. Click the tab for the Library palette to bring it to the foreground (or select Window → Library to open the palette, or just press F8 once or twice until it appears). Next, choose the Corporate option from the drop-down Set menu at the top.

The Library palette contains seven types of graphical assets: menus, buttons, images, backgrounds, layer sets, text items, and shapes, as shown in Figure 1-9. Each group can be included or hidden in the listing by pressing or unpressing the appropriate button. By default, all the buttons are pressed. However, if you select one, you'll quickly notice that Encore deselects all the other buttons—if you want to select more than one type of asset, just hold down the Shift button while clicking. You can preview each item in the list by selecting it; a thumbnail graphic of the asset will appear in the middle of the window.

Figure 1-9: Use the Library palette to store menus, buttons, images, and other elements that are shared across different Encore projects.

Some of the menu and button options in the Library palette are prefixed with a small, yellow star over the bottom right corner of the icon. (Yes, it's very tiny.) These items are the default menu and button graphics that will be used if you create such an asset in the Menu Editor. We'll get to those later, but for now, if you want to change the defaults that we'll be using in our starting project, click a menu (or button) entry in the Library palette, then right-click. Select the Set As Default menu (or button) option on the pop-up menu.

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Encore Behind the Scenes

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Let's stop for a minute and talk about what Encore has done behind the scenes. Believe it or not, Encore performed a lot of magic when it created these buttons.

In these three button graphics, Encore has:

Composited the button graphic over the menu background—this means that it blended two elements together so that it appears that they are the same graphic. Note that the button has a nonrectangular shape. (The default button we used for the clips was the Angled Box button in the Corporate set of the Library palette.)
Included a text field as part of the button, making it easy to enter a button title that identifies the associated clip.

At this point, click the second Direct Select button in the toolbox (with the outlined arrow) to experiment with selecting and adjusting each individual element within the button, such as the position of the video "thumbnail" button or the button text. If you just end up making things worse, as we did in Figure 1-23, use Undo to restore it to its default alignment.

Figure 1-23: Use the Direct Select tool to adjust the individual elements within the button graphic used for the clips, including the button shape and associated text field.

Something interesting also happened with the button highlights: Encore added highlight graphics over the button (in this case, a light blue outline) to indicate a selected button. You probably didn't see this because you haven't previewed the menu yet. However, if you want to see what each button will look like when it is selected, click the Show Selected Subpicture Highlight button at the bottom of the Menu Editor window, as shown in Figure 1-24.

Figure 1-24: Click the Show Selected Subpicture Highlight button to see the outline highlight defined as part of the buttons.

You should be aware of a few things at this point. First, keep from saving many copies of your projects because Encore project files can get rather large. Encore saves both the project file (i.e., Project.ncor) and a nested folder of the processed assets used for your project, including edited menus (Photoshop files), transcoded video and audio clips, and motion menu clips. In addition, although the project does not contain copies of your original assets, if Encore needs to transcode the imported material (i.e., from AVI to MPEG), the compressed files will also be stored in the project folder along with the other elements. Everything is saved under a folder with the same title as the project file.

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Previewing the DVD

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Believe it or not, our DVD is done—or at least it's a first version that we can come back to and enhance later. Time to burn a disc? Not yet. It's always a good idea to check out your DVD before you commit to the time and expense of burning a disc. So, instead of firing up your DVD burner right away, you can use Encore's built-in Project Preview window to test the design and navigation of your DVD. But first, remember to save your project.

Figure 1-26: Take a look at the Layers palette to see the Photoshop layer structure and naming conventions used for Encore menus.

Click the Preview button at the bottom of the toolbox to display the Project Preview window to simulate playing through your DVD (you can also choose File → Preview, or use the shortcut Alt-Ctrl-Space). The Project Preview window includes a large display area to simulate the DVD playback, as well as a status display and common DVD controls along the bottom. See Figure 1-27.

Figure 1-27: Use the Project Preview window to simulate DVD playback to check the DVD's design and navigation.

Your DVD starts playing with the default First Play, which in this case displays the first (and only) menu. You can use the control pad below the window to select various buttons on the menu, or just hover the mouse cursor over the button to select it. To play a clip, click the Enter button on the control pad, or click the button on the menu.

