[Tim Kurkoski]

You could have the window open, but it won’t show any activity. The audio meters only reflect what is happening on the timeline, they won’t reflect what’s coming through on capture.

[Tim Kurkoski]

You need to start a new project. Premiere Pro locks some project settings once the project is created. (Believe me, this is a good thing. I’ve seen too many cases where people changed them without knowing what they were doing.)

If necessary, you can import your old project into the new one after it is created.

[Tim Kurkoski]

1 GB is the max content for all menus on the disc.

Adobe Encore doesn’t have a feature to set up multiple angles. You could submit a feature request to Adobe for it:
https://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html

Well, you’re between a rock and a hard place here. You don’t have to put all 40 videos in the same timeline, but if you have any way that you can group a few together, you might want to do that. For example, you could group all the angles for each movie into the same timeline. Just design the menus so that the user knows what will happen when they press play.

The only other way I can see you going (other than making two discs) is to make some of the videos into menus. The only real downsides to this is that you can’t place chapter points, subtitles, or mutiple audio tracks in a menu. And you’ll have to be careful not to exceed the 1 GB limit. If you use it for the shorter videos and maybe compress them a little more, you might be able to squeeze them in there, assuming your actual menus are static and don’t take up much room.

[Tim Kurkoski]

Premiere 6.x allowed you access to QuickTime’s filters. Premiere Pro, sadly doesn’t have this capability. But if you have QT Pro, you can still do it. You can either just filter your video in QT Pro after you’re finished in Premiere, or use the following workaround:

1. Create a new sequence in Premiere Pro, add a black video matte and make it the length of your project (as long as you need the old movie look for).
2. Turn off the visibility of the track the black matte is on.
3. Export this sequence as a QT file, Animation compressor with Millions+ colors.
4. Open the file in QT Pro. File > Export, choose Animation and Millions+ again, and apply the Film Noise filter.
5. Import the file you created in step 4, and put it in your main sequence above the other clips.

If you want a sepia tone to your clips as well, you can nest the sequence and apply the Tint effect (or whatever your favorite method of tinting a clip is).

[Tim Kurkoski]

The DVD spec has these limitations:
No more than 99 video streams (timelines)
No more than 1 GB of disc space allowed for menus
No more than 36 buttons per 4:3 menu, no more than 18 buttons per 16:9 menu

There are others, of course, like the maximum number of audio tracks (8) or subtitle tracks (32) that you can have per timeline. Check out DVDDemystified.com, or better yet buy the book. Encore also has it’s own limitations. I ran into a problem once where I found out that no more than 42 buttons can access a single timeline. (This was a problem when creating an animated transition from the menu.)

For your project, you could combine some of the animations into single timelines, as long as you don’t mind them playing through to each other. It sounds like you’ve also thought of creating them as motion menus, which is a good thought, but you might exceed the 1 GB menu limit very quickly that way.

[Tim Kurkoski]

So, did you submit a feature request to Adobe?
https://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html

[Tim Kurkoski]

Jimmy-

The reason rollover buttons are so messy is because the DVD specification doesn’t support them. What you want to do is not possible to build inside of a single menu. You have to create multiple menus.

The reason you’re getting a big white box instead of your picture is because you defined it as a highlight layer. Highlight layers only show the image area of the layer as a single highlight color.

Go to the Adobe Evangelists site and watch the video on Highlight Colors – The Lowdown on Subpictures. It should help you understand how subpicture highlights function.
https://www.adobeevangelists.com/encore/index.html

Doog’s site has some good tutorials you should look over, too:
https://doogs.sitesled.com/downloads.htm

[Tim Kurkoski]

You’re really much better off using Premiere (or some editing application) to cut out the bits you don’t want. Encore isn’t an editing application. Trying to do this with Encore is cumbersome at best.

However, it can be done. You need to create multiple timelines, one for each chapter (or at least each segment that is going to have cuts around it). Drop the same clip into all the timelines, then trim the in and out points so they each have a unique chapter/segment. Link the end actions of each timeline to the next one in sequence.

This will work fine for playing the video through. However, navigation between timelines doesn’t always work (it depends on what the DVD player wants to do when you hit “Next Chapter” and there is no chapter; you can help this by putting an extra chapter point about 1 second before the end of each timeline). Also, there will be a slight pause every time the DVD switches to the next timeline.

[Tim Kurkoski]

You need to export both a PSD and a movie file (I’d recommend AVI instead of QT) out of AE. Or combine the movie file with your original menu or the PSD you created from it.

Then create the menu from the PSD, set the movie file as the motion background, and turn off any layers in the PSD that aren’t needed (including the non-highlight parts of the buttons).

[Tim Kurkoski]

What bitrate are you burning your video at on the DVD? This sounds like the typical playback buffer problem. What happens is that many DVD players have trouble reading burned DVD’s, so the video playback buffer stays filled as it slowly reads the data off the disc. If the buffer is filled and a section of high bitrate video is reached, the buffer can’t refresh quickly enough and frames are lost in playback. In your case, rewinding clears out the buffer, and there’s enough room again.

Try to keep the max bitrate of your video below 7.0 Mbps. That’s about the threshold where most DVD players cna start to suffer playback buffer problems.