Hello everybody, my name is Brian Schmidt. I'm the product manager for DVD Studio Pro. Very excited to be showing you the app today and talk about DVD Authoring a little bit. And one of the big things for our whole Pro Apps team is like it's all about the customer. So we're really focused on delivering what our customers need. And the way we really get our satisfaction is seeing what our customers do.

At NAB this year we actually did a little thank you reel, kind of a tribute to our customers. And if you're at the keynote you may recognize a little bit of the style. But I wanted to play it for you real quick and then we'll get into DVD Authoring. Who was at the Final Cut Pro things this morning? So you guys have probably already seen this so bear with me and then we'll get on with it.

I've said this a hundred times and I still like it. So to get an idea of the kind of people we have in the crowd today, how many people have authored a DVD to begin with? Like one DVD. Good number of you. How many have done it with DVD Studio Pro? Okay, so you're all pretty familiar with DVD Authoring.

Anybody actually developing content for people who are authoring DVDs, like maybe menus or transitions or any kind of third-party stuff like that? A few of you? Okay, great. Let's go ahead and switch to the slides. Great. So as you can see with that demo reel, especially when you look at, like, the DVD Studio Pro customers, they're all over the board. There's a lot of people using DVD Studio Pro for a wide variety of tasks.

And so... DVD Studio Pro-- it's a pretty unique application, really. Because we looked at it and we said, "DVD authoring has this reputation for being really hard, and you have to be a rocket scientist to do it." We wanted to give people a scalable interface that you could actually grow with as you grow with a product.

So when you're first starting with DVD authoring with DVD Studio Pro, we made it so that it's relatively simple to get going. As you want to start adding more advanced features to the disk, you can do that through our scalable interface. We added these powerful design tools. So you can now design menus right inside the application. You can do transitions. You can design these things in third party tools and easily integrate them into the application using the tools you already use, like After Effects, or Photoshop, or Final Cut Pro, and soon, Motion. Has anybody seen Motion yet? A few of you, that's good.

It's a really cool app. And then on top of that, we really go deep. It's a very technically deep application. So that when you need the features that you might not use 99% of the time, that 1% of the time you need it, they're there. And so you can deliver the kind of DVDs that your clients really want.

And going back to the point I was making earlier about people using DVD Studio Pro, it's a pretty wide variety of people. We saw in the reel, Criterion Collection has done a couple of DVDs with DVD Studio Pro. Criterion, for those of you who don't know, is really an excellent DVD authoring house. They really pride themselves on special features and doing a great job of really portraying a DVD and a movie in its light. We're also seeing people using it as corporate projects, weddings, special events type usage, and even ad agencies, post houses are doing things.

We're seeing boutique shops, like the American Splendor example that was on the reel. We actually have-- there's a company called Twinklin in New York that designed the DVD menu system with DVD Studio Pro and then handed it off to a company and they finished it in another really super high end, very expensive authoring tool. So there's a lot of variety in the usage of DVD Studio Pro.

Let's talk a little bit about the interface. So here we have three different modes you can start out with, basic, extended, and advanced. This is the basic mode, and it's basically menu editor with some other panels in the background there, and the templates and other content options you can use. And then it goes all the way to the advanced mode. This is actually the extended. No, this is advanced, I'm sorry. But you have the assets here on the left. You've got the timeline, you've got the graphical view, you've got the menu editor.

And so on. So it really kind of blossoms out to become this DVD authoring powerhouse. The transitions. These are new with DVD Studio Pro 3. You can see the example just kind of flew by there. They give you real-time previews. You don't have to render anything and wait for things to actually happen to see them. When you actually build your menus, they incorporate the menu content that you build into the transitions and build completely new chunks of video. Prior to this, people had to go back to After Effects.

Design the whole transition in there, drop it in DVD Studio Pro, and do a couple other things to set that up. And then if that menu changed that they were actually transitioning from, they had to go back into After Effects, redo everything, bring it back in, and update it. Now all that just happens for you automatically. You can create your own alpha transitions, which we'll actually show you how you can build those in After Effects a little bit later.

And moving on to the templates and menus. We added templates primarily to After Effects. Primarily to help people get started DVD authoring. Because when we came out with DVD Studio Pro 1 so many years ago, one of the complaints we got is like, it does a lot, it's a great app, but you look at it and you don't know where to get started and you have to do a lot of things to actually get going with the DVD.

So we added these great looking templates that you can just drop into your project, start working, start adding your video content, and get a DVD done really quickly your first time around. Then you can create additional templates that you then reuse and modify as you need them for projects.

And we also have an advanced slideshow editor. So you can do things like drop in slides, add transitions to the slideshows, add audio to them, fit audio to the slides, add audio per slide. There's a lot of different options in there, a lot of possibilities. The workflow, um, one thing we really knew we had to do was work well with Final Cut Pro.

Um, we do that with the chapter markers and compression markers in Final Cut. When you actually export everything out through a compressor, everything gets maintained right into DVD Studio Pro from the chapter markers. Compression markers get set in Final Cut Pro, automatically forces iframe, so you get better encodes.

With Motion, we've done some really cool integration things I'll show you in my demo. And, uh, we've even improved Photoshop integration. We've been able to import layered Photoshop files. Now we can do launch and edit with Photoshop, so it makes it a much more seamless working experience. And then we've also borrowed a lot from the iLife, uh, world, and I'll show you that in my demo.