Encore's Project Preview window is not very adjustable; you can use the Zoom menu in the bottom left of the window to switch between full-size (100%) and half-size (50%), but you can't arbitrarily resize the window. But then again, you can't resize your TV set either. Also, you may notice that there are no minimize or maximize buttons for the preview window; the thinking here is that you don't need to see all the other windows while you are previewing. But the downside is that Encore won't let you continue editing until you finish previewing.

Once you click a menu button, Encore plays the associated video clip. By previewing, you can ensure that the correct clip is playing, and that it starts and ends at the right places. Note that as Encore previews the video clip, it also updates the clip name and play time in the status area. In addition to the buttons typically found on a DVD remote control, the Project Preview window also includes some special buttons to help test your projects. In particular, the Execute End Action button (under Previous Chapter) can save you a lot of time when playing a DVD full of video clips. To help test the navigation, Execute End Action jumps to the end of the clip and then performs the action defined for when play finishes, so you can check what happens next after each clip plays to the end (and not watch a two-hour movie to find out).

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Building DVD Folders

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We can test the DVD further before actually burning a disc by building the DVD folders on hard disc and then checking them using a DVD software player, as described in Chapter 2. We also can use the DVD players to inspect the structure of the DVD (to check for chapter points or for alternate audio and subtitle streams).

The first thing we should do is build the actual project on our hard drive. So, let's do that now.

Make the DVD folder. Choose File → Build DVD → Make DVD Folder to build your project into DVD folders on hard disk. Encore first prompts you to save your project, if needed. Encore also may display a warning dialog that states your project has problems that may cause the disc to play incorrectly. We'll discuss checking disks in more detail in Chapter 8, but for the moment just click Ignore and Continue. Encore then displays the Make DVD Folder dialog, shown in Figure 1-28. Fill in the Destination Path field for the DVD folders, and then click Next.

Figure 1-28: Use the Make DVD Folder dialog to build your project into DVD folders on hard disk.
Start the build. Once you specify a destination path, Encore is ready to start building, and displays the final Make DVD Folder: Summary dialog. Click Build to start the build process.
As Encore builds the DVD folder, it displays the progress and status in the dialog, as shown in Figure 1-29. Encore transcodes the video and audio, composites (merges and flattens) the menus, plans and organizes the DVD elements, and then writes the final DVD folder data. Depending on the quantity and length of video clips that you used in your project, much of the build time will be spent transcoding the video into DVD-compatible MPEG format. Audio transcoding is relatively fast, as is composing menus, although motion menus also can require significant time to create the looping video sequences.

Figure 1-29: Encore displays the build status in the Make DVD Folder: Summary dialog.
Look at the result

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Burning Your DVD

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OK, now it's time to actually burn a disc. To do this, follow these steps.

Open the Disc tab. Start by bringing up the Disc tab (Window → Disc), as shown in Figure 1-31. Note that the disc icon in the top left shows a pie chart of the DVD space occupied by this project. Our few short clips barely make a dent in the 4.7GB of available space. Ignore the other fields for now, and click Build Project.

Figure 1-31: Use the Disc tab to build and burn your final project.
Build the project. Encore now displays the Make DVD Disc dialog, as shown in Figure 1-32. (Again, ignore any warnings about checking the project, as long as you created a simple project as described earlier.)

Figure 1-32: Select the Source as a DVD Volume in the Make DVD Disc dialog.

The Source field now is available. You can build from the Current Project (again), or, better, pull down the Create Using menu and select DVD Volume. Then click Browse and navigate to the folder that contains the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folder you created in the previous section. You will save time by building from the DVD volume instead of from the project because the DVD elements have already been combined into the final DVD format.
Under the Writer field, select your DVD recorder, leaving the other fields set to their default values for now; then, click the Next button.
Start the build. Encore will check the DVD disc media in the selected device, and then display the Make DVD Disc: Summary dialog, as shown in Figure 1-33. Click Build and watch the dialog to monitor the burning process. Encore writes the files to disc and then finalizes the disc. Finalizing means that Encore writes out additional information to ensure that the disc will work with a consumer DVD player.

