Adobe Encore DVD: In the Studio

Starting a DVD Project

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.

LEARNING MORESample Projects and Clips

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:

1. Create an opening menu page for our DVD

2. Add buttons, with thumbnail images, to our opening menu

3. 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.

Create a new project

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.

1. 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).

2. 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 → Preferences → General.

   

   Figure 1-5. Specify the television standard for your DVD when you open a new project.

The Project window

After closing the initial dialog, Encore opens an empty Project window. Not surprisingly, this window also contains four tabs: the Project, Menus, Timelines, and Disc tabs. (Note these are called tabs, not palettes.) The previously empty Properties palette on the upper right now contains a number of new options under the heading “Disc” (Figure 1-6).

Figure 1-6. The Project window is used to import and organize the assets used in the project.

STUDIO ADVICEDragging Tabs

Dragging tabs from the Project window can be tricky. Here’s an easy way to do it.

First click anywhere on a tab, and then drag it to a destination. If you drag a tab within the same window, or over another window (of the same type—Project or Palette), the tab gets placed at the end of the target window. To drag a tab out into its own separate window, however, you need to drag the tab all the way out of the original window and over the background of the main Encore window. When working with the large Project windows, the quickest way to do this is to drag upward and then drop it just above the top of the window. At this point, you can move the new window from there to your desired final location.

To place a lone tab back into its previous window, simply drag the tab back into the bounds of the window. Encore highlights the destination window when you are over it. Be sure not to drag the entire window that contains the tab! That just repositions the window itself.

STUDIO ADVICECleaning Up

Don’t despair if you find yourself unable to find a window after a frenzy of opening, moving, and resizing tabs and windows. This can happen especially if the window is resized smaller or has been minimized, and then is hidden under the floating palettes or ends up offscreen after you resize the main Encore window.

You can maximize the main Encore window on your display to display all open windows, if they have been hidden out of view. If a Project window is not visible, look at the tab name in the Window menu. If the name has a check mark, the window is open, but hidden under another window. Select the window in the menu to close it (or use the appropriate function key), and then select it again to reopen it, grouped as a tab in the Project window.

You also can clean up the window layout in a few easy steps. First, select Window → Workspace → Default to open all the project and palette tabs and reposition them within the current frame of the main Encore window. You then can drag windows to reposition or regroup them, or close tabs to save screen space. (Actually, you can close any three of the four Project window tabs and still keep the project open.) If the tab is visible, close it by clicking the close box on the right side of the tab.

To further clean up your main Encore window, you also can close any editing windows such as the Menu Editor and Timeline window, then recover them later using the Window → Workspace menu or pressing the corresponding function keys.

If you find a layout you like, be sure to use Window → Workspace → Save Workspace to save your own window layout presets.

Like the two palette windows, you can drag the tabs in the Project window out into separate windows, or drag them back to nest them in another Project window. However, you cannot drag a Project tab into a palette window, or vice versa.

Here is a brief description of each tab in the Project window.

• The Project tab is the main window of your project, used to import and view all the assets used in your project. An asset is simply a resource, such as a still image background, an MPEG or AVI movie, or an audio file that you plan to use with the DVD. The Project tab also lists elements, which are similar to assets, but are resources that Encore generates for you.

• The Menus tab provides more general information on the behavior of the graphical DVD menus that you’ll create. We’ll talk about this tab in much more detail in Chapters 5 and 6.

• The Timelines tab provides more advanced information on the video clips contained on the DVD. We’ll discuss timelines in Chapter 4.

• Finally, the Disc tab is used to set options when you are finished authoring, and provides an interface to check and burn your disc. We’ll get to it at the end of this chapter, as well as Chapter 8.

For the moment, let’s just stick with the Project tab.

LEARNING MOREGetting Help

To help you understand the Encore interface, the software displays pop-up tooltips when you hover the cursor over buttons and interface elements. If your tooltips have mysteriously disappeared, you can turn them on in the Preferences dialog, accessed by selecting Edit → Preferences → General.

Adobe also provides extensive Help information along with Encore DVD. Choose Help → Adobe Encore Help to display the Encore documentation in HTML Help format. The Help menu contains all the information in the written User Guide documentation, conveniently accessible with links between different topics. You also can look up specific topics through the Contents, Index, and Search function.

For updated information from Adobe, choose Help → Online Support to access the Adobe Encore DVD support web site, located at http://www.adobe.com/support/products/encore.html. This includes a searchable Knowledgebase for known issues, user forums, and other resources. Adobe also includes a Video Workshop DVD along with Encore DVD and its other new digital video products (Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Audition). The DVD includes more than 90 minutes of video training from a third-party company called Total Training.

Importing video clips

The Project tab is the organizational center of Encore. The first thing that you’ll always do with the Project tab is import the asset files you want to use, and then build and link timelines and menus from them. For this chapter, we’ll just import a few short video clip files. Encore can actually import a variety of media file formats, discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. For the moment, however, let’s just use AVI files in DV format, which should be compatible with the TV format you selected when you started the new project. If you don’t have any clips handy, you can use the Tutorial files on the Encore product disc.

1. Import an asset file. To import a file, select File → Import As Asset (or press Ctrl-I) to open the Import dialog to select an AVI file. You can also use the context menu by right-clicking in the interior of the Project tab, or you can even double-click in an empty area of the interior of the Project tab.

2. Import more files. Go ahead and import some more AVI files to work with (short clips are fine for this first project). Note that you can select more than one file to import at the same time by pressing Shift or Ctrl while clicking the filename. After you’re finished, Encore lists the imported clip files in the Project tab, along with their type (AVI), duration, transcode status, and transcode settings. You can click the column headings to sort the list, or drag them to resize the displayed columns. This becomes very useful when reviewing larger projects. See Figure 1-7.

   

   Figure 1-7. Import your video clip asset files into the Project window.

3. Preview your assets. You can preview your asset files one at a time in the Project tab. Click an asset name in the list, and Encore displays it in the Asset Preview thumbnail at the upper-left corner of the Project tab. Encore lists the asset’s filename and format to the right of the thumbnail, including the video or still image resolution and the video or audio clip duration. If you want, click the Play/Pause button next to the thumbnail in the upper left to play through it, or drag the slider below the thumbnail to skip to a specific location in the clip. These are shown in Figure 1-8.

   

   Figure 1-8. Use the Asset Preview thumbnail mini-player to preview your project’s assets.

4. Use the closure triangle if needed. If you are cramped for space in the Encore window, you can click the closure triangle beyond the top left corner of the asset preview (also shown in Figure 1-8). This will hide the Asset Preview thumbnail area, freeing space for three or four more rows of the asset list.