Auto-Play vs. Menu-Based Authoring

When you choose Export to DVD from an active timeline, the default mode of authoring is called Auto-play, meaning the resulting disc will play automatically when inserted into a DVD player. With Auto-play, you cannot create a DVD with menus; you can only export a sequence and choose whether or not the created DVD plays in single-play mode or in a continuous loop. To create a menu-based DVD, you must open Premiere Pro's DVD Layout panel and click Change Template (Figure 11.1a).

Figures 11.1a and b. New to Premiere Pro 2.0 is the DVD Layout panel, where you can design and modify DVD menu templates. Because no template has been loaded for the selected sequence, Auto-play is the active Export to DVD mode (a). To load a menu template and turn off Auto-play, you must click the Change Template button and select one of the templates available in the DVD Templates dialog (b). On the contrary, if you had a menu structure built for a specific sequence and wanted to export to DVD in Auto-play mode, you would access this same dialog and click the button for Auto-play DVD with no Menus, thus disabling the menu-based output

Notes

One of the top new features for 2.0 is the ability to create customizable and fully functioning menu-driven DVDs from your timeline. You'll learn the tips and trick to do just that in Chapter 16, "Custom DVD Design."

With the DVD Templates dialog box open (Figure 11.1b),click the radio button for Apply a Template for a DVD with Menus. You now can toggle between the different themes and select the appropriate template that you wish to load. Clicking OK applies the template to the active sequence from which you accessed the DVD templates. Once a template is loaded, the DVD Layout panel displays that template when opening its host sequence. If you were to create a new sequence, the DVD Layout panel would display the default Auto-play mode until you loaded a menu template and turned off Auto-play for the sequence.

No matter which type of DVD you wish to create, you have three choices for exporting when you write out the files of the DVD.