Figure 1-33: Encore displays the build status in the Make DVD Disc: Summary dialog.

Ta-da! Your first DVD, courtesy of Adobe Encore DVD! Feel free to drop the disc in a set-top DVD player and check it out.

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Quick DVD

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As you have seen in this chapter, Adobe Encore DVD provides a very convenient drag-and-drop interface for quickly creating a DVD, but still provides you with complete control over the menu design in the Menu Editor window. You can import clips from the Project window, choose the menu background and button graphics from the Library palette, and add text titles using the Character palette. Even with simple drag-and-drop, you can adjust the menu layout and add additional graphical design elements.

Meanwhile, Encore does all the behind-the-scenes DVD work for you, including creating the menu buttons with video thumbnails, linking the buttons to clips (and back), assigning the navigation between buttons, creating timelines for the clips, and even specifying the First Play.

Encore also opens up significantly more capabilities for you to explicitly control in your DVD authoring, especially through the Properties and Layers palettes. You can use Encore as we have done here to do a quick design with drag-and-drop, and then return to the project later to enhance and refine it, as described in the following chapters.

In the meantime, enjoy your first DVD!

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Chapter 2: Deconstructing DVDs

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Chapter 1 provided you with a quick introduction to using Encore. Before we go any further, however, we need to take a look at a commercial DVD. This time we're not simply going to watch a movie. Instead, we'll examine how the DVD was authored to help us understand some of the design options available for creating DVDs. This kind of exploration is part of the attraction of watching DVDs on a PC: you aren't limited to using a remote control, but you can use the application to dig further into the DVD to understand its design (and to take shortcuts to "Easter eggs" and other fun extras).

This chapter starts off by explaining the internals of a DVD, including its physical structure, how data is organized on it, and copy-protection mechanisms. We'll also talk about some of the competing formats for writable DVDs. You may not know this already, but you can watch DVDs directly on your PC. In fact, testing out data in this way is a valuable part of the DVD authoring process, so we'll continue by discussing Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9. In addition, we'll check out two other software DVD players, CyberLink PowerDVD and InterVideo WinDVD. You may already have these on your PC—they often come bundled with new PC systems and DVD burner hardware.

Before going any further, you'll have to promise not to get distracted by any movie content once we start looking at the DVDs. Yeah, I know it's hard. However, the purpose of this chapter is to dig in and deconstruct the design and structure of the discs—in effect, to look at the menus and how they are linked together, and how the video and audio content is laid out in multiple tracks. This is important to understand because later I'll point out how you can use Encore to create the same kinds of specialized functions and effects.

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Talking the Talk

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At this point, let's talk about DVDs themselves. At its core, the term "DVD" is both a technology and an associated set of standards. Hence, you'll see the word DVD in several forms: as disc media, content on discs, consumer electronics products, and computer products.

Here's an interesting bit of trivia: what do the letters D-V-D stand for? Those of us who remember the original advertising for DVDs in the mid-1990s recall that the letters stood for Digital Video Disc. Later, however, the acronym somehow revised itself to stand for Digital Versatile Disc, which (truthfully) implied that the disc format could hold much more than video (e.g., data and/or audio). Depending on which corporate patent holder you ask, you're likely to get one of those two responses. However, the DVD Forum (www.dvdforum.org), the current governing consortium of more than 200 corporate members, has not come to an official decision as to what the letters stand for. And neither of the preceding definitions is considered valid today. So, if someone asks what DVD stands for…well, it just stands for "DVD."

As with most standards, DVD started off with two fiercely competing video standards. Fortunately for us, it didn't stay that way. In 1993, companies such as Philips, Sony, and Nokia proposed the Multimedia Compact Disc (MMCD) standard. Soon after, the competitive Super Density (SD) format was proposed, backed by Matsushita, Thomson, and Toshiba. Because both sides had extensive patents in the field and were unwilling to give up their share of potential royalties, an agreement on a common video format stalled out. In 1995, however, IBM and various Hollywood studios pressured all the companies involved to bypass the mistakes of the VHS/Betamax era and, in September 1996, a unified standard was agreed upon: DVD. However, as we'll see shortly, the basic DVD standard now has an unpleasant number of variants. And a new battle is being fought over extending DVD to high definition (HD).