The graphical view is really cool because it lets you lay out your project. So you can keep an eye on what the disk is doing. So you can keep everything in your head much better just by glancing at the graphical view. So you can see how things are connected to each other.

You can print this so you can show it to a client, maybe put it on your wall so you can see the DVD while you're working on it. It's just a great communication tool. And then you can also use it to help author your DVD. And I'll show you a little bit of that in the demo.

When you talk about the advanced features, it kind of becomes this big grab bag of all these really powerful things that you need to do in DVD authoring that prior to DBCO Pro being around, you were paying thousands and thousands of dollars to get these features, to do things like subtitling, to do things with end jumps on chapter markers and stories, buttons over video, multiple video angles, all this stuff.

We give you all of this power in an application that's $499. This is unheard of. And with DBCO Pro 3, we've added some things like jacket picture creation so that when somebody hits stop on the DVD player, you can put a picture of your product up, or the couple if you're doing a wedding, or the film logos if you're doing a movie, and so on.

It comes to professional features. Again, we have the timeline so you can do so many things with our timeline. You can string together video clips so you don't have to have one sequential piece of video in there. You're doing a lot of different things with chapter markers. You can attach script to chapter points. You can do end jumps on chapter markers. You can do buttons over video, all kinds of great stuff with that. The encoding, we've done a couple of different things.

One is if you want to just use QuickTime, you can drop a QuickTime movie into DVD Studio Pro and we'll encode it for you in the background or when you build your disc. We also run it straight out from Final Cut Pro through a compressor and you can drop QuickTime movies into the compressor.

The compressor lets you do batch files with presets. It lets you do a lot of really cool things. New with the Compressor 1.2 version that's with DVD Studio Pro 3 is the ability to scale your HD content. You have your DVC Pro HD content and it scales it down to SD resolution so you can take this great looking source, punch it out to MPEG-2 that will work on today's DVD players so you don't have to wait for that next generation.

We've also got a new generation of HD DVD to come out in a few years to actually take advantage of HD content. You can still reap the benefits of that today. And we're one of the very few applications to actually include a Dolby Digital Professional quality encoder. Some other applications around our price range do include Dolby encoders but they're the consumer level.

So that means you can't put the DVD or the Dolby Digital logo on your DVDs when you actually ship it out. Our encoder gives you that professional quality encoder that Dolby signs off on that lets you actually add their logo to your AMERI cases for your DVDs. And we're very standards happy. We support QuickTime, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, FullD1, CropD1, HalfD1, any kind of video format you basically want. All kinds of audio formats including DTS with DVD Studio Pro 3. So that means now you can offer your clients all of the audio that they need.

You can do uncompressed audio, you can do Dolby Digital audio, you can do DTS, all kinds of stuff, basically doing everything possible. Also with media we now write out to drives that support -r, -rw, +r and +rw and we'll master out to all the major formats as well, DLT, DDP and CMF.

And it's available now. You can buy DVD Studio Pro for $499. It's a $199 upgrade. And let's go ahead and take a look at it real quick here. So I'm going to show you... Pretty good look at all the features in DVD Studio Pro. And then I'm going to ask Doug DeVore from our QA team to come up and show how alpha transitions are actually made.

So you can get a look at the settings you need to make in After Effects, how you can use motion to create these alpha channel transitions, and so on. So you can start creating your own because it's a really powerful feature. You can start creating your own alpha transitions, integrate them into your content, and just go from there and just reuse them.

So here we have the basic view and these are some of the templates and I'm just going to drag in one of the templates. And it just pops up on the screen and if I want to go over here to say, let's go to the stills tab. And if I had any photo albums from iPhoto, those would actually show up in my stills tab up there. So you can see that iLife integration.

Same goes for the audio tab. If I had iTunes playlists, they all show up in the audio tab. You can just drag in directly from those. So I can drag a photo down here into a drop zone. It may not be the most appropriate picture. Let's try this one.

Okay, that looks a little bit more. Okay. And then if I want to make a connection, let's say I want to drop this second template that matches this template onto this button. I just drag it to the button. Let's get that button. And it's going to add that.

Make a connection for me, make a new menu, and link all that up for me just with a simple drag. It's kind of how DVD authoring should be. So now when I go to the simulator, you can see it's a motion menu background. I hit that button. It actually is going to generate this for me on the fly, this transition, using my content that I just created, creating that whole new chunk of video automatically. So I can hit the main button. We'll go back to that menu. So you can kind of get an idea of how powerful that feature actually is. Let's back out of this a little bit. Okay.

And then I mentioned the extended mode. So I can hit F2. F2 launches. And we have the timeline extended across the bottom. Got the assets up in the upper left. We have the menu here. The menu up there and inspector shows up and all this stuff. And you'll notice that when I go to the configurations, I can go to these menus.

It's going to now add a fourth quadrant. And so what we did when we designed DVCR Pro is we built this four quadrant system so that when you're actually working with the app, you can customize all this. So if I want, say, in this view, if I want the track editor to be all the way across the bottom, I just drag it across. And I can drag that out. I can grab this and move that up, make all these things slower. I can pull these tabs out, do all kinds of things, save those configurations. And so I can reuse those configurations just by hitting F keys.

