Adobe Encore DVD: In the Studio

Encore Behind the Scenes

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.

Button graphics

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.

Button highlights

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.

STUDIO ADVICESaving Multiple Copies of Projects

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.

The size of the project file and associated folder therefore depends on the amount of material you include on the disc, and whether you compress your media before importing it or whether Encore needs to compress and save it with the project.

So, this is my advice:

• Feel free to do a Save As when working with small projects while learning Encore.

• For large projects, however, it’s better to transcode the media first. Alternatively, you can have Encore transcode it and then grab it out of the Encore project folder.

Timelines and navigational links

When you dragged the AVI asset from the Project tab to the Menu Editor window, Encore also created a Timeline element in the Project tab. This tab is used to associate the video and audio tracks and add navigational links from the menu and back:

• Encore linked the button to the clip. This involved creating a Timeline element for the clip with the video and audio from the AVI file. In addition, Encore also created a return link from the Timeline element back to the menu when it finishes playing.

• The Project tab shown in Figure 1-25 now lists each Timeline element created from the clips. Click the “Type” heading to sort the list by AVI Video, Menu, and Timeline, or click the “Name” heading to see each clip listed with its associated original AVI video file and timeline.

  

  Figure 1-25. The Project tab now lists the timelines that were created automatically from each clip when they were added as buttons to the menu.

To modify the columns, right-click in the heading row and choose Hide This to hide a column, or select and unselect fields under the Columns menu item to add or delete columns. You also can resize the columns, and drag-and-drop the headings to reorder them.

STUDIO ADVICEMenu Layers

If you promise not to be put off by some of the behind-the-scenes plumbing that makes this all work, select the menu asset in the Project window that we just created and then look at the Layers palette (Window → Layers, or F7). This is actually a view of the menu we just created as a set of layers. In fact, these are Photoshop layers because Encore stores menus as Photoshop files and can exchange menu designs directly with Photoshop to edit and tweak them.

The menu has layers for each element: the Background is on the bottom, and corresponds to the Library background that we used to create the menu. The title text, “Nova Scotia”, and the decorative graphics, “Corner Element 4”, are elements that we also added. Finally, the three angled box layers are the three buttons created from the default Angled Box library entry when we dragged each clip from the Project tab to the Menu Editor window.

You can click the disclosure triangle for one of the buttons to reveal its nested layers. Here you see some of Encore’s deepest magic: the button includes the text layer, a video layer to position the video thumbnail, and a highlight layer to add the selection highlight, as shown in Figure 1-26. Each of these is identified using a naming convention in parentheses at the front of the layer names. Encore inserts these automatically when it creates menus, or you can use this convention when you create a menu in Photoshop so that Encore can identify the button components. We’ll talk more about these in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6.

Video thumbnail

As mentioned earlier, each button includes a video thumbnail from the target AVI file above the text. Here is what Encore did:

• Encore automatically extracted a frame of video from each clip and inserted it into the button as a thumbnail image. As we will see later, you then can use the Properties palette to specify that the buttons themselves be motion video clips, and if so, set the duration, looping, and other attributes. You even can specify which frame of the clip is used for the thumbnail in the Timeline window.

Much of the power of Encore is that you can take advantage of this drag-and-drop ease for creating simple discs quickly, and yet still drill down to perform any of these individual actions for more sophisticated designs.