As a technology, DVD has to do with the physical structure of optical discs, and the kinds of data that are stored on those discs (see Figure 2-1). So, when people talk about "DVD formats," they could be referring to either the

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DVD Physical Disc Formats

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Remember when writable CDs first came out? You could write a whopping 650MB of data on a small disc. This allowed more than an hour of music to be stored on a disc in the simple CD-Audio format, even without compressing the audio. Alas, our data storage requirements have continued to grow, especially for video: DV-formatted video from a digital camcorder (at a data rate of 25 Mbps) requires around 11GB of storage per hour of video, and MPEG video compressed to 6 Mbps still requires 2.3GB per hour.

One of the design requirements for the DVD format, therefore, was to have enough capacity to hold at least a two-hour movie. This requirement led to the standard DVD size of 4.7GB.

As with hard disks, the DVD industry is playing a marketing game when advertising disc capacity. A disc described as "4.7GB" actually contains 4.7 billion bytes (as in a power of 10), and not 4.7 gigabytes (as in a power of two).

By convention in the computer industry, the capacity of memory storage is measured in true gigabytes, and the capacity of optical and physical discs such as hard drives, CD, and DVD is measured in billions of bytes, but still is called "GB."

The true capacity of a "4.7GB" DVD is actually 4.7x10⁹, or 4,700,000,000 bytes (an actual total of 4.37 true gigabytes).

A "4.7GB" file is really:

4.7 x 2³⁰, or 4.7 x 1,073,741,824, or 5,046,586,572.8 bytes.

So, if you copy a 4.7GB file to a DVD, you may suddenly discover that the "4.7GB" DVD is actually 346,586,572.8 bytes smaller than what is needed. Now you'll know why.

On the surface, CDs and DVDs look very similar. In fact, if you get out your ruler, you'll see that they're identical in size: 120 millimeters in diameter, 1.2 millimeters in depth, with a 15 mm diameter hole in the center. The intent was that DVD players and burners would be backward-compatible with CDs. And that's exactly what happened: almost all set-top DVD players also play music on CD and Video CD discs, and desktop DVD burners can play and burn both CD and DVD formats.

The similarities don't stop there. With both CDs and DVDs, an extremely accurate laser is used to read (detect) or write (burn) depressions, called

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DVD Application Data Formats

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The physical DVD disc formats described previously determine how (and how much) data is stored on a disc. But a disc still is not useful for a specific purpose until the format of the data stored on it is defined. This is the domain of application, or logical, DVD formats: these determine the data structures and types, as well as specific compression formats, used to organize and store files of data on the disc. Put succinctly, the physical format allows the hardware to access the raw data, and the application format allows it to be understood and played back.

DVD-Video and DVD-Audio are the base DVD application formats, but some variants, competing formats, and related CD formats also exist:

DVD-Video is the DVD format for movies, supporting high-quality video, surround-sound audio, interactive navigation with menus and chapters, alternate video, audio, and subtitle tracks, and several content protection features.
DVD-VR/+VR (Video Recording) is a variant of the DVD-Video format developed for set-top DVD recorders. VR recorders essentially save meta-information on the disc so that its contents can be edited to record and delete segments. Unfortunately, dash and plus use different VR formats, and these have varying compatibility with standard DVD players.

Some DVD authoring tools provide the ability to create and edit the VR disc format, which is useful for sharing discs between the set-top and desktop, so you can record and/or edit the same disc from either platform. Encore focuses on creating fully compatible DVD-Video discs.

The high-end audiophile market is currently split by another format war, between two different approaches for providing higher-quality, multichannel, surround-sound audio for discriminating listeners:

DVD-Audio is a music audio format defined by the DVD Forum. It supports higher-quality surround sound than DVD-Video, plus options for menus, navigation, and some multimedia that can scale from TV displays to simpler car players. Most set-top DVD players do not support DVD-Audio format, and therefore many DVD-Audio discs also contain a DVD-Video version of the music.