And so it's a really fast way to work. If you're doing subtitling, you like a certain layout for subtitling, you create that, save it as a configuration, go to it when you're subtitling, and then go back to something like the advanced view when you're doing your normal working. Now, I mentioned you can save your own templates.

And that's what I've done here. So throughout the course of this seminar, I'm going to create a demo reel that actually BlackBox Digital created. They do some really high-end effects processing and things like that for Hollywood commercials, things like that. And they made their demo reel disk with DVCR Pro so they could theoretically get more clients if they needed them, and just by giving out this demo reel. this DVD and showing off their great work.

Okay, so I just dragged a template in. This template has a few elements in here. This is just a Photoshop document right there with an alpha channel in it. These are buttons, so I can click on these and just drag them around, move them wherever I want. So then I can grab video.

I'll just grab this music video clip up here and just drag it down here. So you notice when I get this context-sensitive drop palette, it actually is looking at what I'm dragging and where I'm dragging it to. And give me a relevant list, a short list of options of what I could actually do with that.

So this does a couple of different things. One, it saves you a lot of time when you're first getting started. Because if you don't know exactly how to set something up or what to do, this will do it for you. So if I just drag it on here and say create track, I drop it, and it actually creates a new track for me. You can see it up in the graphical view. And it linked it to that button.

So it took care of a few steps for me. I didn't have to know, okay, so I need to go into the menu, the menu, select the button, go over here and change this target and do this other, you know. I didn't have to know all that stuff. That drop palette took care of it for me.

So it's kind of a mini way of authoring, of automating the program. Now, in the graphical view, I can just drag these things around to keep them organized. And I'll just kind of play with that a little bit more and show you a little bit more about the graphical view when we get to have more content in there.

So I'm going to take another template and create a submenu on this one. So I'll drag this template. And you'll notice there's only one thing that really makes sense when I drag a template into a button, so it just gives me the one option. And I'm going to drop it on there. And so you can see now it created a menu 2 for me.

"So you can select different things in the graphical view, it will show you in the menu editor what you are actually playing with. And then I can go in and create, I want to put some slide shows on this, so I'm going to go to this design folder here, and this folder right here, for the people up in the front two rows, you can see that those are actually PSD files.

You can just drag this in, and this time it knows I have a folder of slides, so it knows I probably want to create a slide show, so that's the first option, or else I could create a bunch of buttons, I could create a bunch of sub menus. So I'm just going to choose create buttons and slide show, so it makes the slide show button there use it for me.

And I'm going to get this arranged a little bit. And that is my corporate ID stuff, so I'm just going to call this button Corporate ID. So I can just name buttons in there pretty easily. And let's go ahead and add a couple more slides. Let's get the promos, drop that in there, create another slide show.

Get one more. I'll grab the tunes. And you'll notice that the, um, These buttons are all coming in with their little thumbnail on them already, the preview of it. That's just because with the template, that's the default button I created. So every button that gets added uses that template or that button.

So to kind of show you what I mean, this button is a different button, so I can control click on it. And there's an option here that says set as default button style. So now when I drag in this movie to add a new, create a button and a track with this, it actually uses that button for that movie.

Thanks, I'll just do that. All right, now what I want to do is actually... changed my slideshow around a little bit, because we found that people weren't actually using our slideshow editor in DVD Studio Pro because, well, it was a good slideshow editor. There wasn't really anything wrong with how we built it. It was more that they were doing them in Final Cut.

And we weren't really sure why they were doing it in Final Cut. And it turns out that they didn't like those hard cuts. And we're actually going into Final Cut, adding transitions in between these hard cuts so that it would be like a dissolve from side to side or a fade through color or whatever.

One of the things we wanted to do was make that really easy to do in DVD Studio Pro. So you didn't have to do that in Final Cut because if you do it in Final Cut, you want to make a change, you've got to go back to Final Cut, make the change, export out of Zimpeg 2 again, then bring it back in.

So we made it so that you could -- I'll just double-click on the slide button and it actually shows me in the viewer now the slide show and down below it, it switched to the slide show editor, so now I have all this. And if I want to add a dissolve to all these slides, it's just as simple as saying dissolve. Picking that from the pop-up. And then when I hit play, now we just automatically build the slide show with dissolves on it.

So if you want to go back now and reorder one of these, let's say I want to drag this moon crescent one up to the top, then I hit play, it just rebuilds it for you. So you don't have to go back to Final Cut. You don't have to redo all that stuff.

It just does it here in the application for you. On top of that, we added the ability to do different transitions for each slide. So I have the dissolve on the first one. I can do a cube. And we have little parameters in here you can set. So I set this to a one second cube, which actually turns out to be kind of cool. This one is a droplet.

And I'll go in and add maybe a fade-through color on this one. And let's go ahead and put some, We're going to do some alpha transitions on a couple of these so you can get an idea of what more of those look like. A little fog, maybe a lens flare, static is a good one.

Then my personal favorite, the remote control. All right, so now I can just Control-Click on this menu, hit Simulate. The simulator lets me simulate the entire project, or I can just pick a part of the project and choose Simulate from that menu, like I just did here, to go directly to that piece. So then I can click on this button, and it will play back as if it was on a DVD player. So you can see now how these transitions are actually working in the Slideshow. There's my cube. A little droplet. Fade through color. Static. The fog.

