Finally, I was ready to bring everything into Encore! I created two new projects (one for each disk), and started importing all of my video and audio assets. I made timelines for each section; one for the main movie, one for each featurette, one for the deleted scenes, etc, and then dropped the audio and video into their respective timelines. On the main movie timeline I set chapter points by going through the film using the monitor window, and clicking on the “Add Chapter” button whenever I wanted a new chapter. Supposedly these chapter points can be set in Premiere Pro by creating markers which are then embedded into the mpeg2 file during encoding, but since I’d previously encoded my video in another version of Premiere Pro, I wasn’t able to test this feature.
Next I imported my Photoshop files as menus. Double-clicking on them brings them up in the monitor window, and lists the layers just like in Photoshop. Using the pick-whip, I linked up my background video and audio to the menu, which put Billy Jump behind the Photoshop layers.
I then right-clicked each blood-splatter button and selected the “convert to button” option. This automatically turns the Photoshop layer into a button, saving you the trouble of having to create the subpictures yourself! After creating the buttons, I made them transparent by clicking the eyeball next to each button layer. If realized that if I didn’t do this, all of the buttons remained on the screen at all times, and Encore simply overlaid another color over top of them when they were selected. I then went into the “Menu” drop-down at the top of the screen and selected “Menu Color Set”. This is where you get to choose what color you want your buttons to be when selected and when activated. Keep in mind that Encore doesn’t care what color your buttons were originally; you can change them at any point through the Menu Color Set. The “Selected State” setting is where you pick what color you want the buttons to be when the viewer presses the up or down arrows on the remote. I set this to a dark red, and reduced the opacity a little so that the text could still be seen through the blood splatters. Finally, there is the “Activated State” setting, which determines what color the button will be when the viewer chooses a selection to play. It flashes a different color for a brief second. I made this a brighter red, and set it to full opacity.
At this point I selected each individual button and linked it to its corresponding timeline (or menu) in the Project window using the pick-whip next to the “Link” selection. You can also use a drop-down menu to make this selection, but at this point I had so many assets that it was easier to use the whip than to scroll through all of the assets in the drop-down. I set the menus to loop indefinitely so that Billy Jump would keep harassing people over and over until they picked an option.