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DVD Product Features

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Now that you understand DVDs better, let's get started deconstructing some DVDs. The Planet Earth series of DVDs that we'll start with is subtitled "Visions of the Earth from Space." The content is based on NASA space imagery of planet Earth: oceans, seas, islands, and coastlines. Each disc is organized by geographic region, with more than an hour of video panning over different areas accompanied by a thematic music track. The discs also include hundreds of detailed information screens linked to the videos. The Planet Earth series is designed to span seven titles. The first three Planet Earth discs are Oceania, Australia, with the Great Barrier Reef and New Zealand, and North America, covering Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

Let's look at the cover to understand the features on this specific disc, and also take a look at the disc contents on our PC to see the data files stored on it. The front of the cover is shown in Figure 2-6.

Figure 2-6: The Plant Earth: North America DVD.

Special features are often described on the back of the DVD case, along with a profusion of logos, as shown in Figure 2-7. Depending on the publisher, these are described in varying detail with phrases such as "Special Features" or "Technical Specs," and are also indicated by the row of tiny logos arrayed at the bottom of the cover.

Figure 2-7: The back cover of Planet Earth: North America.

The logos on the bottom of the back cover represent, from left to right:

AlphaDVD, the disc producer and authoring company
DVD International, the disc distribution company
DVD Video format, suitable for play on set-top DVD players
DVD-ROM content, readable on PCs
DTS audio, containing optional soundtracks
Dolby Digital audio soundtrack
InterActual Player, with WebDVD features

These typical DVD features and logos are described in the following sections.

As we mentioned earlier, a manufactured movie on DVD is a DVD-ROM physical disc with content stored in DVD-Video format. So, at least one logo there should be very familiar.

(3) DVD-Video: The DVD-Video logo, present on nearly every commercial DVD, identifies a DVD disc that is designed to be compatible with DVD players, both set-top devices and computer DVD-ROM drives and software.

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DVD Data Files

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Next, let's examine the contents of our example DVD, Planet Earth: North America. Because this DVD also supports the DVD-ROM format, we can open a Windows Explorer window, display the Folders side panel, and browse the contents of the inserted DVD. It's helpful to go through this disc to give you an idea of what you might find in your own DVDs.

No matter which commercial DVD-ROM disc you look at, you're likely to see a mess of files and directories. The Planet Earth: North America contents are shown in Figure 2-10. These include both DVD content and PC data files.

Figure 2-10: Use Windows Explorer to view the contents of a DVD as folders and data files.

Windows XP desperately wants to be helpful and do things automatically for you, both when you insert a DVD disc, and when you open the disc from Windows Explorer. Depending on how Windows is set up on your machine, the Windows AutoPlay feature may recognize the disc as a DVD-Video and automatically launch a DVD player application such as Windows Media Player. Alternatively, Windows may find the AUTORUN file on the disc and automatically launch the InterActual installer from the disc.

For the moment, just close or cancel any of these; we'll get back to playing the disc in the next section. If you need to tame the AutoPlay feature, display the Properties dialog for the disc from a Windows Explorer window and set the options under the AutoPlay tab.

Only three of these folders are related to the DVD specification, and are of any use to set-top DVD players.

VIDEO_TS: This is the entire playable DVD-Video content of the disc, including video and audio, menus, and navigation links. Everything else on the disc is auxiliary stuff.
AUDIO_TS: This is an empty folder that is a placeholder for DVD-Audio content. DVDs can contain both DVD-Video and DVD-Audio content, so it is good form to include both folders on a disc, even if one is empty.
JACKET_P: This folder contains the jacket picture content, which is optionally displayed by the DVD player when the DVD is inserted. This is a good idea defined in the DVD specification, but not used much in practice.

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Playing DVDs

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OK, enough postponing the main event: it's time to actually play the DVD. In this section, we'll cover three different tools: Microsoft's Windows Media Player 9, CyberLink PowerDVD, and InterVideo WinDVD. These provide different features to explore the disc, play its content, navigate the menus, and view alternate audio and subtitle streams. While exploring these three players, however, we will discuss the structure of a typical DVD.

Be sure you have the latest version of Windows Media Player. To check your version of Windows Media Player, select Help → About, and look for at least version 9.0. To update an older version, select Help → Check for Player Updates, or use the Windows Update feature of Internet Explorer (Tools → Windows Update). For more about Windows Media 9 series technology and tools, see www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia.

