25610c01.qxd 7/28/04 2:37 PM Page 9 Tiger Basic Project: Using the Basic Configuration Matt Geller is a Chicago-based systems integrator, consult- ant, and all-around technology therapist specializing in dig- ital video postproduction installations. In addition to his work as a video editor and motion graphics artist, Matt is a certified instructor for Apple, Boris, and Discreet, and is a courseware author and technical editor for Apple. He helped form the Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group and served as its treasurer for three years. You can find out more about Matt at http://thetechtherapist.com. 25610c01.qxd 7/28/04 2:37 PM Page 10 1 Lesson Files Lessons > 01_TigerBasic_Completed Media Media > TigerBasic folder Time This lesson takes approximately 60 minutes to complete. Goals Learn the six steps of DVD authoring Learn about the DVD-Video Specification Learn what assets can be used for DVDs Work with the Basic view Assemble a simple DVD project Use the Palette window Create a basic menu Create a slideshow with audio Burn a disc 25610c01.qxd 7/28/04 2:37 PM Page 11 Lesson 1 Preparing Your First DVD Project Welcome to the world of DVD authoring! As an interactive medium, DVD-Video gives you, the DVD author, a unique opportunity to plan and create an experience for the user. The experience you create includes not only things to see and hear, but also choices for users to make along the way. Apple DVD Studio Pro 3 provides elegant, simple, and powerful tools to help you create this user experience. In the first lesson in this course, you’ll learn some fundamental facts about the scope and limitations of what a DVD-Video disc can be. Then you’ll jump right into the DVD Studio Pro interface and author an entire disc. By the end of this lesson, you’ll have a fully burned disc that’s ready for viewing. So fire up that Mac and let’s go! 11 25610c01.qxd 7/28/04 2:37 PM Page 12 12 Preparing Your First DVD Project DVD Creation Process DVD authoring involves six steps: 1. Planning your user experience by means of a storyboard. A storyboard is a visual diagram that shows main elements of your project and how they are linked. 2. Creating your assets, which are the actual media files that will form the content of the disc. Video, audio, and image files are all examples of assets. These assets can either be created using content creation software, such as Apple’s Final Cut Pro or Logic, or Adobe Photoshop, or pulled directly into the com- puter from other sources, such as videotape, an audio CD, or a digital still camera. 25610c01.qxd 7/28/04 2:37 PM Page 13 DVD Creation Process 13 3. Importing your assets into DVD Studio Pro. 4. Assembling these assets into items that make up a DVD-Video disc. Disc items are containers that hold assets. Examples of items are menus, tracks, and slideshows. 5. Linking these items to form the user experience. This step involves referring to your storyboard to ensure that the experi- ence flows correctly—and creating menus, submenus, and, most impor- tant, buttons that link up every item on the disc and guide the user through the experience. 6. Building and formatting the disc. In this step, the computer takes all your authoring work and creates the files that wind up on the disc itself. Those of you who are already familiar with the authoring process may be thinking, “Hey, what about encoding?” Encoding is the process of converting your assets from whatever file format they’re in to the file format necessary for DVD authoring. Unique to DVD Studio Pro is the choice you have when you do your encoding. Traditionally, encoding is done between steps 2 and 3, and is accomplished most efficiently with programs such as Compressor and A.Pack. These two additional programs, which come with DVD Studio Pro, will be covered in depth later in this book. You also have the choice of importing assets directly into DVD Studio Pro without changing the nature of the assets at all. If you choose this method, you have two further choices. You can choose to let DVD Studio Pro encode your assets in the background as you work, or you can encode just before step 6, in a process called encode on build.The best part of choosing the second of these two in-program encoding methods is that all the lonely, computer-only, time- intensive parts of the process are relegated to the final step, and we authors can go outside and play. 25610c01.qxd 7/28/04 2:37 PM Page 14 14 Preparing Your First DVD Project The DVD-Video Specification Although DVD-Video is