So Doug, I think you're going to show that one, right? Excellent. You guys can learn how to make your own remote control transitions. All right, so now I've got a few things going on on my graphical view still. Let's go ahead and hit shift spacebar, and that expands it out, because this is another thing we notice. It's like people have a lot of tiles in their graphical view.

You want to have a way to quickly do it full screen, so you just sit here and do shift spacebar, and it'll actually expand that view out for you. So you can work with all these in a much bigger space. So I can drag these around. Say I want the slideshows to look over here, go like this.

I can drag all of these out. I can hover over these, and it puts a little flag when I just hit the F key. So if you're not done working on a menu or something, you can flag it so you don't have to go back to it later.

And this is really cool, because now I can see that I have three slideshows attached to this menu. I've got this menu one that goes to this video here, and I have this commercials trailer. And I've got this soundtrack that hasn't been attached to anything, because there's no arrows showing anything going on there. So immediately I know there's a problem. I need to fix that.

Can you add comments? No, not right at this point. Question was can you add comments to this? And the only thing you can do at this point is flag items. And so then I can hit Shift Spacebar. It goes back, but I have a little problem because it's all kind of hidden now.

Shift Z actually fits it all to that window. So there's a lot of little accelerator keys in here, so you can zoom around. You can hit the M key. Brings up this little macro view, so you can actually zoom around inside of it if you have a really big project. By the way, if you have a really big project, I have an answer. 30-inch display. Phenomenal.

It is absolutely wonderful. Okay, and then there's some other things in here you can do, like you can show relative connections on this. So this is pretty cool because you can step through a disk and see, okay, this menu goes to these two things, this menu goes to these three things, and so on. It really comes in pretty handy.

Okay, now I want to hook up this commercials tile here. And when I double click on that again, it shows me the clip and the viewer and then the timeline, so everything I really need to do to play with this clip. And you can see down the timeline here, I've got those little purple chapter markers above the clips. These are all actual individual clips.

So a lot of times when you're doing a demo reel like this, you have content that was created at all kinds of different times. So you want to be able to see what's going on. And you can see that you can actually be able to string them all together, even though one may have been done in January, one was done in February, and so on. So DVC-RO Pro gives you the ability to do that.

And I can even go in here and grab a new commercial that just got done and drag it to the timeline, just pops it in. It automatically knows to grab the audio there, so it was right next to it with the same name, so it pulled it in for me. And then I can use this, the control menu. to add a chapter marker there to the clip end and just name it up here in the inspector.

OK, and so then I just type in a name. I can do other things on that chapter marker if I'd like. Then I can go back to the menu, and I want to actually add it to menu one. So I'm going to take this tile and I can drag things directly in from the graphical view to the menu editor now.

And I'll just drag it into this button, and this time it's saying, ah, you maybe want to create a chapter index with this because I have chapter markers in here. So that's exactly what I want to do. So I'm going to hit chapter index, go to a template that was designed to be an index, hit OK.

So now, DvD Sphere Pro in the background has created a new menu for me with a bunch of buttons on it all linked to "So, I've got the commercials track right here and that menu. And so then you can see that each of those buttons up there, so you can see the first one is mini carbonation, relates to this chapter marker and so on. So each of those buttons is hooked up for me.

All in all, that was about 25 steps if I had to do it manually. So, the only thing I really have to do on my own is give this a name. Okay, and I'm done with that. So now when I go play this menu, it's actually going to navigate directly to the individual movies. Okay.

Let's do one more thing. I want to show a quick example of multiple angles. Let's go ahead and grab the... So I'm going to import a whole folder. And now I have-- Budweiser before spot and an after spot. So this is some work that BlackBox did for a Bud spot. I'm going to go ahead and drag the-- let's put the after in V1. So I'll just drag it in here and drop that clip on here. So it just made a track for me.

It knew I had video. Made sense. If I pull this down now, it shows me V1, V2. And we go all the way up to V9, or video nine. So that's nine video angles. Video angles are very useful for some very specific purposes. All the way from things like usability testing, where you may want to have a camera on the person, a camera on the computer screen, a camera on the mouse and the keyboard, and maybe a full edit.

So you could have the full edit in video one, and then the keyboard on video two, and the person on video three, and the computer screen on video four. So that any given time, you can say, oh, I want to see what was actually happening on the keyboard at this time, even though the editor chose to show me the person. So it's got some pretty cool uses like that. Then there's other commercial uses, like there's a BMW disc out where they're actually driving the car down the road.

You can look at it from the front, from the side, from the back, from the driver's perspective, and so on. So it's a pretty cool way to actually give people the full experience of the car. So a lot of really clever uses for this. And another one is this one right here. If I drag in the before spot here. So this allows BlackBox to show the compositing work that they've actually done for a spot.

The after spot here, so you can see now the clouds and all this stuff, but if I go back to video two, you can see the clouds and everything weren't there. So a client could actually watch this and switch between angle one and angle two and see the before and after of this. Actually a really kind of a cool spot of this horse. So they have the horse's eye, you can see the trainer and another horse in the background. And then you go to that and it's actually, they put a lightning bolt in there.

