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[R Hewitt] “…the final still doesn’t fade to black, it leaves a faint image of the last frame.”

It could help to add at least half a second of black at the end of the timeline to prevent this.

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If you didn’t already, try exporting from Premiere with the “Optimize Stills” setting disabled. That is what usually causes problems with the stills in Encore.

Also see Adobe TechDoc: AVI exported from Premiere Pro 1.x does not play in Encore DVD 1.5. (Not the same, but a similar problem with the infamous “Optimize Stills”.)

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If no user of the DVD should be able to remove the “SAMPLE” text, the only safe option is to burn it in the video in the video editing app, before it is handed over to the MPEG encoder. Or you could do the same in Canopus ProCoder (an encoder which offers the option to add a burned-in watermark to the output).

The alternative would be to add the text as a subtitle stream to the DVD, but any determined user will be able to rip the video without the watermark.

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Justin,

I think that instead of “submenu” you mean “subpicture” – the part that takes care of the button highlighting. There is an excellent video tutorial on subpicture creation available at adobeevangelists.com: Adobe Encore DVD (Highlight Colors – The Lowdown on Subpictures).

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Dirk,

If you exported the still from Premiere as 720×576 it should fit nicely in a “PAL DV/D1 720×576” image in Photoshop CS. Both should be using the same non-square pixels. (Since the introduction of CS, Photoshop can work with non-square pixels.) If it doesn’t fit, something is wrong, somehow…

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Justin,

A1- I don’t understand the question. A submenu is a menu like any other menu and you can link a button to a timeline or to a menu. What is it that you want to do?

A2- What you are seeing may be caused by the fact that the text in the background is antialiased, which makes it “spread” a little, while the subpicture overlay consists of a single color and therefore can’t be antialiased, making it appear smaller.

A solution could be to put a stroke on the subpicture highlight to make it slightly fatter, or to reduce the opacity of the highlight so that the text in the background shines through a bit (visually blending the difference between the two).

A3- A still menu background on a DVD is a single MPEG-2 I-frame. This is compressed similar to a JPEG still. The artifacting may be a product of this compression. JPEG and MPEG compression doesn’t work well on flat colors. It may help to add a little bit of noise or other structure to the background blue.

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Instead of setting the end action of the timeline to link to the “default” button on the menu you can set it to link to a specific button of the menu. So the end action of timeline Kill Bill would be set to “menu : button Matrix”.

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Do the problematic AVI clips start with a still (or video without motion)? If so, I would suggest to export again from Premiere with the “Optimize Stills” setting disabled.

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Dirk,

Which settings/dimensions did you use in Photoshop CS? E.g. is the menu designed as 768×576 based on square pixels, or is it 720×576 based on a DV/D1 pixel aspect ratio?

Which version of Encore are you using?

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Susan,

If you post your question in the Apple DVD Studio Pro forum it will be seen by more fellow DVDSP users. 🙂