-
Best structure for large project
Hi all! My first serious DVD project is a large one; I have filmed and edited a dance contest with 115(!) numbers, and have calculated that these will fit on three DVDs. Its a non-commercial arrangement, and some ‘idealism’ is the reason why I took the assignment without really having the experience with such a large DVD project. I am experienced with filming and editing, though. I use Premiere PRO (v.1) for editing, and have opted to make 115 unique ‘Sequences’ which are now finished.
The functionality I need from the DVD menus are:
– Two modes: Jump to any specific numer (35-40 on each disc) and ‘Play all’.
– When selecting one number and it finishes playing it should jump back to the (sub)menu it came from. Here, the number you just played should be in a ‘selected’ state, and if possible every number played (random) should have its own color.My main question is which is the wiser:
1. Create a long Timeline in Premiere with the sequences going to DVD ‘A’ assembled on it, with a chapter mark for each one. AFAIK I understand from the Encore manual, this method will have difficulty with jumping back to the menu after one number is finished. Am I right, and if not, how is it done in Encore?
1b. One can do either, but should I render this out from Premiere, or rather import the project (Timeline) to Encore, letting it do the transcoding?2. Render out every Sequence as a MPG2 file from Premiere, and assemble them in an Encore Project instead, probably using a ‘Playlist’ for the menu setup. This is a huge manual job (115 Sequences / files), with waiting for rendering and high demands on disk space.
2b. BTW would rendering to DV-AVI from Premiere be better? I hear good things about the MPEG2 transcoding within Encore. Even more disk-space for the in-between stage though…There might be a ‘third way’ that I more experienced users know.
Anyway, thanks for any qualified input and any thoughts about how to set up my project, with the least amount of work.
-
3 Replies
-
There is no way to do what you are trying to accomplish in a single Encore timeline, so if it’s imperative that a user be able to play only one sequence and then return to a menu, then you will have to use multiple timelines.
The problem is, you are limited to 99 timelines (each timeline is a VTS, and only 99 VTS can exist on a DVD).
Finally, you are limited in the number of buttons in a single menu (36 is the maximum for DVD-Video), and the number of colors you can use in a menu for button highlights (16).
With this in mind, you may want to reconsider the project to fit within the limitations of Encore (the first issue I mentioned) and the DVD format itself (the others).
-Joe
-
Thanks! This will save me from taking the wrong route and do a lot of unnecessarry work. I will reconcider just how imperative it is to have that auto jump-back function. As for the other things, I will only have around 35-40 timelines on each of the three DVDs in the package, but that means I just hit the roof on one or two of them when it comes to the number of buttons. Darn! I meant only one color for ‘not viewed’, one color for ‘viewed’ and one for ‘latest view’; just three in all. Guess I’ll figure that out.
-
Three DVDs? I’m sorry…I overlooked that detail.
Then you should be able to do it with multiple timelines, no trouble at all. I would recommend using a playlist (Encore 1.5) to create a link for the Play All button. But yes, you will need two menus if you have more than 36 timelines to link to. You can do it in such a way that it appears like a single menu using Auto-Activate for the last button of menu 1 and the first button of menu 2, but it means some of your buttons will not be active depending on which menu you’re at.
Hope this helps,
Joe
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up