So then you can actually hook these up to different buttons in DVD Studio Pro. So you could have a button that just played angle 1, a button that played angle 2. You could give people instructions to hit the angle button to switch between the angles. And this is pretty cool too.

Blue screen. So you can really get a sense of the kind of work they do through the DVD medium. This is not possible really so much when people are doing this in VHS. Okay. Now the last thing I want to add to my menu is a contact page.

I'm going to drag this Photoshop document in here and drop it on this button. Again, the drop palette, I want to create a submenu. Now it's going to make a new menu for me up here. It's showing me that that's linked up. A lot of people use Photoshop for doing DVD menus. It makes a lot of sense. A great many of our customers use Photoshop. It's very important to work with it.

What we did in DVC-O Pro 3 is add this Open in Editor command, which is pretty powerful. Now I can say Open in Editor, and it'll actually just launch Photoshop for me because it's a Photoshop document and open that file up in it. Then I'm going to be able to make changes.

There we go. And I'm going to be able to make changes to this document now. Let's say I want to maybe move this text up here for some reason. I hit save, close that, come back to DVD Studio Pro, it updates. So it's really handy to do things like that. I actually don't want that text up there because it kind of throws everything off.

I'm just going to throw it back down here. Come back to DVD Studio Pro and it updates. Good. But, um, still menus are great. People use still menus for a lot of things. Um, but Hollywood is doing a lot of motion menus on all their DVDs now, so it tends that clients are starting to demand more motion menus 'cause that's what they see, and they want their discs to look as Hollywood as possible.

So we wanted to tie into Motion. Motion, Motion Menus, makes a lot of sense. Thank you, pretty lame joke. And Motion is an excellent program for making Motion Menus. When I first saw it, I just was like, nah, this is going to be perfect. It's exactly what our customers are needing. We have to work with it.

So I'm going to grab the same contact info PSC that I had in here. And these look familiar. So Motion is now using our contact-sensitive drop palettes and really handy in Motion, just like the R&D V Studio Pro. I'll hit F5 to show me my layers. So these are the same layers I would see in Photoshop, for instance.

And what I want to do with this is I'm just going to add some bubbles to the fishbowl. Because we don't want the fishbowl to be in the way. It needs a little air. Motion has these really cool things called emitters. And these emitters, I can show you a few of them here.

That's a good one. So you can take shapes that they build in and do different things with them and actually spit them out, like the bubble machine here, like this one. So I'm just going to drag the bubble machine in, put it underneath the fishbowl, and when I hit play in here, you can see now it's added these bubbles. And they're just randomly generated bubbles just going all over the place. If I had to keyframe those and do those all by hand, I'd go crazy.

Um, and now what I want to do is actually take these bubbles and drag them down here and add them to the fishbowl. So I'm getting closer now because they're behind the fishbowl now, it's got the transparency in there, uh, except they're escaping the fishbowl and that doesn't look very, very good. So I'm going to add an image mask to... I'll just drag in the fishbowl here. And I'll just drag in the fishbowl itself to the image mask.

Turn it back on. And so now you can see the image mask is actually masking the bubbles inside of the fish tank, so it looks a lot more realistic. And I could go in and control these emitters. I could make them faster, slower. I could make more bubbles, fewer bubbles, change the size of the bubbles over time, do all kinds of crazy little things. Matter of fact, if I go to the inspector here, you can see these are all the parameters I can set for the bubbles. So you can do a bunch of different things with color effects and there's so much control in motion it's unbelievable.

Okay, and the really cool thing is now that I have my motion menu background designed, I can just hit save. I'm going to save it to the, I'll call it contact page. I'm going to save it to the Movies folder. And it just saves out. I didn't have to render it or anything. So I'm going to go now to my Video tab, click on that same Movies folder, because DVD Studio Pro just automatically references that. It shows up in here. And I just drag it in and set the background with it.

And it's going to say, OK, I've got a motion project. Let's hit the Preview. And I hit the Preview and it automatically displays back. Thank you. So the key point is here, this is actually just a motion project. So then when I want to, I can go back over here to where it shows up now in my asset manager and just say open an editor.

And we'll go back into Motion. I can make more changes to it, save, it'll automatically update in DVD Studio Pro. Some really tight integration there. That's really super handy for making Motion menus. So that is pretty much the end of what I wanted to show you, and I'm going to ask Doug to come up and show you actually how to build your own alpha transitions. Did you have any more general questions about DVD Studio Pro? We can take a couple and then have Doug go on. Got one over here.

Philip Makero, can you put Can you put buttons into a slideshow so that the user can interactively select which is the next slide? So the question is can you put buttons into slideshows and in the slideshow editor, no you can't. But what you can do is actually hit convert to track on your slideshow after you have it built and turn it into a track. And you can actually add buttons over video on top of the slides in that point. So, yes.

Is there a specific reason why there's a limit of 99 slides that I'm not aware of? It is a limit of the spec where there's a certain number of chapter markers that we have to maintain. Okay, it's chapter markers? Yeah. Would there ever be an option? And actually, I'm not even sure it's chapter markers.

Do you know more about that? A limit of the specters to have slides. Okay. Because our slides are actually stills that are, you know, if you set a slide to be five seconds long, it's actually one frame that's held for five seconds. It's not five seconds of video. So they're really efficient.

