Back on the Farm, How Do I Build This Thing?

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OK, we've gotten most of the tough planning issues out of the way, and imported and added chapter points to our video. Now let's get back to work and finish this project. First up is linking our buttons to content and other menus.

Linking Your Content and Menus

Generally, there are two ways to link buttons to either menus or content. Most programs use drag and drop, as shown in Figure 8.12. Typically, you grab the chapter point or menu you want to link to with your mouse, drag it onto the button, and release, usually guided by symbols such as the plus sign visible in Figure 8.12.

Figure 8.12. Dragging the target into the button frame to create the link.


Alternatively, some programs use right-click menus to allow you to choose the target video and chapter point, as shown in Figure 8.13; it's less visual, but gets the job done.

Figure 8.13. Selecting the button target via right mouse-click commands.


Once you identify your preferred method of linking, link all buttons to their targets. The next step is to preview your DVD and check your work.

How do I Preview my DVD?

All DVD authoring programs allow you to simulate the playback of your DVD in preview mode or a similar with simulated controls containing all the controls normally found on a DVD remote. This is demonstrated in Figure 8.14.

Figure 8.14. Run a DVD playback simulator to check your project.


Using this control, test all project links to verify their accuracy tedious but critical. For example, while some programs automatically check to make sure a button is linked, there's no way the program can ensure it's linked to the right target. There's also no automatic way to verify that chapter points are set to the right location. During preview, you'll also discover whether all menus have links back to the main menu (otherwise, you'll be left hanging), and check that all menu timeouts and end actions are working as you planned.

Note that some programs offer a view that displays the target of each button on the menu, as shown in Figure 8.15. This is a really helpful to quickly identify mistakes.

Figure 8.15. In this view, the menu displays the targets of all buttons.


As you move up in price, authoring programs offer increasing ranges of error detection, from "orphan menus" that aren't linked to any other menu, to unlinked buttons, missing assets, and far, far beyond. As mentioned before, however, these functions can't detect when you've made a mistake and linked to the wrong content, so you're still going to have to perform your own comprehensive preview and manual error-checking.

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    DV 101. A Hands-On Guide for Business, Government & Educators
    DV 101: A Hands-On Guide for Business, Government and Educators
    ISBN: 0321348974
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 110
    Authors: Jan Ozer

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