[Tim Kurkoski]

It sounds like your color settings are a bit messed up. Take a deep breath, because color management is a wild and wooly topic. If you’re really interested (and it’s a topic that any serious Photoshop user should grasp), I can recommed the book Real World Color Management.

That being said, you may be able to get out of this easily. Go to Edit > Color Settings. Try changing the Settings pulldown to one of the standard defaults, like North America General Purpose. If that alone doesn’t help, you may have an odd profile assigned to the image. Choose Edit > Assign Profile (BTW, this is all assuming you’re using Photoshop CS2; in older versions these settings are a little different), and try the three different options. If you have to pick a profile, try sRGB or Adobe RGB.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Premiere doesn’t capture the second stereo pair at all. You’ll either need to use another application, or change the audio mix settings on the camera and capture the audio in a second pass. (If I recall, I once looked up how to do that with an XL1 and wasn’t able to find a way, so you’ll probably need to use another app. Try Scenalyzer.)

[Tim Kurkoski]

This is fairly normal, but rather than relying on Encore’s preview you should test your project by burning disc and trying it on several DVD players. What you experience will vary from player to player, but most players should make a quicker transition than Encore’s preview does.

The problem is that when the player (or Encore’s preview) is switching between video streams, it has to pause to load the data. On some players this happens quickly, on others it takes a second or so. Most players will pause the last frame of the video, but there are the rare few that might show black like Encore’s preview.

Bottom line here: Test, test, test, and don’t trust Encore’s preview mode a 100% representation of what the final disc will look like.

[Tim Kurkoski]

You can’t create custom transitions in Premiere.

What you can do is use transitions in creative ways.

For example, to create a “dip to white” transition:

1. Put the clips you want to transition between on Video 2 or higher, so that there is open space on a video track immediately below the clips.
2. Temporarily move the second clip to that track.
3. Place a Cross Dissolve transition on the end of the first clip. By default, as long as the clip isn’t touching another one, Premiere should place the transition in “end at cut” mode.
4. Place a Cross Dissolve transition on the front of the second clip. Again, since it’s not touching another clip, Premiere should set the transition to “start at cut” mode.
5. Move the second clip back to the same track as the first clip.
6. Create a new Color Matte that is white.
7. Put the Color Matte on the lower (now empty) video track, and position it so that it fits to the transitions.

Voila. Instant dip to white. I like to use this setup with the Additive Dissolve transition to give a sort of “flash bulb” effect.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Unless you’re in Europe or another PAL country, any television monitor you use is going to be an NTSC monitor. The difference is whether or not it’s “reference” quality. But any functional television monitor will work fine.

To preview live video from Premiere Pro, what you do is connect the FireWire cable on the computer to your DV camera/DV deck/DV converter (I use a Canopus ADVC-100 converter), and the television monitor to the DV device. (Caveat: most DV cameras can do this, as long as it’s in VCR mode, but there are a few that can’t.)

Then in Premiere, go to the Project menu > Project Settings > General, hit Playback Settings, and select the option to preview video on the DV device.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Are you viewing your video on the computer monitor or on an external television monitor? For accurate color, you should always use the latter. Computer monitors vary widely in their color response, due to the monitors themselves (same problem with television monitors, which is why you should always calibrate them) and in how the video card handles color.

[Tim Kurkoski]

I haven’t heard anything bad about PS CS on Tiger. I’m about to install Tiger today myself, though I have CS2 so I won’t really be much help for comparison tests.

You should check the Adobe knowledgebase for known issues, but in general I would doubt that there’s anything major.

You don’t need to uninstall your 10.3 version. If you’re referring to the installations allowed by the license agreement (not activation, which didn’t come to the Mac until CS2), the license is per computer, not per installation. (That’s my interpretation; this is legal stuff, and I’m not a lawyer. So it’s at your own risk.)

[Tim Kurkoski]

You can’t import animations and make them a part of the menu, no.

But there are a couple of workarounds:

1. Use After Effects, like you’ve mentioned. You can also use Premiere, or any application that allows you to create a movie file. Because that’s what you’ll be creating- a movie file which is the background of your menu.

2. Import your animated button as a DVD-legal AVI, QT, or MPEG. Make a timeline out of it. Link to the timeline from your menu using an animated video button. Then customize the button routing on the menu so the user can never actually get to that button with the remote. (You won’t be able to stop them from clicking on it with a mouse, though.)

[Tim Kurkoski]

There’s an old adage about trying to predict software releases (among other things):

Those who know don’t talk.
Those who talk don’t know.

[Tim Kurkoski]

You’re running into a combination of problems:

1. When you creat timelines in Encore 1.5 they are numbered in the order you create them (in 1.0, they are numbered backwards). The numbering is what the DVD player will use to seek the next chapter, and you can’t change the numbering once you’ve created the timeline.

2. The “next chapter” button is not strictly defined for the DVD spec when there’s no chapter points left in the timeline. Most DVD players will simply execute the end action, some will do nothing, some will jump to the next timeline.

The most effective solution people have found is to put an extra chapter point about a second before the end of each timeline. That way when the user presses “next chapter”, it will jump to that point and after a short pause the end action will execute.

Otherwise you’re stuck recreating all of your project’s timelines in the exact order you want.

Oh, also, I’ve seen a bug where if you have too many timelines in a project that are all linked from the same end action or override (for example, you have a transition from the menu that leads to all of them), Encore screws up the navigation. I think the limit is something like 42.