While this article has a tutorial-like form to it in some areas, allow me to offer the following disclaimer: I am positive that I didn’t fully utilize all of the integrated features that Adobe’s CS3 provides. As such, this article should be seen more as a chronicle of my journey in using the entire Adobe CS3 Production Premium package to create the Special Edition Livelihood DVD that fans' of my feature film have been asking for, rather than the be-all, end-all tutorial of the CS3 Production Premium workflow. (For folks who want to see the officially sanctioned version of this process, you can check out Total Training's package, which, ironically, is called: Adobe Creative Suite 3: Production Premium Workflow.)
Like many other people who have been in the post production business for a while, I’ve been making DVD projects for many years now. I learned DVD assembly the old-school way, which was basically to render out all of your video and audio elements, convert them to mpeg2 and AC3 with separate encoding programs, create your menus in Photoshop (including subpictures for buttons), and then import them all into a DVD creation program (this was before Encore even existed!). From there you’d begin the haphazard task of trying to link everything together, hoping that you properly created all of your elements. This was not an intuitive process, and that’s why I got a lot of jobs making DVDs; the learning curve was too steep for most people to do it themselves with the available technology.
However, Adobe’s CS3 Suite changes everything by offering unmatched integrated tools for creating DVDs from the ground up, allowing you to seamlessly utilize key features from Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, and Encore in the process. This is a revolutionary new way of creating DVDs. Each of these four programs is still crucial to producing the finished DVD, but previously you’d have to do little bits and pieces of the project in each program separately, and then try to patch all of your resultant assets together at the end. Now you can make changes to each element as you create the DVD project, from encoding your video and audio, to adjusting motion menu backgrounds, to completely restructuring the navigation of the DVD.
So I’m stuck halfway between the old-school “do it all in separate programs and hope it comes together in the end” method, and Adobe’s “don’t worry about it, you can tweak everything from Encore until it looks just right” method. As a result, at certain points in the process I’ve unnecessarily committed myself to things that could easily have been left in flux. I’ve had to re-render multiple times when I could have just rendered once at the end. I’ve imported when I could have just linked. Etc, etc, etc. At any point during the tutorial where I did things the hard way and later learned a better method, I’ll mention both, as well as expounding on the benefits of the new Adobe way of doing things.
When I began planning the Special Edition DVD for my film Livelihood, I knew it would be a big undertaking. I wanted to create a two disk set loaded with special features, and also wanted entertaining motion menus, two commentary tracks, and a cool layout that looked professional. It was not a task I was looking forward to, and I put it off for a while. But once I installed Adobe’s CS3:PP, I was instilled with a newfound vigor, confident that this new software package would make my job much easier.
My first task was getting together all of my basic assets. I’d used Premiere Pro to edit the film, and already had an mpeg2 video and AC3 audio track for the finished cut (both were rendered a while ago using Premiere Pro 1.5). However, I was now faced with the task of editing together deleted scenes, bloopers, and two featurettes!
To do this, I used the CS3 version of Premiere Pro, and was happy with how comfortable the workflow seemed. All of my deleted scenes opened up fine in the new version, and there were some nice new audio features that kept me from having to export the audio to Sound Forge or some other mastering program. Once I was finished editing all of these projects, I exported them to mpeg2 using the built-in Adobe Media Encoder. Premiere Pro also has a feature called “Export to Encore”, which is basically the exact same thing as the Adobe Media Encoder, except with fewer choices. If you try to delve deeper into the presets, it simply brings up the full Adobe Media Encoder. The only bummer with this version of Premiere Pro is that it wasn’t compatible with my AC3 (aka Dolby Digital) encoder, and only included a temporary license for built-in encoding. (The cost to buy the full license is $295, which is a bit much considering that the cost of CS3 isn’t exactly cheap to begin with!) Dolby Digital is the best pick for DVD audio because it is compatible with all DVD players, and results in smaller file sizes than PCM encoding, allowing you to make your mpeg2 file larger for better video quality. I just ended up exporting the audio as a wav file and encoding it in my old standby DVD program, Sonic ReelDVD, which includes a built-in AC3 encoder. I wish Adobe would include a free AC3 encoder by default, so that I didn’t have to use a long-since discontinued product to get the job done.
