A single timeline can be split into relevant chapters, and these can link to multiple menus. Each menu does not necessarily have its own timeline. It is my normal practice to have a single timeline, one main menu, and several sub-menus for the dvd navigation.

It is possible to have 1 sub-menu per chapter, and just have the other chapters in the background as picture objects. The user then navigates left/right changing the sub menu and hence the selection. I find this not practical - especially when the audio track keeps restarting. What I was wondering is if we could get an animated 3D circle bringing the relevant chapter selection to the foreground. I assume what you did with the video clip was to animate this type of sequence, but as it was a background video, you would not have control of left/right motion or selections. Even if you auto advanced the sub-menu after a predetermined time, to coincide with the chapter showing in the video clip, this would not be practical as if the user 'missed' a selection, he would have to wait say 5secsx 20chapters = 100secs - 1min 40secs, and only then would have a timeslot of 5secs to make his selection, otherwise he has to wait again! Not a practical solution really for professional productions.

The very nature of Encore allows you to have a track play, and it will allow you to navigate INSIDE the current sub-menu, but it's once you navigate to sub-menus for chapters 7-12, 13-18 etc, the track changes. Movement between sub-menus is straightforward with left / right arrow links. I am not sure what you mean by 'You have to make transition clips'. Can you enlighten us?

Regards

Steve

Steve,

Just thought I'd chime in to say that this is not an Encore issue. The specifications for the DVD format do not allow continuous audio to be played when changing PCGs (tracks). What you want to do with the video side of things can be done. I assume what you are looking for is something like the menu for "The Wedding Singer". Each element is its own piece of video, then you link to those pieces of video from the buttons on the menu. It will not be seemless - there is usually a 1/4 to 1/2 second pause as the DVD changes PGCs - and the audio will start over. I personally find that having to wait for the video to transition "around the carousel" before I can access the next group of buttons is frustrating. YMMV.

Have fun!

Rob

Hi Rob

Not seen the Wedding Singer, so not sure if it has the same menu system as I want, but from what you say it very well sounds like it. I take you point about having to wait and the frustration this causes. Just wanted to offer something different to my clients.... guess I will stick with the trusted seperate sub-menus. Thank you for your valued feedback on this point.

With reference to the Program Chain...... Will authoring not allow both the main menu and the sub-menus to be contained within the same Prog Chain, and hence have the same audio track?

Thanks for your feedback.

Steve

What I meant by transition clips is that to have a visual representation of changing menus you need to make videos to "connect" (so to speak) the menus together. The transition clips are what I use when changing menus because abrupt screen changes (hard cuts, if you will) isn't my thing. True, like Rob said, there's a slight delay between menu changes, but it's just a matter of preference for me. I recently did a 2-menu project in After Effects (they port nicely into Encore) and I did 2 transition clips to connect them. One was a slide from Menu 1 to 2, and the other was from Menu 2 to 1. Those clips were used as the "transition" setting for each of the Next/Previous Page links in Encore. I might not be on par with what your original question was, but I'm just pointing out a possible alternative.

-Michael

Hi Michael

I understand you now. Thanks for the clarification.

All my menus are the same with the exception of the motion menu clip inside 1 of 6 boxes on the screen, so I do not notice much of a 'hard' transition, but I appreciate what you mean if the menus are somewhat different.

From what you say, I could create several transition clips to animate the circle motion of a carousel and have these as the 'transitions' as I change menu, bringing the active chapter selection to the foreground and having this box as a motion menu. I'll give this some consideration in my next project - thank you!

Thanks for the advice - much appreciated.

Steve

Encore message
 

A few days ago my Encore started coming back with the following message when burning a DVD: "This image has sector headers. Hit OK if you would like to continue with the record with the sector headers removed". I get this message on both +RW (erased or not) and +R disks, I have not tried -R discs as I am not using them.

Anyone has an idea what this is all about? I can click OK and the discs gets burned just fine... I am still curious to know what it might be.

Did you enable copy protection?

Also make sure that "CGMS: Unlimited copies are allowed." is selected in Disk tab > Project Settings.

Hey Yossi,
I get this error message too - although I just click OK to get past it. However, I do select "No Copies Allowed" sometimes - is that when I get the error message? If that's so, how can I burn a DVD that can't be copied? I'm guessing when I clicked OK to that error message it was removing the copy protection...

That's it!
 

Yes Yossi,

that was it! I turned the copy protection on working on a project about a month ago... come to think, that's when I started seeing that message. But on subsequent projects I didn't manually turn the copy protection on, looks like it got stuck on that setting.

Jeff, I suspect clicking "yes" does not turn off the copy protection (although I am not sure). But to answer your question, yes, you can copy protect your DVDs... from honest hackers... For averyone else, there is plenty of software out there (even for free) on the internet to rip your DVDs. It's really not worth the effort. Maybe one of those scary "FBI Warnings" can help you more.

Thanks Yossi,

Glad to hear that it worked.

The copy protection feature is only for use with DLT masters that are going to a replication house. It does not work with writable disks. The copy protection uses sectors that are 2054 bytes and writable disks always have sectors that are 2048 bytes (or something like that).

DVD with ROM content using Encore
 

Hi all use Encore for day to day DVD creation but now have a client wishing to mix standard DVD with data content (PDF's etc.).

What is the best work flow you all of found and software? I really still want to use Encore still as it's the program I'm used to but what will I have to add to this for the mixed output?

I’m having a similar problem as well, were going from PP2 to Encore 1.5.
We have all our text slates included in one clip. The video plays perfectly however, the text slates only play for one frame. I don’t get it at all! We’ve tried mpeg2, DV AVI and DV AVI to mpeg2 through Encore all with the same results.

Could this be another manifestation of the dreaded "Optimize stills" option? I'm not in front of my Premier Editing station right now, so I can't look for where that option is, but I know setting "Optimize Stills" bites you in the butt in a lot of other ways. Perhaps that is what is happening here. Try unchecking that option and see if that helps.

Have fun!

Rob

i believe it's in "project settings" or "edit/preferences"

On export, you can also uncheck the box for "optimize stills"

I had a similar problem once after exporting out PP1.5... I was using magic bullet as well... which usually has adverse effects on things i've noticed.

Troubleshooting
 

You have several options to troubleshoot your problem. First you need to determine who is causing it, Premiere or Encore. Since the exported video plays fine, I would try encoding it to something else, anything - Windows Media for example, use any other encoder you have available, even the (othewise useless) Movie Maker, turn your file into a .wmv. This will show you if there is a problem in the way your text is embedded into the video.

An alternative workflow would be to export an mpeg file directly from Premiere (go to Export > Media Encoder > MPEG), then import that into Encore. You could even author your DVD directly in Premiere Pro if you don't need sophisticated navigation (PPRO 2.0) or no navigation at all (PPRO 1.5).

Ideally you should bypass completely all Adobe software, but if you don't have any other mpeg encoder, this should help.