First, let's start up Windows Media Player for Windows XP. You can typically find this in All Programs → Accessories → Entertainment → Windows Media Player. This software, which either comes with your operating system or is freely downloadable from Microsoft Windows Update, provides a nice interface for playing commercial DVDs. In reality, however, Windows Media Player is much more than this. Windows Media Player is a kitchen-sink tool for organizing and playing digital media, including ripping and burning audio CDs, downloading to portable devices, and searching, playing, and renting clips over the Internet.

Here, we'll focus just on the DVD playing features. If you insert your DVD while the Windows Media Player is open, Media Player reads the disc information and then searches online for more information on the movie. Wait ten or so seconds for the disc to spin up and for Media Player to identify the disc.

If needed, click the Display dropdown menu in the top right of the window and select your DVD device with the movie title from the list of media devices and recent titles. Media Player displays the Now Playing tab with the DVD playing in the window. Select View → Now Playing Options → Show Media Information to display the DVD cover in the top right of the window, with a link to more information about the DVD (see Figure 2-16). As with any CDs that you insert, Media Player accesses an Internet DVD database to download this information for the DVD.

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Deconstructing DVDs

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In this chapter we explored commercial DVDs in several ways, looking at their physical structure, menu design, navigational linking, and track layout. Along the way, I've pointed out how you can use Encore DVD to provide these kinds of features for your own discs.

As you have seen, PC-based DVD player software applications provide great access for exploring and deconstructing DVDs to understand how they are made, especially by browsing the titles and chapters on the disc. Before we move on to authoring our own discs, however, I now release you from your promise to not get distracted by the content of your discs.

Take some time to mess around with these DVD player applications, and tweak and tune your DVD-watching experience. Viewing DVDs on a snazzy computer with a large monitor and surround-sound audio can be a rather impressive experience. And viewing DVDs on your laptop is a good way to pass time while traveling. With a laptop, you even can hear simulated surround sound on headphones with Dolby Headphone audio processing, and you can timestretch the playback to speed it up slightly (without distorting the audio) so that you can watch the entire movie before your plane lands.

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Chapter 3: Assets and Projects

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As we discovered in Chapter 1, the first things that we need to do after creating a project are to import assets and then create elements. Assets and elements are, in effect, the building blocks of your DVD project, and it's important to understand exactly how Adobe Encore DVD imports, layers, composites, transcodes, and burns your prize video and audio to disk. So, before we go any further, let's tackle the first question that many Encore novices ask, which is…

Encore can import three basic kinds of digital media asset files to include in your DVD productions: video clips, audio clips, and still image files (for slide shows). You also can import media files to use in menus, with still or motion video backgrounds, background audio, buttons, and other graphical elements. In Encore, you import media assets into the Project tab, and then create the playable elements of your DVD as timelines, with a video clip or series of still images, plus multiple tracks of audio and subtitles. You also can use the Encore Library palette to store and organize menu assets shared among multiple projects.

We typically think of media assets in terms of the file type, such as AVI or QuickTime (MOV) video, Wave (WAV) or MP3 audio, and bitmap (BMP) or Photoshop (PSD) still images. Encore can import these common file formats, and more. However, the DVD specification has strict rules for the formats and characteristics of the media material stored on the disc, including compression formats, resolutions, and frame rates. As a result, these kinds of general media file formats will need to be transcoded (converted) into DVD-compliant formats that are compatible with the DVD specification (i.e., MPEG-2 video).

It's your choice whether to transcode before or after importing your assets: Encore can transcode your media files for you, or you can transcode your media files first, and then import them into Encore in DVD-compliant format. In either case, the basic characteristics of your material, such as video resolution and frame rate, must still be compatible with the DVD specification.

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What Assets Can I Import?

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There's also one more twist in working with media files under the Microsoft Windows architecture: the difference between the file format (i.e., AVI) and the compressed data format used within the file. Even if an application such as Encore understands the file format, it still cannot read the media data unless the corresponding codec (compressor/decompressor) module is installed on your system. That's why you may find the same file is playable on one Windows machine but not on another: along the way somebody installed an application or library that included a compatible codec for the specific compression format used to encode the video or audio data stored in the file.

