Authoring
With your media prepared, you’re ready to start authoring. DVD Studio Pro’s interface consists of a Graphical Display window that provides a flowchart view of your project, an assets window where you can access your media, and an assortment of tool and Inspector palettes for creating objects and setting parameters.
You begin authoring by importing your media into the Assets window. Your audio and video files must be imported separately, along with any images or movies that you’ll use for menu creation.
Authoring takes place in the Graphical Display window. If you’ve ever used any kind of visual database or programming package, you’ll feel right at home in DVD Studio Pro: You carry out all your authoring tasks by creating different types of objects and then wiring them together to create your disc’s logic and structure.
DVDs comprise several different types of components. Track components contain video and audio files and can be divided into chapters to facilitate non-linear playback. Menu components can contain still images or movies, and include button definitions and branching information. Slide Shows can hold a series of still images that can be stepped through, while Scripts allow you to create complex interactivity.
Each of these components can be created by clicking on the appropriate button at the bottom of the DVD Studio Pro main window. This creates a small tile in the Graphical Display window. When you click on the tile to select it, its parameters and characteristics appear in the DVD Studio Pro Inspector palette. You can use this palette to attach appropriate media –- video and audio for a Track object, still images for a Menu object, and so forth.
The Inspector palette also lets you specify how components are related and linked. Menu components, for example, are usually linked to other menu components or Tracks. Such links are indicated by simple flowchart lines in the Graphical Display window.
DVD Studio Pro’s main authoring interface provides a simple visual programming environment along with an intuitive inspector palette for configuring your menus, buttons, and flow.
The Inspector palette displays a pop-up menu for each button on a DVD remote control (the DVD spec requires all players to have certain buttons). From these pop-ups, you can specify how components should link to each other. For example, if you select a Track component, you can use the inspector window to choose other Track components that will play when the user hits particular buttons on their remote. In this way, you can quickly create all links and logic for your project.
For more complex interactions, you’ll want to use the robust DVD scripting language, which offers arithmetic operations, conditional branches, and global and local variables. If you’ve done any scripting in HyperCard or Macromedia Director, you’ll have no trouble with DVD scripting.
DVD Studio Pro also lets you specify many global parameters. In addition to creating global remote-control actions, you can also activate digital and analog encryption. DVD Studio Pro provides standard CSS encryption for preventing digital copying, and Macrovision encryption for preventing analog copies (recording a DVD onto a VCR, for example).
At any time while authoring, you can press the Preview button to view an individual track or component, and to test logic and branching. Video is passed through your computer’s DVD playback hardware so you can see exactly what your project will look like. However, because your computer has greater bandwidth capability, preview mode won’t necessarily reveal any bottlenecks or playback skips.
Authoring in DVD Studio Pro is simple and straightforward and the program’s interface is intuitive and efficient. However, there is room for improvement.
Our biggest difficulty when authoring was with DVD Studio Pro’s Asset-management controls. When you import media into the program, no actual data is copied into your project file. Rather, a link is made to the external media. Unfortunately, this link is very strong.
On several occasions, we wanted to swap out an imported video file with an alternate file (usually, another copy of the same file compressed with different settings). Because we didn’t want to lose the old file, we moved it to another folder and placed our new version in the appropriate location. However, rather than using the new file, DVD Studio Pro managed to find the old file, and continued to use it. The only way to add our new file was to create a new Track component, attach our new video file, and then re-create all of our links and settings. We’d much prefer to be able to freely replace files with new media.
We would also like to see the addition of more robust zoom and navigation controls for the Graphical Display window. With a lot of tiles, your project can quickly become illegible.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on July 17, 2001
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