Adobe Encore DVD: In the Studio

Chapter 8. Transcoding and Building Discs

In this chapter

Automatic transcoding

Transcoding assets

Building projects

Building and burning DVDs

We’ve finally come to the actual goal of all this work designing DVDs—building and burning the final result to disc. In the preceding chapters, we used Adobe Encore DVD to import and organize our assets, design the menus to access them, and then linked these elements all together into the navigational flow. And, in Chapter 7, we used the Preview and Check Project functions to verify the design and links in the DVD. So, now we’re all set, and it’s time to burn, right?

Well, not quite. We still need to build the DVD data ready to burn to disc, and, before that, we need to transcode (compress) the video and audio assets into DVD-compatible format. As you know, Encore includes integrated video and audio transcoding, and provides a great deal of flexibility in transcoding and burning your project. Encore can automatically transcode your clips to best fit the size of your project, or you can explicitly specify compression parameters in great detail. It can do the transcoding in the background as you work, or you can schedule the processing when you want it.

Once the transcoding is complete, you can burn your project directly to a DVD disc, or build a DVD folder on hard disk to preview and test. You also can build a disc image of the DVD to simplify burning multiple copies, and even write a DVD master to tape for professional replication, including ...