Okay. So you could turn those all into video. The efficiency's cool, but 99 is really small, so I was wondering if there was ever going to be maybe an option where it would actually render it out to video frames just so that you could have the, you know, the ability to go higher.

How many slides do you typically do? Well, the thing is, it's kind of morbid, but it was for a funeral and there was way more than 99 slides. Okay. And so DVD Studio Pro wasn't an option. Okay. How many was it? Like 300. Okay. So you could still do three of 99 each. Yeah.

But not continuously. But not all the same. Yeah. They just wanted to be able to set it and it ran in the background and just forget about it. Okay. Yeah. You could have still done that. It would have just been three drags instead of one. Oh, okay. Because you can actually set. Yeah. And then jump on a slideshow to go to another one. Okay. So you can link them together like that. So. Any other quick questions? Then I'll turn it over to Doug. All right. Doug DeVore. Great.

Thanks, Brian. If you have more general DSP questions, we'll bring Brian up in the end. And if you have any questions while I'm giving this presentation on alpha transitions, feel free to interrupt or say I'm going too fast or too slow. If I'm going too slow, I probably can't do anything about that.

So Brian said he mentioned alpha transitions. Alpha transitions are basically transitions that use a QuickTime asset as part of their transition, or they can use a QuickTime asset to influence the transition. And we're going to look at a couple different situations here. So what I'm going to do is open up Motion.

We'll create a really simple alpha transition. It's the remote control that we saw earlier. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to a preset that Motion lets me create. I'm going to call it alpha transitions. This is a preset that I created. Basically, when you create alpha transitions, you want to create them at 60 progressive frames per second. And the reason is because when DSP makes these alpha transitions, it's going to pull those 60 progressive frames and make its own interlaced frames for you.

That way, the user can speed them up, they can slow them down, and you're not going to have to worry about the fields being placed back into the right place. You're working with progressive frames. It'll make its own field. So you'll have these nice field-based -- yeah, go ahead.

No, I'm sorry. If you're working with the-- not that I'm ignoring Pal. Pal will work with 50 frames a second. Any NTSC resolution that you use, 720x40, 720x486, or CropD1, HalfD1, SIF, are going to work. They're going to be recognized in DVD Studio Pro as alpha transitions. If you're using PAL, of course, you'll use PAL sizes. So I'm going to hit F5 and F6. That'll show me my timeline and my media layer. And let's see, I'm going to go to my Documents folder. And here we go. We have some content. All right. I've got this blue screen footage.

I'm just going to... Let's make this the same length and zoom in a little bit. So what this is is a remote control shot against a blue screen, just like so. I've got 60 frames per second in this timeline. And first thing I need to do is go to this This is a piece of media here in Telmotion that this was originally "Shot as lower field dominant." So that will give us some nice clean frames. So what Motion is doing here is it's taking every other field and building a full progressive frame out of it. It's interpolating the information to build that extra half of information that we need.

And we need to key this out, so I'm going to take our remote blue screen and add a filter. I'm going to choose keying, prime at our T. There we go. We get kind of a basic key. It doesn't look very good yet. I'm going to call up my heads-up display or dashboard.

And we'll bring that matte density up a little bit. Now if you want to see, basically what we're doing is we're creating an alpha channel. If you want to see that alpha channel, you can go right up here to color. We can look at transparent and any area where you see a checkerboard, just like in Photoshop, that's going to be transparent. I'm going to leave this on color for now so we can see this blue and get rid of a little bit of it.

So I've got my matte density up. I don't want to take too much away. And I'm going to bring my spill suppressor up to get rid of the blue fringe, but I don't want to bring it up too high or we start to discolor the original asset. Now this piece was originally shot in DV.

And DV presents sort of a keying problem. You can see, like along these edges, we have a little bit of stair-stepping, a little bit of aliasing going on. So I'm going to do a little trick here. I'm going to add another filter. I'm going to go to blur, and I'm going to go to channel blur. I'm going to bring the channel blur down so it occurs before the key. Oops. Try that again.

There we go. Now, I only want to blur the blue channel in this situation. So I'm going to turn off the red, I'm going to turn off the green, I'm going to turn off the alpha, and I'm going to bring this down to about 2. What this does is it gives us kind of a more of a smooth border. So here it is without the channel blur.

You can see the A-list edges and you can use this in any keyer that's not meant to key DV. So there we go. We have a nice smooth border. We'd work on this a little more, take away some of this blue, bring up the matte, bring up maybe a choker on there, but this is good enough for now. So we play through here.

We've got the remote control. We want one other thing to happen here. When the remote goes down, we want kind of static to obscure the screen. Otherwise, the source image is just going to change to the destination image, and that's not too exciting. Let's add a little something in there. So I'm going to go back to my file browser, and we have this piece of static that's very handy. And we'll shorten it up just a little bit.

Here we go. So about halfway through this transition, we're going to have a piece of static go on just like that. We'll play that. That's what it's going to look like. So I'm going to export this. I'm pretty much done at this point. And I've created some export presets. I'm going to show you what those export presets are. I'm going to choose Alpha Transitions with Alpha.

