- Getting Started
- Arranging and Trimming Clips in the Timeline Viewer
- Working with Audio in the Timeline Viewer
- Adding Subtitles and Closed Captions to Your Project
- Editing Subtitle Attributes
- Review
Working with Audio in the Timeline Viewer
You can have one video track and up to eight audio tracks on a single timeline. But a DVD player can play only one audio track at any given moment. Generally the main sound track of your project goes on the Audio 1 track. That sound track can be one of several types of audio—from monaural to digital surround sound. Other tracks might be dubbed versions of the sound track, director comments, or teacher instructions.
All audio tracks need to be complete within themselves. For example, if you want the same background music and sound effects to be heard in each dubbed language track, you must mix them with the dubbed voice track in another editing application like Adobe Audition before you import them into an Encore DVD project.
- Import the following files from the Encore DVD 2.0 CIB Assets/Video and Audio folder: Behind the Scenes.avi, Party Life-video.m2v, and Party Life-audio.wav.
- Create a new timeline by right-clicking on Behind the Scenes.avi in the Project panel and choosing New > Timeline.
Since Behind the Scenes.avi is an audio/video file, this timeline will have clips in both the Video and Audio 1 tracks.
- Drag any photo file from the Project panel to the video track.
It falls directly after the Behind the Scenes.avi clip. The purpose is to create a gap in the audio track to facilitate the next few steps in this exercise.
- Drag Party Life-video.m2v from the Project panel to the video track.
This is an elementary MPEG-2 video file (it doesn’t have an audio track). It ends up where you’d expect it, following the two clips in the Video track.
- Drag Party Life-audio.wav to the to the Audio 1 track.
Encore DVD automatically places it directly to the right of (after) the Behind the Scenes.avi audio clip, not under Party Life-video.m2v. This is the default behavior for any clip you add to any track in the Timeline. Newly added clips always snap to the beginning of the timeline or directly after the last clip in the selected track.
- Drag the Party Life-audio.wav clip so its first frame lines up directly under the Party Life-video.m2v clip’s first frame.
Depending on how much you’ve zoomed in the view of the Timeline, the audio clip might not line up exactly.
- Move the Current Time Indicator (CTI) to the first frame of the Party Life-video. m2v clip on the Video track by pressing the Page Down or Page Up keys.
- Zoom in the Timeline view by pressing the equal key several times (or use the Zoom slider or its buttons).
- Drag the audio clip so its first frame lines up directly at the CTI. You’ll note that the Snap feature helps you place the audio exactly where you want to put it.
Adding Audio Tracks
Adding audio tracks is easy. Simply right-click in the Timeline and choose Add Audio Track, or drag an audio clip below the lowest audio track to have Encore DVD automatically add an audio track.
Once added, there are a couple of options in each audio track:
- As is the case for those viewing your finished DVD, you can listen to only one audio track in the Timeline Viewer at a time. To listen to a particular track, click the empty square on the left end of the track (highlighted in the next figure) and that will turn on the audio speaker icon (highlighted in the next figure) and mute the other tracks.
- If you are adding audio in different languages, choose the appropriate language code from the Language menu on the left side of the audio track (see next figure).