[Daniel Ludwig]

charlie,
that must be a wrong behave!

normally you need to switch the background layer off to see the underlying film.

I allways delete the BG-layer if I´ll create motion-menus, so encore wont be confused – you can delete it in encore as well.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

hey again,
no – intro-transitions like you know from DVD can´t be done with blu-ray and especially with encore.

if you are working with a full-spec blu-ray authoring solution you could add in- and out-effects to your interactive graphic-stream, but you can´t do this with encore.

if you feel like having the time, you should look at DVD Logic EasyBDSuite.

it´s a full-spec-solution for a reasonable price at 700$.

https://www.dvd-logic.com/easybd/

but be awared: it´s windows-software.

you can also download a 21days full functional demo from the website.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

yes, you need to set them 1920×1080.

please look at your project-transcoding-settings and/or your blu-ray-transcoding-settings within your project-window on the left hand side.

they should be 1920×1080.

cu

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

hi again,
here is what you need to do:

1. you need to get rid of the text out of your background-video that should be your buttons.

2. start the video without the intro-part. it should start where the loop-point is.

you also need to have first frame of your video should be last frame of your video + 1 frame, so you´ll get a nice looping background-video. it would be good if you could create it a bit longer as well, so you will not get to the looping-point that fast.

your video should be 1920×1080 and you project-settings should be the same, of course.

3. you need to create your PSD-file for the menu that way:

as you could see, there is no background-layer within this PSD-file and you can see 4 buttons at the lower position and also in the layer-view.

the lowest (+) play is button no 1 of the main page, followed by the other 3.

then there are the other sub-pages of the menu which start with the (#1) for chapter page 1 and (#2) for chapter page 2, and also (#3) for setup.

you can see them all on top of the 4 main page buttons overlapping, but as long as they are not within the same (sub-)page, that doesn´t matter.

there are also a lot buttons within each of these (#1)-pages for chapter-selection and setup.

allways keep in mind: buttons are not allowed to overlap each other, as well as with DVD.

so you need to import your menu as PSD-file and then set the background-video to be the background-video for you menu. to do so you need to select your menu, go to properties, select the motion-tab and drag these @-symbol onto your background-video-file within your project-window. the video will be linked as backgroundvideo for your menu.

link all the buttons from your main page and your sub-pages, and it´ll should work.

if you have further questions, please let us know.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

hi charles,
there are different issues that you need to take care of:

1. menu-background

you need to know that adobe encore allways encode/transcode the menu-assets to MPEG2HD. it doesn´t matters if you are using a mov-file or a previous transcoded h264/m4v-file.

but if you have cascading transcodes, that will result in bad picture-quality.

so the best way to solve this problem is to use your quicktime-movie as backgroud-movie for your menu.

2. general menu-behave

as you are authoring a blu-ray disc the technical specifications are different what you might know from DVD.

there is a new way to create menus for BDs – so called muli-layer-menus.

meaning you´ll have different pages of menus within the so called IG-stream. IG stands for “interactive grafic”. the IG-stream could contain a lot pages that could have a lot buttons, too.

so you need to create a PSD-file containing these pages and the buttons, you don´t need to have a seperate “sub-menu” for chapters or setup, it all could be within your top-menu on different pages.

if you would like to get an example about how it could be, please have a look over here:

https://rivergatesoftware.com/tutorial-12tangos

there you can find some useful help and a tutorial how to work with IG-graphics within encore.

the tutorial is quite a bit different – the most interesting thing for you might be the PSD-file. you can see the order of the pages, buttons and layers.

if you have further more questions, please let us know.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

hi charles,
creating a blu-ray depending on other standarts than creating a DVD – and especially in your menu-case it wont be possible.

if you would like to have a looping BD you must create a loopig menu-background without any intro-transition.

so you need to get rid of thinking “DVD-ish” as there are no submenus as well – you have multi-layer-menus that work on the same background while running, or selecting/activation a button.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

hey brent,
first of all I would open your project and save it AS. give it the same name with an index DVD at the end, so you know which one is BD and which is DVD.

then you need to select the built-tab and change your format fram blu-ray to DVD and select disc-folder.

next step will be to set the correct transcoding-setting for DVD. before that you need to do a bitbudgeting, to be sure the data-rate wont be to high, so you wont get to much content for your DVD.

you need to set that specific data-rate for video-transcoding and then your disc should fit with the media.

therefore select your project-tab and right-klick on each asset to change the DVD-Transcoding-Setting to the necessary bitrate.

so finally you should get a working DVD.

Note: if you are using WAV-audio for you BD, you might change your audio to dolby AC-3 to reduce the necessary space for audio on the disc.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

charles,
this is a DVD-spec-thing, you can´t change it – you need to live with it!

there are no more buttons possible than 18 for 16:9.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

hi rob,
first of all – I haven´t done this either, but I´ve been told that you should export a XML-file out of FCP, import this to premiere and then send the projekt to encore using direct linking.

so you might give it a try and let us all know.

cheers

danny

[Daniel Ludwig]

hey joseph,
it´s no good idea to create your BD-menu using compressor to encode as ALL encore-menus will be re-trancoded to MPEG2HD even if you allready encoded it before.

you can blame adobe for that! the best way to go is to encode all assets to you prefered codec but you need to leave out your menus. import your original MOV into encore and let him encode the menus.

so you´ll have no re-transcoding.

cheers

danny