not nearly as flexible as other interactive formats, such as museum kiosks or Web sites, DVD-Video does include many unique features. These features are defined as part of a list of technical guidelines referred to as the DVD-Video specification.There’s lots of gobbledygook in this specification, so let’s just concentrate on the cool stuff: DVD-Video discs can contain up to 99 tracks of content. Each track can include up to 9 streams of video, 8 streams of audio, 32 subtitles, and multiple languages, all of which makes DVDs ideal for multinational and multicultural experiences. The user can switch between the multiple video, audio, and sub- title streams at any time. Tracks can have chapter markers,which allow the user to navigate directly to specific places on the track. You can also control the playback of a track’s chapter markers via stories, which essentially function as playlists for the content between chapter markers. DVDs have an item called a slideshow,which can contain up to 99 still images that advance either automatically or manually, with or without music playing in the background. Menus are the main interactive item of a DVD, and you can have up to 10,000 of them on a disc! Menus can contain up to 36 buttons to link up your disc items. If this isn’t enough, you can also write scripts that customize the user experi- ence even further by instructing the DVD-playing device to do specific tasks based on user input or environmental conditions. Even with all these features, the DVD creation process is rather simple, in part because the specification is rigid and limited. Theoretically, every set-top DVD player should be able to play any DVD that is created according to this specifi- cation, without the need for special plug-ins or other software. The uniformity in DVD discs and players ensures universal compatibility. Finally, DVD Studio Pro allows access to every corner of the DVD-Video spec- ification, and it even has a few tricks up its sleeve that allow you to enhance the user experience beyond the limits of the specification, without violating any specification rules. 25610c01.qxd 7/28/04 2:37 PM Page 15 The DVD-Video Specification 15 DVD-Video File Formats A requirement of DVD-Video is that the assets it contains must be encoded into very specific file formats. The DVD specification calls for the following, and only the following, file formats when authoring a disc: Ǡ Video files must be in MPEG-2 (Motion Picture Experts Group, version 2) or, less commonly, MPEG-1 formats. Ǡ Audio files must be in PCM (Pulse Code Modulated, also known as AIFF and WAV files), AC-3 (Dolby Digital), or MP2 (MPEG1-Layer 2. Yep, that’s an audio file format) formats. Alternatively, audio files may also be in DTS (Digital Theater System) format. Ǡ Still images must be in MPEG-2 still image format. These limited choices for encoded asset file formats are all that the DVD- Video specification allows. However, file format flexibility is one place where DVD Studio Pro really shines. Working together with the magic of Quick- Time, DVD Studio Pro allows you to import any of the following file formats listed, and will encode them into the file formats we just listed: Ǡ Video—MPEG-2, MPEG-1, QuickTime (all codecs supported) Ǡ Audio—AC-3, PCM (AIFF and WAV), MP2, MP3 Ǡ Images—TIFF, PCT, JPEG, BMP, TGA, PSD (Photoshop) DVD Studio Pro also accepts the following file formats for automating the cre- ation of subtitle streams and chapter markers: Ǡ Subtitle—STL, SON, SCR, TXT Ǡ Markers—TXT With the flexibility that DVD Studio Pro gives you to import any QuickTime movie file, a multitude of audio formats, and a number of different still image formats, you can move from the content creation process into the authoring process without pause. 25610c01.qxd 7/28/04 2:37 PM Page 16 16 Preparing Your First DVD Project The DVD-Video Disc The DVD-Video specification was created by an assembly of manufacturers and content distributors known as the DVD Forum. One of the greatest accomplishments of this group was creating a list of disc formats so confusing that it boggles the mind. We won’t go there. We’re interested in just two of the many (try 38) formats that exist. DVD-5 This is a single-sided, single-layered disc that can hold 4.7 GB of data. We can burn these discs on our Macs today. All Mac SuperDrives burn onto a physical disc called DVD-R (pronounced “DVD dash R”). More recently, we also have the ability, via third-party burners, to burn onto a physical disc called DVD+R (“DVD plus R”).