Adobe Encore DVD: In the Studio

Understanding Projects

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.

The Project tab

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.

Asset name and information ...