Jon Geddes
Forum Replies Created
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Hmm… I wonder if it thinks your HD video is placed into an SD timeline? Can you try importing the video again and placing it into a new timeline?
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com -
Yes we do. We have an hour long Encore tutorial which explains how to author a disc with custom motion menus and transitions that have been rendered in After Effects (using our Pro Motion Menu Kits).
It is a very thorough tutorial and takes you through using the Chapter Index feature, manually configuring multiple pages of scene selections, Blu-ray pop-up menus, and much more. Even if you don’t use our products, it is a very informative tutorial.
This tutorial can be accessed for free from the Tutorial section of our website, under the product tutorials for our Pro Motion Menu Kits. Simply select any one of our kits, and it will take you to the Tutorial Series.
In fact, you might be interested in watching the entire tutorial series, as it walks you through the entire workflow of authoring with custom motion menus and transitions, complete with music and sound effects.
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com -
No need to recut the video, this functionality is built into the DVD spec and Encore.
You can have your entire step-by-step video as one asset on a single timeline, then place chapter points before each step.
You can then create chapter playlists for how you want it to play, then link the buttons on the menu to the chapter playlists instead of the video. Please let me know if you have any questions about this process.
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com -
Have you tried building your disc?
The Encore preview is not an accurate representation of how the final disc will function.
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com -
If you order a lot of discs (in the thousands), shipping can get expensive. You might want to consider finding a local place. Where do you live?
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com -
Encore is definitely capable of making great looking Blu-ray discs with custom motion menus. In fact, our company specializes in making DVD & Blu-ray motion menu templates for use with Adobe Encore, and we provide complete walkthrough video tutorials for the entire process. These tutorials are available for free from the tutorial section of our website (no purchase of our templates are necessary).
We also provide a full array of professional DVD & Blu-ray authoring services using our industry leading motion menu templates with Adobe Encore. I’m not saying this to promote my company, but rather showing you how capable of an authoring program it is, and that we are able to base our business around it. Encore certainly has some limitations with Blu-ray authoring, and should never be used for commercial releases of Hollywood movies, but it is still a very capable program that can produce great results as long as you are aware of the limitations.
Some of those limitations are issues it has with subtitles (the program supports them, but has faulty programming of how it implements it on the disc), as well as non-seamless flow between menus and menu transitions (again, faulty programming by Adobe, and not a limitation of the format). Adobe could fix all of these problems if they consulted with people like Larry Applegate who know a great deal about the Blu-ray spec and know exactly what the problems are with Encore and how to fix them, but it appears they are trying to get by with their 3 programmers in India who haven’t figured out how to do it correctly yet (I really hope they figure it out sooner rather than later). Adobe is saving themselves some money by outsourcing to India, but in the end they are losing money because the quality of the product is not what people expect from Adobe. The only thing they have going for them is that the products from the competition aren’t any better. But like I said, if you are aware of the limitations and don’t try and do something the program is not capable of doing, then you can make some great looking menus that function as they should.
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com -
Set the End Action of the movie timeline to return to the loop point of the Main Menu.
Click the drop-down arrow in the field for the timeline’s end action, then go down and select ‘Specify Link’. In the window that pops up, select the main menu (and a particular button if you want), then at the bottom of the window, make sure “Set to Loop Point” is checked, then click OK.
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com -
This is a well documented problem with Encore and the Mac OS. What you need to do is edit the menu in Photoshop, and change the highlight layer prefix from (=1) to (=3). Then in Encore, you may need to change the color of the (=3) highlight colors in the menu color set.
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com -
No adjustment in Encore will solve the problem unless you have frame blending enabled (by default, it should be turned off). You may just need to use a better quality encoder. If you’d like, I can encode a short 5 second clip for you to see the difference using a studio quality encoder. If you are interested, please send me an email: jon (at) precomposed.com
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com -
There is an easy way. In the build tab, simply select DVD as the output format instead of Blu-ray. Unfortunately this method doesn’t yield the best quality results. Your downscaled menus and video will look a little pixelated, and your button highlights will look terrible.
For the best quality, you will want to downscale your menus in Photoshop using the “Bicubic Sharper” algorithm, and you will want to downscale your video in the Adobe Media Encoder with Maximum Render Quality on. If you have a Mercury Playback capable graphics card, you can use Premiere to scale down the video in realtime for even better downscaling quality (as it uses a superior algorithm.
You will then want to start a new project in Encore for the SD version. Sure, this process isn’t nearly as fast as simply selecting a different output format in the build tab, but necessary as Adobe has yet to implement a high quality scaling algorithm into Encore.
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com