After Effects & Making DVD’s

[Jon Geddes]

When it ends up on the DVD it will be mpeg2. You can either export as mpeg2 out of After Effects, or export as Quicktime MOV and then have Encore transcode it to mpeg2. Personally I prefer to export as quicktime mov, then let encore transcode. It’s best to let After Effects do the downscaling, as it uses a superior algorithm than Encore. You can create a new composition with the SD resolution, then drag your HD comp into that and scale it down.

You will then need to import a blank menu into Encore, set your After Effects render as the background, and add the button highlights in Photoshop (go to ‘Edit > Edit Menu in Photoshop’). Make sure you follow the instructions the the Encore help files for naming the layer groups and layers with the appropriate prefixes for Encore.

I am the Senior Designer and Owner of Precomposed, an industry leader of DVD/Blu-ray Motion Menu Template Kits designed in After Effects, and provide complete walkthrough video tutorials (for free) on how to customize everything from the AE project to the Authoring in Encore or DVD Studio Pro. Even if you don’t use our products, I’m sure you would learn a great deal from watching the product tutorials, available from the Tutorial section of our website.

Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com

[Michael Szalapski]

You have 0 choice on what resolution you will get from a DVD. I don’t care if you’ve designed your footage at 4k film resolution so it can play in a cinema, DVDs are stuck at NTSC or PAL standard definition resolutions (720×576 in PAL’s case). Both of them will look crappy on an HD screen (unless you’re using an upconverting DVD player, but even then it’s not going to look nearly as good as your original animation).

Besides being much smaller resolution for DVD, MPEG-2 is a compressed (lossy) format. Now, with a video as short as you’ve got, the compression won’t do too much to it, but that much smaller file size is to be expected.

Now, if you want your video to play as you’ve designed it, in HD, you have two options:
1. Make a Blu-Ray disc instead of a DVD
2. Create an HD Quicktime or Windows Media file and play it off a computer that’s plugged into the screen.

If, however, neither of those options are workeable for you, you’re going ot have to deal with an SD
As Jon mentions, it would be better to downsize your video to standard definition in After Effects and render out the SD QT from there rather than having Encore downsize it.

Speaking of Encore, Encore can easily be used without menus. Just set your video’s timeline in Encore to be the first play option and set its end action to be itself. Then it will play as soon as the DVD player reads it and it will keep looping. (Look in Encore’s help for first play or end action for how to do these things if you need to.)

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Jon Geddes]

I thought he wanted the AE composition to be the menu… reading it back, I understand now that he wants it to be a video on the dvd.

You can ignore the part of my post about the blank menu and editing it in Photoshop. Everything else should be relevant.

Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com

[Kurisuta Vd wilk]

this helped me alot reading this posts.

but not yet to the end.
When i export to quicktime, to than afterwards, let it downsize by encore (or something else)
which codec should i use on the quicktime?
H264 ? mpeg4 ?

Thanks in advance !

No knowledge is a Statement

[Kurisuta Vd wilk]

and what codec do you give the QUICKTIME before encoding it in encore to MPEG2 ?
thanks in advance !

No knowledge is a Statement

[Jon Geddes]

You can use the Animation codec at 100 Quality.

Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com