What I think you're talking about is sometimes called stories -- it's the same thing as on *some* (not all) DVDs where they have the un-rated & rated versions. Unfortunately you can't do it yet in DVDA, & will have to do some minor editing in PGCEdit after DVDA prepares your DVD. It's basically the same technique used by some authoring software & by DVDRs that allows you to edit out commercials from your TV recordings.

First a bit of necessary background... DVDs have titles, which are the various movies to play. Now while these titles are obviously video clips, to the DVD player a title is really just an ordered list of cells (chapters) to play. If you think of yourself in Vegas with your video on the timeline, you'd select the in & out points and cut out what you didn't want. In DVDA you'll set the in and out points by setting chapter markers, then after the fact tell the DVD player to just skip everything in between.

So, what you'd do is in DVDA import your main title to the menu twice. If you don't want the button visible, remove any pictures or text, & resize it as small as possible in the corner - then make sure your button navigation ignores it. You can create scene menus and such for the edited version, but, you have to account for any future missing chapter numbers. I find it sometimes easiest to start with a video with all chapter markers, save the markers, make the copy, delete the chapters that will disappear with editing, create any scene menus or links for the title you'll edit, then import the saved markers back and finish the DVD.

Now once it's prepared to your hdd, open the DVD in PGCEdit, and go to your 2nd title (the one to edit) in the left hand window. Click the edit PGC button on the lower left, and you'll see a dialog with a list of all cells and chapters. Click the button at the bottom that says "Remove Cells". Make sure that the bottom check box is checked (shorten the chapt...). Move the top slider to show one of the chapters you don't want to play, & click OK - do this for every chapter you want to cut, then click OK to the prompts, save the DVD etc & test.

What you'll get is a DVD with two versions of the same video - one with the entire contents, the other with only the parts you want to see. Is there any catch? Depends on how picky you are, your DVD player, and how much time you have to spend. Since you're in effect cut editing, and because DVD players look ahead in the video, sometimes the cuts could be cleaner. If you want it to look 100% like a Hollywood production, stick in some fades to/from black where the jumps will occur.

Have fun!

Hey, that sounds even better than what I did! First of all, thanks so much for the great explanation and background - that was very helpful.

Second, thanks for the tip. My approach works, but doesn't shorten the chapters. If I'm watching the scoring drives, at the end of one drive, the video would continue normally (with the kickoff), but if I hit the "next chapter" button, it correctly jumps to the next scoring drive.

If I understand you correctly, I could use PGCEdit (heck, I've never even heard of it!) to actually shorten the chapters so that the second video would include only the scoring drives on it.

What's nice is that these videos are many years old (I was in college), but by using a few filters in Vegas I was able to at least improve them quite a bit. I haven't used a fraction of the power of Vegas and DVDA, but this is really cool. I told a friend what I'm doing, and he was really curious about how it turns out. Another friend is now thinking of buying Vegas for his high school band (out of the band's budget).

Thanks again! Now to google and/or find PGCEdit. :-)

Would using the builtin PLAYLIST functionality work? Copy in your video as many times as you want (making each copied section just be a scoring drive). Then piece all the scoring-drive sections together into a playlist.

Playlists are cool, they don’t always play seamlessly, and at least in DVDA, they add a kind of a convoluted path for the player to follow. Unfortunately to try & explain the difference between playlists and so-called stories I’ll have to go through more background on how video DVDs work - I’ll try my best to keep it brief and well, not too mind-numbingly dull...

Video DVDs use & rely on something called cells; a cell is just a way of dividing up video content, & they work kind of like bookmarks. Every DVD title or video file has at least one cell, including menus. When the DVD player shows a menu or jumps to a video segment, it’s told which video & which cell to play - kind of like UPS delivering to this apartment in this building, both pieces of information together describe the exact location.

In DVDA you know cells as Chapters... A chapter can only occur at a cell, but cells do not have to be chapters - that’s a limitation of DVDA; you can only add a cell to your title by adding a chapter.

Now a playlist just plays a group of video titles, much like a CD player plays the songs on an audio CD, and it does this through a bunch of scripting for the player to follow - the player plays a title, goes through a bunch of scripting, & eventually plays the next title in the list. One common usage on retail movie DVDs is when you have a bunch of separate out-take scenes on the DVD as separate titles, & you want to provide the viewer with the option of just going through the list without having to deal repeatedly with the menu or remote.