I have a special transition folder that I'm going to save these into. DSP recognizes transitions saved into certain folders. So if you go into your application support library and find DVD Studio Pro, you can put a folder in there called Transitions, either your root level library or your user level library. And DSP will automatically import any of these transitions. So let's create a new folder here. I'm going to name it asterisk remote. That will help me find it a little easier later.

And you need to name the asset the same name as the folder. So there we go. We've got Asterisk Remote. Let me show you what this preset is. It's QuickTime Movie. It's using the animation compressor. We're using the animation compressor so that we can save the alpha channel in the transition. Now, later on I'm going to show you that you don't actually need to do that because using the animation compressor is going to create a fairly large-sized file. If you're putting transitions up on the web for people to download, that can get out of hand.

So you can actually have DSP make its own alpha channel based on information that you provide, a matte layer. And that's going to create file sizes that are about one-tenth the size that we're about to create now. But in this case, we're going to export the alpha channel. So our resolution is full. We don't need field rendering. We've got 60 frames a second. We're going to pre-multiply the alpha. The alpha channel transitions work with pre-multiplied alphas, so don't do straight alpha. And everything in there looks good.

We just need video and we export. Oh, one extra thing I forgot to do there. Let's just do that export one more time. We don't want to actually export this entire project, so I should have done use play range. So let me just back up a little bit. New folder. We'll call this one Remote 2. And we'll name the asset Remote 2.

We've got Use Play Range selected. We've got Alpha Transition with Alpha. And we export. We're going to get a little preview. It goes pretty quickly. Now we can go into DSP. I'm actually going to relaunch DSP to clear out Brian's project. I hope you don't mind if I don't save it.

And we launch DSP. And that transition, since it was saved into the Transitions folder, is going to be accessible in DVD Studio Pro. I'm going to grab a couple stills. Now these transitions can be used in menus. They can be used in slideshows. They can also be used in the timeline.

That's easiest to demo, so I'm just going to drag these down. We've got this very important looking man. And we want to transition-- let's put him first-- to the donkey. That might be something you need to do someday. So we'll choose our transition. And what did I name it? Remote 2. Here we go. It's automatically put in there. And we get a nice transition.

You can vary the length of it, speed it up so now it's much faster. You can slow it down. And when we finally compile the DVD, it's going to build nice interlaced frames. It's going to look really nice. All right, so that's one way you can create transitions. Any of you use After Effects at all? Any After Effects users? Okay. So we're going to go into After Effects. I'm going to quit motion. I won't save.

So you don't need to create one-layer transitions. You can create up to two and three-layer transitions. We're going to show you a different type of transition. Let's look at this transition called Rings. Now this transition called Rings has an interesting bit in that we see the source picture and we see the destination picture on the screen at the same time. It's not perfect, but there we go. And that way we don't just get a sudden change.

Now if we use just a sudden transition switch point like we did in the remote control transition, it's not going to work very well. What we need to do is create something called a background matte layer. So let's go into Adobe After Effects. And I'm going to import, still here, we'll import this DVD.

Let me just want the DVD layer. All right. And I'm going to set my project settings to 60 frames per second, which it already is. and create a new composition. I'm going to make this composition three seconds long. Frame rate's going to be 60. Okay. I'm going to bring this DVD down into our comp. And basically what we want to do here is fly through the center of the DVD.

So what we need to do is create a scale. I'm going to set a keyframe there and set the scale to 1. Then I'm going to go to the end of the comp. And I'm just going to scrub through here. We're not going to fly exactly through the center.

We'll fly a little off. Right to there. So now when we play this... We're going to fly through the center now. Unfortunately, the way these keyframes are interpolated is sort of a linear progression. So the difference between 1% and 100% is pretty large. But the difference between 760% and 860% is pretty small.

You just don't see a lot of difference. So it looks like the DVD is coming at us real fast in the beginning, but then it slows down in the end. So what we want to do here is grab these keyframes Thanks.

So I'm just going to set a keyframe at the beginning, go to the end, rotate it almost 321 degrees. Play that back.

We get a nice rotation as we fly through it. That looks better. And if we want to look at the alpha, we can. We can choose this little alpha button. Basically, what we do at this point is export this movie. Now, I'm going to export it without an alpha channel.

So I'm going to go to Make Movie. And I'm going to choose my preset, Alpha Transitions. I'm going to choose Alpha Trans-- oh, this preset, by the way, is just setting field render off. We're using 60 frames a second. If I go to this preset, I'm going to choose Alpha Transition, No Alpha. Basically, what that's using is the Photo JPEG compressor. You can use any compressor you want.

This works pretty well. I've got it set to about 75%. We've got our 60 frames per second, and we're not rendering the alpha this time. We're just rendering the RGB channels, no alpha at all. You can't in this codec anyway. And then I'm going to add another output module.

Oops. I'm going to say Alpha Transmat. And basically, that's the same thing as the first output. But this time, I'm outputting the alpha channel. Now, this actually isn't exporting an alpha channel. What it is is it's exporting the equivalent. Say OK. And that equivalent is just white on black. Any areas of gray, they're going to show up as partially transparent, just like so.

So I'd export both of these things, and then we do still have a problem. There are points in the transition where we want to see the source image and the destination image. So we want to see the source on this outside part, and we want to see the destination on the inside part.

So how do we fix that? Well, we create another layer called the background matte layer. I'm going to create a new layer here. I'm just going to make it pure white. Just like so. Bring that down underneath our DVD. I'm going to create one more layer. It's going to be pure black.

