ProVideo Coalition.com: Ripple Training by Steve Martin, Brian Gary, Mark Spencer, Andrew Balis

Jacket pictures are images your DVD player throws on the screen whenever you stop video playback. Jacket pictures are a way of branding your dvd with a company logo, graphic, or a picture of the dvd box itself (or jacket image).

Keep in mind that some DVD player manufacturers support this feature and some do not. The ones that don’t, generally use their own jacket picture when the DVD is stopped. My feeling is, why not create one anyway? The file takes up so little room on the disc, and the players that do support it will display your logo (or whatever) whenever playback is stopped.

1.The easiest way to create a Jacket Picture is Photoshop. Create a new document and choose NTSC DV from the Preset drop down. This preset is important because DVD Studio Pro encodes all assets at 720x480 when building the disc.

2. Turn on the NTSC title-safe guides by pressing Command + colon (;). Here, I’ve copied and pasted my logo into the document, making sure the graphic does not go beyond the inner title-safe rectangle.

3. In the DVD Studio Pro asset tab, import the image you created in Photoshop. In the graphical view, click the gray background to load up the Disc properties in the inspector.

4. Click the Advanced tab, then choose the image you imported from the Jacket Picture pop up menu.

5. When you simulate your disc (option-command-0) and stop playback, your jacket image will appear in the simulator. This is what should happen on the set top dvd player whenever playback is stopped.