What I'm trying to accomplish is to have a main menu with 2 links:
o Play all
o Choose Scene

I'm starting with 18 video files and need to add them all to my project. These files are, in essence, chapters of an 18 chapter movie. I import them as timeline and then combine them into 1 timeline of 18 chapters in order to accomplish Play All.
I then want to link each file as a chapter in my Choose Scene submenu.

Am I doubling the amount of data in my project? In other words, I have an approx. 1hr long timeline and 18 separate files equaling 1hr? Is this the proper way to do it? Thank you.

Hopefully, you have Encore 1.5 or higher. If so, what I usually do (for what it's worth), is make a playlist with all the timelines in it instead of putting them all into one timeline for the Play all button.
I'm not sure about doubling the amount of data your way, but the playlist way will easily enable you to fit the material in.
John Rich

That's exactly what I was looking for.
I'm still a little confused as to building and size, etc. I started my project, went to advanced settings, chose 6mb and mpeg. I uploaded all my content into Encore and have a little bit of space left over, however as I transcode I seem to have less and less space. I thought encore can do auto bit budgeting. Am I missing something? Will this still burn to 1 disc?

I've just been letting Encore do all the encoding automatically. That is, assuming you are working with standard definition and not high definition video, your editing software will generate an .avi file.
Then I just import the .avi file into encore, convert to timeline and attatch to all the buttons, etc.
Then go to the Burn tab and look at the circular icon which tells you where you are in filling the disk.
Then just click burn, and Encore takes care of all the calculations, etc.

An hour of video, as I mentioned before, shoulld easily fit on your standard DVD (4.7 gb).

John