We've got two layers. I'm just going to bring them back to the beginning of our comp. "So what we want is that black layer to follow underneath the DVD. I'm going to create a quick mask here using our masking tool. Draw a mask, constrain it, just like so.

So now if we look underneath the DVD, we've got this black circle that's going to follow the DVD. It's not going to follow it yet, of course, because it's going to just stay there. So I'm going to use an expression and bring up our scaling of mask, bring up our scaling of the DVD.

"Go to our layer, let's see, oh I'm sorry, we're going to go to animation, add expression to the scale, and I'm going to attach using this little pickwit tool the scaling of that black solid to the scaling of the DVD, just like so that now when we go the black is going to follow underneath the DVD. We turn off the DVD layer and we render this out and we call it the background matte layer. So let's take a look at what that looks like. I'm not going to render those out right now. Hold on.

We'll open up our transitions. We have one pre-rendered for you. Here's a background matte layer. It's just going to look like this. And in this example, I created one movie with alpha built in. There it is. When we see it in DVD Studio Pro, we'll choose our DVD.

So, let's look at the first slide. So, we've got the source asset, and we've got the background asset in the middle following along, and we've got these semi-transparent areas right here. Now, there's one other thing you can do to create a transition. Let's look -- I keep doing that. Let's look at a transition called Brush. Now the Brush transition only has a background matte layer in it.

So basically, it's not using a QuickTime asset to overlay any part of the transition. It's just using a background matte layer. to influence the change between the source and destination assets. So if we look at that transition, brush, we get something that looks like this. There you go. That's how you create alpha transitions. Any questions on that? Brian, I don't know if we have time to show the buttons and drop zones, do we? Okay, let's show you one more thing here.

I'm going to go into Photoshop. And what DVD Studio Pro allows you to do is create your own custom drop zones and buttons. We'll see what those look like. So let's open up a file and we'll go to our documents. And I'll just find where I put them.

Let's go to the DVD Studio Pro. I'm going to open up this clip. We've got a TV here. We're going to create a button or a drop zone out of this TV so we can drop movies or stills into this drop zone or button and it's going to respect the boundaries.

Basically what DSP needs is four different layers. We're going to create those layers now. First, let's separate this TV from the background. So I'm just going to select the black here. And I'm going to say, let's bring that tolerance down just a little bit here to 16, deselect, and select again. I'm going to say select similar.

And I'm going to inverse that selection. That's Command-Shift-I. I'm going to copy it, Command-C, and paste it, Command-V. That brings us up with a layer. The first layer that we need to create is called the Image Mask. The Image Mask defines when we drop a QuickTime asset or a still asset onto this button or drop zone, where do we get to see that image. So if we created just a little button right here and we dropped a movie onto it, the movie would only show up in the little circle there. We're not going to do that. We're going to create a much larger area.

What I'm going to do is just Define an area. Now, it doesn't matter that I'm not adhering to the contours of this TV. Because the image mask is going to be behind the shape layer that we see right now. So my imperfections are going to be sort of covered up.

Go to Layer 2 here, and I'm just going to grab my paint bucket tool, fill it in with white. Now, if you have this filled in in semi-transparent areas, that semi-transparency will also show up in the drop zone or buttons. That's kind of nice. So there we go. We've got our first layer. I'm going to name it Image Mask. It's not important that you name these correctly. What's important is the order that they're in. So you can keep them named Layer 1, Layer 2. This is our shape layer.

I'm going to use my little lasso tool and we'll create sort of the universal symbol for play. Oops, there we go. It's not a perfect triangle. And I'm just going to fill that in with black. Now, notice we have anti-aliasing on. Now, if you've worked with overlays before, then you know that anti-aliasing can sort of mess up your overlay. It can cause all sorts of jaggies, things like that, because Well, DVD players can't handle transparencies.

But what DVD Studio Pro is, it interprets the semi-transparency for you into grayscale, and then you can map that grayscale to the same color, giving you full anti-aliasing, which is great if you're doing text. If you're doing any type of text buttons, you can get nice round edges just based on those transparent areas that show up as anti-aliasing.

So let's fill this in. And then the last layer is going to be our thumbnail. So I'm just going to duplicate the shape layer. The thumbnail is just what shows up in our palette for us when we're looking for this layer, what it's going to look like to us. So there we go. We don't need all this extra area around the edges.

I'm just going to crop this a bit. And it is awfully big because we're viewing this at 50%. Let's just make this whole thing a little easier to work with. It's not going to be much bigger than that in a NTSC project. There we go. And we'll just save this.

I'm going to save it in my documents folder. I'm going to call it tv.psd. Now just in case I already have it imported, I'll call it TV4PSD. All right, so we go back to DVD Studio Pro, go to our shapes, and we can click import. I saved it there, tv psd. Now we can save it when we import this. It's going to create a copy of it and put it into our application support library so we can use it for later.

Or we can choose to just import it for this project. If we import it into the project, it actually makes a copy of it in the project within the package contents. So if you give this project to someone else, they'll have the shape imported as well. We click import. I'm going to go to my projects, go to menus, here we go, create a button. It's a little bit big, it's a lot bit big. We'll bring it down a little bit.