DVD Studio Pro 3: In the Studio

Appendix B. DVD Style Guide

In this chapter

Asset Organization

Menus

Color Schemes

Subtitles

Compression

DVD-ROM Content

Templates

Although none of the recommendations that follow is a hard and fast rule, you should consider each of them for your projects. Over time the recommendations you like and appreciate will become second nature. In the meantime, you can use this appendix as a checklist.

Many of the items listed here have counterparts throughout the book that provide more details or information on implementing the recommendations. Where appropriate, we've tried to include cross references to make it easy to go back and refresh your memory.

You also can take a look at the Style Guide section of the DVD included with this book. It contains several examples (and nonexamples!) of the recommendations listed here. You can see for yourself that tiny fonts in bad colors make for poor menus.

Asset Organization

You should get into the habit of organizing your assets in a consistent manner. You can use folders to organize by function (graphics, video, audio, etc.). You can duplicate this structure in the Assets tab in DVDSP and other applications such as Final Cut Pro and After Effects. It makes locating and editing the different parts of your projects much simpler.

You also should work on planning out your project before just diving in. Many of the projects in this book are tiny one-menu tasks that illustrate a particular feature. Larger projects always will benefit from an outline ...