Adobe Encore DVD: In the Studio

Chaining Links

The primary use of navigational links in a DVD is to define a default organization and path through the disc. Typically, when you design a DVD, you create a hierarchy of menus, spread down from the main menu, to organize and access the content of the disc.

There are two different approaches to organizing and presenting your material on a DVD:

• Editing your material together as a single movie timeline allows it to play smoothly from the beginning to the end (because this is the whole idea of movies on DVD). You also can jump into the timeline at any chapter point, but then must play to the end; Encore does not provide the ability to play only a partial sequence from the middle of a longer timeline.

• Organizing your material as a group of separate clips provides the ability to play each clip independently. In addition, you can link them together into a sequence by setting the End Action links for the timelines to chain from one to the next. However, there is no guarantee that every DVD player can play through these links seamlessly. Instead, you should plan for the possibility that there will be a short hesitation between clips, and therefore fade the audio and fade or freeze the video, if needed, through the discontinuity.

Movie DVDs

Many DVDs contain a main movie, or a single long piece of content, that has been edited into one continuous clip. A menu hierarchy for this kind of movie disc is shown in Figure 7-1, with buttons for the main movie and a scene index menu to ...