Digital Home Thoughts: Applause for Adobe's Encore DVD 1.01

Figure 7: Transcoding audio options

Figure 7 shows the audio options and, whilst there are fewer of them, the choices can appear to be just as complicated. If you select Dolby Digital, the audio format is Dolby Digital Stereo. It isn't possible to do 5.1 encoding with Encore, even if you've installed it on a computer that has Premiere with the SurCode 5.1 encoder on it. So, if you want to do 5.1 surround encoding, it has to be done within Premiere first and then exported to Encore as pre-built files that don't need any further transcoding. Still, that probably isn't a bad thing as Premiere does have very good audio tools for precise setting up of the audio mix and, in addition, it is possible to set chapter points within the Premiere timeline that get preserved & understood by Encore when it opens the MPEG file - this is a very useful feature as it means that any subsequent editing done in Premiere doesn't lead to manual chapter point editing in Encore.

Setting Up The Timelines
Once you've collected the assets together, you need to place them into timelines. A timeline is used to present a sequence of video or still clips. Figure 8 shows a very simple timeline consisting of a number of still pictures whilst Figure 9 shows a timeline that has got four audio tracks and a subtitle track to go with the video track. One difference to note between a stills timeline and a video timeline is that the latter can only contain one video clip whilst the former can contain multiple stills.


Figure 8: Timeline with stills and chapter points


Figure 9: A more complicated timeline with video, multiple audio tracks and subtitles

You can see from Figure 9 that each of the audio tracks and the subtitle track has a language setting against it. This serves two purposes - the first is that when the user first puts the disc into the drive, the DVD player will automatically select the correct language track if there is one that matches the player's defined language setting otherwise it selects the default track. The second is that if the user decides to change audio or subtitle tracks through the DVD player's own interface, they can see the language choices available to them. One of the great things about Encore though, compared with other authoring tools, is that you can create buttons in menus that allow the user to select which audio & subtitle options they want - something that you often see on movie DVDs but that isn't always possible in a home-grown DVD.

With regard to the subtitle support within Encore, there are four supported methods of creating subtitles:

• Creating a subtitle track in a timeline, navigate to the point in time where you want the subtitle to appear, drag out the text box and type the text in;
  
• Import a text file that defines the start and end time along with the text to be displayed;
  
• Import subtitles created by Captions Inc. This consists of a text file that defines the start & end time, along with the name of the pre-created image file containing the subtitles;
  
• Import subtitles created by FAB. As with Captions Inc, the text file defines the start & end time and the name of the pre-created image files.

With both formats, because the images are pre-defined, you have to indicate to Encore the background colour, the outer colour and the fill colour used, as shown in Figure 10. In practice, I found picking the outline colour very difficult - it would be better if there was an option to zoom into the image so that the outline colour is easier to hit.


Figure 10: Picking the colour mappings for subtitles

If you aren't working with pre-created image files, the next best method, particularly if you've been provided the source files by a client, is the importing of a text file. As you can see from Figure 11, there are plenty of options available to you in order to get just the look that you want. The window displays a frame from the timeline, along with the text bounding box and the first subtitle text. One of the really useful features here is that whilst you can adjust the size & position of the text bounding box, Encore won't let you move that box outside the title safe area. This ensures that your subtitles will always be visible on the screen.


Figure 11: Importing subtitles through a text file

What is nice is that you can, after you've imported the text, go back through the subtitles and make alterations within the text. Not only can you edit the text itself, but you can change the position of the subtitle on the screen, change the font attributes for a selected portion of the text and so on. It isn't possible to make these changes with FAB & Caption Inc subtitles because they are stored as image files.

When the subtitles are displayed over the image, the colours used are taken from the colour set specified for the current timeline. Each timeline can only use one colour set, and a colour set can contain three colour definitions, as shown in Figure 12. Each subtitle clip can use one of the three definitions, thus allowing colours to change in the subtitles as they are played back, but not complete flexibility. As you can see from the screenshot, it is possible to vary the opacity of each of the three colours used. In Figure 13, you can see a zoomed in portion of a subtitle where I've deliberately set the anti-alias colour to red so that you can see how Encore uses the three colours to render the text. Another useful feature of the timeline colour set tool is the preview checkbox. This allows you to see the effect of the changes you make, but it isn't necessarily an option you want ticked all of the time as Encore took several seconds every time I made a change. There was also a bug where changing the colour didn't actually change the preview unless I changed the opacity, thus having a seriously negative effect on the usefulness of this feature.


Figure 12: Defining subtitle colour sets


Figure 13: Three colours in a subtitle

Building The Navigation
Now to the bit where commercial discs vary a lot in their capabilities but almost always exceed the possibilities available from consumer DVD authoring tools - the disc navigation. Menus consist of a background, buttons and subpictures - a DVD term used to describe the means of changing the appearance of a button when it is selected or activated with the remote control or mouse. Encore supports two types of menu - still and motion. A still menu is composed of static images. There is no moving footage or audio. A motion menu, by comparison, does include moving footage or audio. For example, a video can play in the background of the menu, a button can include a thumbnail image of the video to which it is linked, or you can have audio playing.

Encore supports four different ways of creating a menu - from menu templates such as those included on the DVD, from predesigned buttons and backgrounds, from any asset in the project or by creating it in Photoshop. The menu templates are accessed through the Library palette, as shown in Figure 14 - filtered using the bottom left-hand button to show only menu assets.


Figure 14: Menus in the Library