Video Project In The Home Stretch....

And yow...I learned more than I really wanted to, but what I needed.

After fighting for a day with trying to get the project exported to Adobe Encore, I just gave up, and figured I'd just burn the compled file, already in MPEG-2 (DVD) format to a disk.

That worked, and it's playable, BUT.....

It didn't have any menus, and required me to do some things with my Oppo BDP-83 Blu-Ray/DVD player that *might* not be possible to do with other players in order to get the disk to play.

Since I'm not sure how many copies of these my brother-in-law will make, I figured I'd better do my best to make these a "universal" disk that will play in any player.

Off to the Adobe Encore forums!

Adobe has some very nicely done on-line tutorials, so for most of today I've been reading, experimenting, and most importantly, LEARNING how to use all the software I have.

It's NOT real intuitive, and the Dynamic Linkage between the two programs has to be done correctly, or *nothing* happens.

Well, I finally figured that part out, and how to make those nice menus with "Play", "Set Up", "Chapters", "Extras", and all that stuff you see when you pop in a store-bought DVD and play it.

Fortunately, Encore has a "Check Build" function you can invoke that checks all the various things required to get a functional DVD built, and boy, did it come in handy.

After reading all the warnings I got the first time I ran it, and spending several mores hours reading the forums, I was able to understand and fix all the warnings and errors it generated when it checked my project.

The first disk id rendering now, and I should be able to burn it and test before the end of the year......!

After that, assuming it plays OK, I "just" have to assemble the various sequences for each disk I want to author, export them from Premiere Pro to Encore, and build them.

And I'll probably forget all this stuff in two weeks, and go through the hair-pulling routine again the next time I use the software.