Using a playlist to create an alternate title, you first have to divide the title up into a bunch of segments - the building blocks that you’ll stack to form your new playlist. In DVDA you do this by creating a new title for each building block; for each segment you add your title video to the menu & limit the start and end times. Behind the scenes on the actual DVD you’re creating, each segment shows up as a new title using your original video, but with fewer cells than the original. Remember, a title is more-or-less just a list of what cells to play and in what order.

The end result is the player jumping to one title, playing however many cells (chapters), then going through a bunch of scripting, jumping from dummy menu to dummy menu in order to find out which title’s next, where it again plays a limited selection of cells from your main video.

A story on the other hand just changes that list of cells to play - same thing really as creating a building block (segment) for your playlist, only you just do it once and you avoid all the scripting the player has to go through to assemble the segments into an alternate title.

Split for example...

Following what a Hollywood author *might* do using a video of a football game for example, in Vegas you first identify all your edit points (putting together an Edit Decision List - EDL), then start with the editing... To keep the numbers simple lets say there are 12 drives, and you want a chapter for each one of them. For a team highlights version of the same video you want to include 6 of those drives - or chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11. Chapter 1 has to transition well to both chapter 2 & chapter 3, so you add a brief fade to black to the end of chapter 1 - it’s really the same thing as if you were working for TNT carving out the spots for them to insert commercials, only instead of fading the audio out, you might go to a more generic fill of crowd noise to add continuity.

Chapter two is either going to follow chapter one or be eliminated, so as long as things flow from 1 to 2 you can leave it alone. Chapter 3 gets treatment at the beginning - it needs to flow from either chapter 1 or 2 - and massaged at the end where it needs to work with chapters 4 or 5. Chapter 4 is left alone as long as it works and so on...

Imported into DVDA, you have one main title with 12 chapter markers... In the timeline view for that video, save the markers (as a failsafe you can also save the chapter list as times in a text file from inside Vegas). Create your second (alternative) title by adding the main video again, and go to that video title’s timeline. Since this version isn’t going to contain all of the chapters, delete the chapter markers for those scenes that will be cut. Now you can create any menu links (buttons) or scene menus that you want for this alternate title.

Deleting chapter markers probably screwed up your original title video though, so now you want to put all the chapter markers back by importing your saved markers. If something happened where that didn’t work you have the times from your failsafe text file to paste in the box in timeline view (Ctrl+V)(Enter) add marker. Now you want to finish your menus and links - note that the alternate title links won’t all be correct until later, but that’s all right. Now prepare the DVD to your hard drive, and optionally make a copy of it using Windows Explorer...

DVDA can create and maintain a record of that DVD so minor changes might avoid a total re-render, but using PGCEdit will change the dates on a couple of IFO files and DVDA will insist on re-rendering the DVD from scratch if you use it to change anything. It will also rename the PGCEdit backup folders. Totally optional you can store a copy of the prepared VIDEO_TS folder, or just the IFO files to avoid that - you can also delete the PGCEdit backup folders/files, assuming they’re now irrelevant anyway.

And finally, as in my earlier post remove the chapters you don’t want (2, 4, 6...), save and test the results. When you delete the chapters PGCEdit will handle re-numbering the remaining chapters for you, so now all the buttons to chapters in your alternate title should match & work just fine - that’s why in DVDA they were created as if those missing chapters didn’t exist.... now they don’t.

In a retail movie the rated version might use this very same technique to cut out swearing for example, optionally along with angles where the dialog isn’t the problem. They might also use this technique to add/cut scenes for a director’s vs theater cut. As long as you can keep track of everything, you can put together multiple titles with not one of them matching the main video. And if you’re just sticking recorded mpg2 of a movie, show, game on a DVD, you can quickly zap the commercials by setting before & after chapters in DVDA, followed by deleting those commercial chapters in PGCEdit.

How DVDA implements Playlists is interesting.

In other software I use, its Chapter Playlist feature lets you select what chapters to use, and it builds the alternate "Title" in the final DVD.

But DVDA's approach does have a benefit -- that is the Playlist can allow the author to build a playlist combining "assets" from multiple titles. But it does go through VM code to accomplish this (which might show as "sluggishness" during playback -- depending on the dvd player).

