Overrides and Effect of Many Layers (2 questions)

[Jeff Bellune]

1. It is very important that you do not set any overrides at all unless you know exactly why you need them. There aren’t many instances where overrides are needed in Encore 1.x and with Chapter Playlists and Chapter End Actions in Encore 2.0, even fewer instances. Overrides will mess up your disc navigation unless you really know what you are doing.

2. Encore preserves the layer structure of the menu and will flatten all elements except the subpicture layer into a single layer at build time.

-Jeff

The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0

[Bob Cole]

[Jeff Bellune] “It is very important that you do not set any overrides at all unless you know exactly why you need them.”

Here’s my situation:

Timelines A, B, C, D.

Menu buttons for PLAY ALL, and for A to play and return to Menu, ditto for B, C, D.

I do need overrides for that, right?

What I’m curious about is why the Menu Button needs to have an override specified, when the override setting in the timeline will take precedence anyway.

[David Garrett]

if you add an overide to the timeline then you wont be able to use the play all button, as timeline-A will play and then return back at its end.
How I would do it is to have a “play all” button linked to Timeline-A and then its end action to go to timeline-B, etc,etc,etc. And then have 4 seperate buttons for each individual timeline with the button ovveride set to go back to the proceeding button on the menu.

By the way what version of Encore are you using?

[Joe Bowden]

Bob, instead of using overrides, use a chapter playlist. It’s a simple, clean solution to the problem you are trying to solve.

Overrides, if not fully understood, will cause undesirable navigation behavior.

[Bob Cole]

Thanks all for the help. Using 2.0, the Playlist/Chapter Playlist feature is new to me. It looks great.

For now, I wound up simply changing each timeline’s Override setting to Not Set, and it appears so far to be working fine. It was erratic when I used Override in both the buttons and the timelines.

Just out of curiosity, what is the point of having an Override setting on a timeline?

[Joe Bowden]

Override is just a tool, and a widely misunderstood one. Buttons, menus, timelines, etc. all offer overrides- what it does is replace the end action of the targeted link. It used to be the only way to provide special-case navigation in Encore, before the advent of playlists and chapter playlists. With the advent of those mechanisms, override’s usefulness is less important. But it’s still a good tool to have- if you understand how it works.