Chapter 12. DVD Authoring

Without a doubt, DVD is now the medium of choice for the buying public. Go to any major video store and you'll find VHS breathing those final breaths of a format on the wane; meanwhile, you'll see that DVDs are confidently ascending to claim the home movie throne. With this in mind, DVD authoring should be your target when you're constructing a project, and if you want to use 5.1 sound, then DVD is your only format choice.

Liquid Edition makes life easy for would-be DVD authors by allowing the whole process to take place on the Timeline. In fact, you never leave the Liquid Edition interface, which means you can still fine-tune edits to the project while you create a DVD menu. The benefits of this are liberating, to say the least, for producers and editors with challenging schedules.

In this chapter, you first learn the basics of DVD authoring; you produce a standard DVD with a menu before you move on to more advanced topics such as customizing a menu template, creating animated backgrounds and buttons, and using nested menus.