Another benefit of using the builtin PLAYLIST feature -- you get to re-order the chapters (if you want to).

Hi George

One of the MAC programs (I *think* it's DVD Studio Pro) uses traditional playlists the same as DVDA, and calls re-ordering chapters Stories. Encore joined in with it's Chapter Playlist if I remember right - it's been a while since I tried it in vain... I love the fact that they added CC, which is why I tried it again, but their sub handling has got to be the most dismal I've ever encountered. It wouldn't be so bad if most DVD players passed thru CC, but so many don't.

DVDA hasn't really gotten a lot of attention the last couple of years - maybe this June will bring in some new stuff besides BluRay? I'm still disgruntled HD lost BTW - with it's more open standards & being based on something close to Java Script, mere mortals had full access too, ;-) Now I've got my fingers crossed that China gets things going with their format - they did all right with SVCD in the past, which I think helped putting on pressure so DVDs opened up to the masses.

I believe DVDA also passes through CC (of an already encoded mpeg with the CC embedded). this assumes you don't have DVDA re-encode the source assets. The only problem is you would have to enable them after authoring if you want to show them on a computer dvd player...

DVDLabPro "stitches" together chapters in a "Chapter Playlist" -- works pretty well, and even lets you specify if adjacent chapters should be "seamless" The beauty of Chapter Playlists is the ability to re-order -- which you cannot do in PGCedit by removing cells.

DVDEncore does have some pros (along with the BD authoring). I like how it handles the NEXT by appending a small dummy section to the end of Titles...

Regards,
George

With big apologies for wandering off topic, PGCEdit will let you re-order chapters I think... Going by memory (it's been a while since I tried it, just to see if it'd work) I believe I added/copied the title to the menu page in DVDA, then limited duration to the 2nd or 3rd chapter... Then editing the PGC in PGCEdit just added chapters to that title in the desired order.

Most authoring programs won't touch CC if it's already embedded in the mpg2, DVDA included, but the problem is the *@#!$&!!! stb players that won't send it to the TVs, so subs are pretty much necessary. OTOH CC is still nice because a lot of folks have everything set up with subs by default off on the stb player. DVDLab Pro is great because you can embed CC with hardly any fuss - Encore I think copied that feature from MediaChance, but blew it on sub handling, where DVDA so far beats most everyone IMHO.

Encore actually had CC functionality before DLP did, and DLP still has a little bug when trying to use CC that displays more than 2 lines at a time.

With DVDA getting Blu-ray soon, it should become one of the better Authoring apps on the PC (it already is - imho).

Regards,
George

Wow, I go away for a short while, and suddenly there's a lot more information to take in! Good stuff here, even if I am going to have to read it several times. :-)

MPM, for my first attempt, I followed your steps of copying the video there twice, removing chapters from the second (invisible) copy, and building the special drives menu from that movie. Works well in that I can immediately jump to the next scoring drive. However, it doesn't actually remove the others, so it doesn't shorten the chapters I kept.

Next, I tried PGCEdit, which is very nifty(!), but it didn't do quite what I expected, so I'm going to work with it some more.

This time, I again copied my video into the dvd main menu twice, removed unwanted chapters, created the "scoring drives" menu from the second (invisible) copy, and then reloaded the original chapters again. I then prepared the movie to a folder and edited it with PGCEdit.

There are 24 chapters (same as cells, right?), and say I want to keep cells 9, 14, 16, 19, 21, and 23. I discovered that remaining cells shift as others are removed, so I started over, removing 24, 22, 20, 17, 15, 10-13, and then 1-8. When I click on each cell's "play" arrow in the editor, they show up correctly, but when I go to preview the "scoring drives" they don't skip the deleted cells.

So I thought, "ok, I'll view the movie in VLC. This was even weirder, because now the first thing played wasn't cell 9 at all, but some other cell.

I may burn a dvd anyway to see if it's actually prepared correctly, and just not previewing correctly in PGCEdit or playing correctly in VLC.

And I can always fall back to my original approach, which works fine.

Again, thanks for all the in-depth info here. It will help me understand the underlying structure!

By the way, do you know what I'm to do with the "Keep the programs in sync with the cells" option? I've tried it on and off (this is when removing cells).

Here ya go - sorry to take so long, but I've had better days... :-(

Any hooo, put the step by steps that should get you on the right track in a new thread in case you want to print it or whatever.