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Understanding Projects

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All DVD authoring work in Encore is done in the context of a project. Put more succinctly, a project collects the assets used to create a DVD, which you must import into Encore, as well as various elements, such as menus and timelines, which Encore generates from those assets. Note that you can have only one project open at a time in Encore.

In Chapter 1, we created a small project that brought together a simple menu with buttons and three video clips into a working DVD. Now, let's take a closer look at the Project window. Start a new project by choosing File → New Project, and selecting a default television standard (NTSC or PAL). Then, import a variety of assets, just like we did in the first chapter, by using File → Import as Asset. Be sure to bring in video, audio, and still image files according to the constraints that we discussed earlier in this chapter.

By default, the Project window contains four tabs: Project, Menus, Timelines, and Disc. Let's just concentrate on the Project tab for the moment—we'll discuss the remaining tabs in later chapters. The Project tab lists each imported asset and generated element, and provides other useful information on them as well in subsequent columns. The Project tab also has a preview thumbnail window in the upper-left corner, and buttons for common operations along the bottom of the window. See Figure 3-9.

Figure 3-9: The Encore Project tab, listing each asset in the project.

Section 3.2.1.1: Asset name and information columns

These columns, which take up the lower two-thirds of the Project tab, identify the name of any project assets and elements, and provide additional information that is useful when creating DVDs. Note the headers at the top of the listing (e.g., "Name," "Type," "Duration," etc.). As your project gets more complex, you can rearrange and sort the columns of information in the Project window to help review the contents and status of all the assets and elements in your project. You can do this by:

Clicking and dragging along the edge of a header to resize a column, much like a spreadsheet

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The Library Palette

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So far we have been talking about importing assets into the Project window to use for our project. Although you typically import playable assets into the Project window (i.e., video, audio, and still images), you also can use it to store other graphical elements such as buttons to use in your menu designs. However, because menu elements are typically shared across multiple projects, Encore also provides the Library palette, shown in Figure 3-16, as a handy place to store menus, buttons, images, and other elements that you can reuse among all your Encore projects.

Figure 3-16: The Encore Library palette stores assets shared across projects.

Think of the Library palette as a handy collection of resources—such as predesigned backgrounds, buttons, and complete menus—that can be imported into your projects.

The Encore installation includes a small collection of predesigned elements in the Library. In addition, you can browse through hundreds of more items provided on the Encore product disc, under the Goodies folder. And, of course, you can design your own elements and import them into the library as well.

At this point, open the Library palette (click the Library tab in the appropriate palette, or choose Window → Library). The Library palette includes the list of stored assets, a set grouping, a preview area, and a row of buttons in the middle. The elements stored in the Library palette are grouped into sets, accessed using the Set drop-down menu at the top of the palette.

Encore stores seven types of assets in its library: menus, buttons, still images, background images, layer sets, text, and vector shapes.

Section 3.3.2.1: Menus

To view only the menus stored in the Library, toggle the Library palette. the buttons so that only the first of the seven buttons is highlighted. Then click through the menu designs to view them in the Library preview thumbnail, as shown in Figure 3-17.

Figure 3-17: Preview the menu designs in the Library palette.

The installed library contains several collections of related menu designs and elements. The items named

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Chapter 4: Timelines

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At some point, you're going to want to play some video on your DVD; after all, that's the whole point of what we're doing here. Or maybe you want to play a slide show with some still images. Or maybe you want to play some audio. In all of these cases, you need to use a timeline to organize the playable assets. In the opening chapter, we took the fast track by dragging and dropping video clips to create video thumbnail buttons. You may remember that, as we did so, Encore created three corresponding timelines—one for each clip. However, Encore can support up to 99 timelines in a project, and each timeline can consist of much more than just an audio and video layer.

In fact, each timeline can contain:

A video track, used to display the actual video on the screen.
Up to eight audio tracks, which can be used for alternate languages, soundtracks, and commentary. Incidentally, the eight audio track limit is not a limitation of Encore DVD. Eight audio tracks is actually the maximum allowed by the DVD-Video specification.
Up to 32 subtitle tracks, to display text and graphics overlays on the video. The audio and subtitle tracks also can be tagged with language codes, which help the viewer select the language he wants to use. 32 subtitle tracks is also the maximum allowed by the DVD-Video specification.
Chapter points to mark specific frames in the clip. Chapter points make it easier for the viewer to skip through the clip by pressing the Next/Previous Chapter buttons on his DVD remote. Chapter points can also be used as targets for navigational links, which we'll talk about in more detail shortly.

