A client has asked me to update with new material the promo video of one of his artists I did for him a year ago. DVD menu was created in Encore 1.5 at the time. I'm now using Encore 2.0. I did not keep all those assets for menu building and I was wondering if there was any way to extract the menu or parts of the menu (like the background image) from the old DVD to reconstruct a new version of the DVD.

If it's not possible, what do you guys do in this situation? Do you recreate the whole menu every time and charge for it, do it for free or keep all your DVD authoring assets in case something like this was to happen?

Thanks for sharing.

Nope, there is really no way to reopen the dvd. You could extract the audio and video but not the menus.

Personally, I am a pack rat and keep everything. External drives cost so little these days. I have been getting these new western digital My Book drives. They look great and I bought a 160G for $80. Can't beat that.

Bought a MyBook too recently. 500GB. Great for backup, I'm thinking of getting an other one already.

I figure I'm going to start saving those menus because it's a pain having to redo them every time. I'm struggling with the idea of charging the client this time for it though. Seems odd.

I think I'm not going to quote the job for that. It was a simple menu anyway. Guess it's my fault for not thinking ahead.

Just speculating... you could try doing a screenshot of the menu... it will probaly come with degraded quality...

All video and DVD authoring assets (Premiere and Encore project files) except the video footage should fit onto a 700 MB CD. So basically if you keep the original tape plus your assets, all you have to do in case you have to reauthor the DVD is to recapture the tape and open the saved project. You will have to render and encode again, but at least you have your assets!

I think the fact it was a basic menu will save me this time as I know how to redo an identical version and it shouldn't take me more than a couple hours, but starting from now I will definitelly start saving my Menu projects and assets on disc for later use.