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

Figure 15: A menu created from a template

Creating a new menu from the current selection results in Figure 15. What isn't readily apparent from the screenshot is that the four buttons aren't part of the background image. Adobe have been really smart with menu creation in Encore - it understands the Photoshop file format and uses it to its advantage by using layers and layer sets. A button, for example, is defined as a layer set with several layers performing key tasks. The layers palette is used to manipulate the menu settings and the layers in Figure 15 can be seen in Figure 16. Encore uses a very precise naming convention to indicate which layer does what. The layering of subpictures in a button is extremely powerful and makes it very easy to create sophisticated buttons that can make the most of the subpicture limitations imposed by the DVD standard.

The biggest shame, though, about the tight integration between Encore and Photoshop is that you really need Photoshop (or an alternative product that can read & write PSD files) in order to get the most out of Encore. It is a shame that Adobe don't bundle Photoshop with Encore or, at least, a version of Photoshop that has been crippled to only exchange files with Encore.


Figure 16: Layers in the menu

Where things really start to get interesting is if the button includes a layer that has been defined as a link to a timeline. Encore will automatically take a poster frame from the specified timeline or, even better, you can instruct Encore to animate the buttons. What happens then is that Encore causes the buttons to play the timeline contents. One restriction of this feature is that it is an all or nothing feature - all the buttons in the current menu do this, or none. At this point, it is important to understand something about DVD menus, though, and that is that they do not, in reality, consist of multiple layers with little video clips in them. What Encore does is render the animated menu into an MPEG2 file and the DVD player then plays that movie. This is actually the process needed if you want to create animated menus in other products like ReelDVD, so you can see how Encore makes life a lot easier. You are pretty much only limited by your ability to create interesting buttons. Figure 17 shows some buttons in a menu created from the Entertainment Submenu. The Scene B button has been linked to a chapter point in a timeline, while the Scene C button hasn't. For a given chapter point, you can specify the poster frame used, thus providing excellent flexibility.


Figure 17: Buttons linked to timelines

The flexibility continues with the settings that can be applied to the menu itself, as shown in Figure 18. Encore exposes more of the DVD Video standard here than a lot of other authoring tools. For example, suppose you've got a series of video clips and you want to provide a separate button to play each clip, with an additional button that plays all of the clips sequentially. Such a scenario is very common to "extras" found in commercial DVDs - but how many authoring tools have the flexibility to reproduce this without unnecessary duplication of the video clips? It can be done very easily in Encore :D.


Figure 18: Menu properties

I briefly mentioned the subpicture layer for buttons and, like subtitles, it is possible to define the colours that are used. Menus have different colour sets from timelines but a similar interface for managing the colours, as shown in Figure 19. Subpictures are horribly complicated but, with a bit of effort, you can get some stunning results from them and the help text that comes with Encore goes a long way to explaining how to get some of those effects. If you are manually creating a button, it is possible to get Encore to automatically create an outline subpicture by selecting the appropriate layers within the button to set the bounding box to be used. However, for more creative results, you will want to use a tool like Photoshop.


Figure 19: Menu colour set management

Once you've created your menus and buttons, it is time to link the buttons to the actions which will be to other menus or to chapter points in a timeline. Again, Encore exposes great DVD functionality, such as being able to specify the button to be selected when the menu is jumped to. In addition to linking the buttons to their actions, if you've got more than one button on a menu, it is usual to define the movement between buttons when a user presses on the navigation buttons on the remote control - in other words, the button routing. Encore can do this automatically, and Figure 18 shows the checkbox near the bottom of the properties window that has this feature enabled. Encore doesn't do a bad job of sorting the routing out, but it does depend heavily on the buttons being aligned in some way. At the end of the day, if the automatic routing doesn't work for you, you can always turn it off and do it yourself.


Figure 20: Displaying the button routing

Figure 20 shows how Encore displays the routing between buttons in a menu. The centre number within the cross is the number for that button. The numbers in the north, south, east & west positions are the identifier of the button that would become selected if the user pressed the corresponding navigation button. Manually setting up the button routing is very intuitive - a case of dragging from the appropriate point on the cross to the button required, as illustrated in Figure 21.


Figure 21: Changing the routing