Auto Chapter Marker insertion

tsatumc wrote on 2/1/2007, 12:50 PM
Any body know if DVDA is capable of automatically inserting chapters markers,, at say, every five minutes? I have taken the time to move the cursor to the five minute point,,, manually mark,,, move to the 10 minute point, manually mark, etc... I have seen this feature on some cheap DVD apps out there!

Thanks

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 2/1/2007, 1:37 PM
Any body know if DVDA is capable of automatically inserting chapters markers,, at say, every five minutes?

No, it cannot do this, but there are lots of scripts for Vegas that do this. Even if you've already encoded, you can use the script to generate the markers and then use the Export Markers script to put those markers in an "sfl" file that DVDA will then read. Once you have the scripts, it takes less than a minute to create the markers and import them to DVDA.
MPM wrote on 2/1/2007, 8:44 PM
Auto chapter insertion is a guess for when you don't want to make a few minutes effort - it's OK for skipping quickly through portions of your vid, but spending a few minutes IMHO is well worth it -- but that's just me.

Taking 8 minutes as an example (I split the diff 'tween 5 & 10), double click the time display & change minutes to 7, hit enter. Play the video till there's a decent scene change, use the shortcut key to insert marker or pause, add marker & save. SInce you know how far ~8 minutes is on the timeline, click where you think 16 minutes will be & repeat. Using the shortcut keys takes less than 10 minutes, & I'm hopelessly slow.
johnmeyer wrote on 2/1/2007, 9:33 PM
Adding markers at exactly regular intervals is actually pretty dumb, as MPM explained. Doesn't make sense to have a chapter break in the middle of a scene. Therefore, I modified an existing script to let you specify an interval (you have to edit the script in Notepad to change the interval -- I was too lazy to include a user input dialog, since no one will probably use this). However, unlike other scripts, this will only place the markers at the beginning of the nearest event on the selected timeline. It is a crude script without any real error checking, but it does work.

Here's the link to the script:

Markers at Intervals, But Only at Event Start
tsatumc wrote on 2/2/2007, 10:00 AM
Thank you all for your information, I will try the scripting method...
What I am doing is taking previously rendered AVI, Mpg QT or wmv and transfering them to DVD. I have a lot of them dealing with all different subject, so the chapter placement as to subject matter is not of concern. Another issue is that these DVDs are going to locations where the DVD players only have up to 8x speed. So I want to be able to let the viewers fast forward into the project quicker... I have also created a DVDA project with the markers already set at every 5 minutes, then I just swap out the movie file,,, So I do believe this makes sense and is not dumb for this particular project... thanks
johnmeyer wrote on 2/2/2007, 10:50 AM
If you have already rendered, you can still use the script to create the markers, then export those markers using the "export markers" script. This will create an SFL file that can immediately be imported to DVDA, thus creating the markers on the DVDA timeline. Both scripts should execute in a few seconds, and the marker import usually takes about fifteen seconds. The whole thing can be done in a minutes or so.
ECB wrote on 2/2/2007, 12:28 PM
Caveat: If you using are Vegas 7/DVDA4 and you want frame accurate chapter points you have to renrender the mpeg after you move the markers.

Ed B