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Activity Forums Adobe Encore DVD Need video button to link to different timeline

  • Need video button to link to different timeline

    Posted by Jen Musselman on December 13, 2019 at 9:48 pm

    I am importing MPEG-2 video that is 352×480 into Encore (Mini DVD source). I have no problem getting Encore to pass it without transcoding, via patching the file’s header in DVD Patcher before import, and then patching the finished VOBs back to the correct dimensions.

    My problem is that, by bringing “incorrectly-sized” videos into Encore, I cannot create video buttons. The video buttons process, but are half-sized because the video is only actually 352×480.

    I tried a workaround by creating 15-second 720×480 MPEGs from the original (transcoded outside Encore) and bringing them into my chapter menus. This creates “pseudo” video buttons that match the original file’s chapter stop locations.

    Here’s the problem: The “pseudo” video buttons link to the 15-second MPEGs (of course). I cannot get them to link to the chapter stops in the correct full-length file. At first I thought the button override would solve the problem but the buttons still just link to the 15-second originals (apparently “override” doesn’t override the original link, but the end action of a timeline instead?).

    Is there any way to create a video button that links to a different video timeline?

    Thanks in advance.

    Jen

    Jen Musselman replied 5 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • Stan Jones

    December 15, 2019 at 11:32 am

    I’d be surprised if you can workaround Encore’s abstraction layer method for making animated buttons, but you’ve done a great job working around the video size itself. Let us know!

    I’ll look for my notes on a workaround method I recall. As you’ve discovered, the workaround requires specifying video from a different timeline than you are actually using.

    The other way to go about this is to abandon Encore for creating the motion background. Ultimately Encore is doing what you can do by creating the final motion background (a bunch of picture in picture snips). Since they’re scaled down, maybe Encore would be happy with a “full size” video for that.

    I found my notes. Unfortunately, I simply kept links. One goes to an Adobe forum thread that has not been carried over to the new forum. And the other is to a tutorial that is the poster’s source for his method, and that link is also no longer available. The tutorial was:
    https://www.eyescreamfactory.com/tutorials/add-videos-to-adobe-encore-menus.html

    The forum post as: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1191788

    I did a little searching, but did not find any archived pages or the like for either of them.

    Stan Jones

  • Jen Musselman

    December 15, 2019 at 3:01 pm

    Hi Stan,

    Thanks for your response and your help. (Can I just tell you how annoying it is to Google questions about Adobe products, and find that their forum posts don’t exist anymore?! Why couldn’t they have moved their forum or at least archived the threads?)

    An Encore guidebook I have states unequivocally that “A video thumbnail button can only display the video from the timeline to which it is linked. You can’t link the button to one timeline and display the video from another.” So…. there’s that. Of course that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a trick out there, but I haven’t found it yet.

    I did finally do the workaround that you described. I brought the six 15-second “chapter videos” into a video editor and composited them at the correct size on the menu background. Then resaved the new video as an MPEG-2, which is then used for the menu’s background video in Encore. Ditched the in-Encore video buttons and simply added subpicture frames around the six squares to create new “video buttons.” The quality of the video buttons is not great, given all the transcoding involved, but it’s not too bad and it gets the job done (the most important part!).

    But if there is an actual Encore workaround that anyone knows, please post!

    Thanks again for your help..

    Jen

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