I have been using Elements for about a year now and now want to progress to creating my own menus so I have downloaded a tryout copy of Encore2.

I expect I am being dense but, as there is obviously no manual to study, I can't see how I can import the whole the movie, including slide shows, title clips and extras (dozens of clips) from Elements into Encore without rebuilding the movie.

This is a new step for me so forgive my naivity but can someone please point me in the right direction. Do I have to rebuild in Encore? Alternatively am I able to export a custom menu to Elements and maintain the chapter links?

Encore is expecting either an MPEG2 encoded video (m2V and WAV files) or a DV AVI file.

you need to export your Elements timeline into MPEG2 format and then import that into Encore.

I'm curious about one thing though. I thought Elements allowed you to define menus for DVDs. I know it's limited but it is there I thought. Or am I wrong?

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I'm not young enough to know everything!

Thanks for the speedy response Alan.

Elements does allow menu production but based only a series of templates. A new background may be imported for the menu but the number of buttons on each menu/sub menu appears to be fixed. I found this just a little limiting when I had recently produced a DVD of a concert plus extras and had to spread everything over two menus because I couldn't create new links on the main menu (unless I am missing something of course).

Within Elements there is a burn to file option which I had assumed would create a single (AVI) file which I could import to Encore2 but this didn't seem to work as it created several files merely of the film clips on Timeline1 and none of the extras.

I will try the MPEG2 route.

This man would suggest you try the DV-AVI route:

http://www.wrigleyvideo.com/videotut...rttofinish.htm

He suggests letting Encore do the DV-AVI to Mpeg conversion instead of Premiere because it will choose the best data rate for you depending on the length of the movie and the DVD space available.

Hope this makes sense.

Hi Bert

Thanks for the link. Watched the tutorial and it gave the basics I needed.

Onwards & upwards now. All I have to do now is decide whether to buy the full version - certainly tempted but it ain't cheap.