Encore can use a range of different types of assets in timelines: video, audio, still images, and several different formats for specifying subtitle data. These are assembled using a multi-track timeline interface, which should be somewhat familiar if you've ever used a video-editing tool such as Adobe Premiere Pro or Avid. In the timeline, we can create a number of interesting elements for our DVDs, including longer clips with chapter markers, still image slide shows, alternate audio tracks (i.e., what you might use to create a director's commentary), and subtitle overlays.

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Introducing Timelines

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Each timeline in your project corresponds to a discrete, playable element on the DVD. You can create links from menu buttons to timelines to play them, and you can create links between timelines, so the playback continues from the end of the first timeline to the start of the second. Finally, you can define chapter points within timelines. In addition to simple navigation, chapter points can also serve as targets for links so that the DVD can jump to a specific point within a timeline and begin playback from that point.

Every timeline has one video track, although it can be empty (and play blank video). The audio and subtitle tracks, on the other hand, are optional. The video track in a timeline can contain only one video clip, or one or more still images, as in a slide show. Each audio track can contain only one audio clip. Each subtitle track can contain multiple subtitle clips that are synchronized to the playback time.

As you might expect, the Timeline window contains tracks for video, audio, and subtitles, along with tools that can be used for viewing and playing the contents of the timeline or editing chapter points. See Figure 4-1.

The Timeline window contains the following items.

Timeline tabs: The Timeline window contains tabs at the top for each open timeline. The name on each tab matches the timeline shown in the Project window. The active timeline has a close box, which you can use to close the timeline.

Figure 4-1: The Encore Timeline window.
Timeline ruler: The timeline ruler marks elapsed time in the hours/minutes/seconds/frames format within the timeline. You can zoom in to display smaller increments of time at each tick mark.
Playhead/current-time indicator (CTI): The playhead (sometimes called the current time indicator, or CTI) marks the current playback or edit point in the timeline, as also displayed in the Monitor window.
Chapter point: A chapter point marks a numbered chapter point within the video track. Chapter points can be used as link targets from menus, buttons, and even other timelines.
Poster frame: A poster frame marks a single frame of video used to represent an associated chapter point. Poster frames are used as the source for a thumbnail image for buttons that link to it. If a poster frame is not specified, the first frame of the chapter point is used by default.

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Creating Timelines in Encore

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The easiest way to create a new timeline from a video clip is to drag it to a menu, just as we did in Chapter 1. However, if you want to create a timeline without messing with a menu, follow these steps:

Select the media in the project window. In this case, just select an AVI clip that consists of both audio and video.
Tell Encore to create a New Timeline. Choose Timeline → New Timeline (or use the right-click context menu), or click the convenient Create a New Timeline button at the bottom of the Project window. Encore creates a new timeline, lists it in the Project window, and brings up the Timeline window with a tab for the new timeline. Finally, it displays the Monitor window with a tab to view the contents of the currently selected timeline, as shown earlier in Figure 4-2.

Once you've reached this point, you can start building timelines to give each video clip one or more audio and subtitle tracks. After creating the timeline directly from the video clip, Encore places the video portion in the video track, aligned at the beginning and continuing for the duration of the clip. If the asset has an associated audio track (e.g., AVI files often contain both audio and video), Encore will also add the audio to the Audio 1 track in the timeline, also aligned at the beginning of the track. You then can edit the video and audio tracks independently, deleting and replacing them in the timeline.

The timeline we created was from a mixed audio/video asset, Igonish Beach Waves.avi. To create a timeline from an asset that contains just audio or just video, just do the same thing. Encore will automatically create an appropriate track and leave the other empty. If you have an empty video track, Encore with display it as black in the Monitor.

If you're used to editing with a nonlinear editor such as Adobe Premiere Pro, you're in for a rude shock with Encore timelines. First, the video track can contain only a single