Chapter 3. Assets and Projects

As we discovered in Chapter 1, the first things that we need to do after creating a project are to import assets and then create elements. Assets and elements are, in effect, the building blocks of your DVD project, and it’s important to understand exactly how Adobe Encore DVD imports, layers, composites, transcodes, and burns your prize video and audio to disk. So, before we go any further, let’s tackle the first question that many Encore novices ask, which is…

What Assets Can I Import?

Encore can import three basic kinds of digital media asset files to include in your DVD productions: video clips, audio clips, and still image files (for slide shows). You also can import media files to use in menus, with still or motion video backgrounds, background audio, buttons, and other graphical elements. In Encore, you import media assets into the Project tab, and then create the playable elements of your DVD as timelines, with a video clip or series of still images, plus multiple tracks of audio and subtitles. You also can use the Encore Library palette to store and organize menu assets shared among multiple projects.

We typically think of media assets in terms of the file type, such as AVI or QuickTime (MOV) video, Wave (WAV) or MP3 audio, and bitmap (BMP) or Photoshop (PSD) still images. Encore can import these common file formats, and more. However, the DVD specification ...

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