Movies on DVD have been a tremendous success for Hollywood and the consumer electronics industry, and now the advent of inexpensive digital video camcorders and DVD burners opens the possibility of creating your own DVDs on desktop computers. Yet DVD authoring can involve a lot of work—organizing your clips, designing menus, creating navigational links—and can require technical knowledge of video compression and DVD specifications.
As a result, current DVD authoring tools have split into two general tiers, and into corresponding price points (ignoring higher-end professional tools for mass-market and Hollywood production). Entry-level tools designed for consumers, and priced less than $100, can create DVDs “automatically” from your clips using template designs, but therefore can severely limit your freedom to customize your productions (even to the extent of not being able to reposition menu buttons). Meanwhile, more advanced, corporate or professional tools, priced around $300–$600, provide much more flexibility in designing menus and creating discs with multiple audio and even subtitle tracks, but they require you to understand more about DVD technology and perform more manual work in constructing your projects.
Enter Adobe Encore DVD, a professional DVD authoring tool that combines the depth of professional authoring for complex projects with the ease of drag-and-drop operation for simple jobs. If you are just getting started with DVDs, or have a quick disc to create, you can simply drag your clips onto menus and Encore will do all the work of creating links, inserting video thumbnails for the menu buttons, and converting the clips to DVD formats to burn to disc. As you grow into more serious work, Encore provides precise control over menu design, navigational linking, and video compression, combined with project management and version control tools.
And, not surprisingly, Encore integrates tightly with the other Adobe digital media tools, so you can reopen and edit audio clips directly in Adobe Audition, import chapter markers from Adobe Premiere Pro, and transfer menu designs with Adobe After Effects to create dynamic motion menus. Best of all, Encore is very tightly integrated with Photoshop CS: you can exchange menu designs directly between Encore and Photoshop, complete with graphics and text objects and properties, layer sets and hidden layers, and even layer effects. In fact, Encore uses the Photoshop file format for importing and storing all its graphical elements.
The hallmark of Encore is its flexibility in fitting into your preferred workflow. You can prepare and compress your clips in Premiere Pro, or just import and convert them in Encore. You can design all your menus within Encore, or you can work in Photoshop to create a family of template designs for your projects, including menus, graphics elements, and even styles. Encore ships with a large library of these predefined templates that you can use and customize for your own projects.
This book is designed for people who want to make interesting DVD productions, whether they’re consumers stepping up from an entry-level DVD authoring tool, or professionals moving into DVD from other Adobe digital media tools. You’ll find the process of using Encore more familiar if you have some experience with playing and exploring (if not authoring) DVDs, and video editing using a tool such as Premiere Pro. Experience with Photoshop also is obviously helpful, but not required.
My goal in this book is to get you started quickly creating useful DVDs, and then give you the tools and options for digging down to customize more advanced designs. The book moves logically through the workflow of creating a DVD, introducing the associated Encore tools, and providing tips and alternatives for more advanced authoring. In this way, you can find your own approaches to using Encore for the kinds of projects that you want to create.
Besides providing the step-by-step workflow for using Encore, this book also serves as a reference to the major screens and dialogs, with annotated screenshots and associated explanations of the Encore interface elements.
This book is based on Adobe Encore DVD version 1.5, released in May 2004, and also available as part of the Adobe Video Collection version 2.5. If you haven’t upgraded to version 1.5, don’t hesitate any further; it provides significant workflow enhancements and even stronger integration with the other Adobe tools.
This book is part of O’Reilly’s Digital Studio series, a new set of books that are geared toward taking novices, whatever their area of digital expertise may be, and turning them into subject-matter experts. At O’Reilly, we forever strive to raise the bar with this series—and with our other books as well—offering you a volume that not only has a tremendous amount of value for your money, but also relieves your “information pain.” In other words, we want to answer not only your simple questions, but also those arcane and annoying problems that you’ll face as you mature in your DVD authoring. These are the problems that others tend to think of as “outside the scope of this book.”
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