BillyBoy - Have you stopped using DVD Movie Factory?

craftech wrote on 5/26/2003, 8:25 AM
Hi Bill,
I haven't tried DVDA yet. Still wrestling with VV4. I bought DVD Movie Factory last year at your recommendation and really like it because it is ACTUALLY intuitive.
Now that you are using DVDA, are you still using DVD Movie Factory for anything or have you found a way to combine them?
John

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 5/26/2003, 12:04 PM
Let me answer this way. I haven't upgraded to version two. I still use Movie Factory's first version once in awhile, but DVDA is good also if you can put up with a few missing features and a few not so petty annoyances.

The biggest flaw in my opinion and still unfixed in DVDA is the lack of control you have over thumbnail creation. The automation is too restrictive. While you can tell DVDA how many thumbnails to put on a page (good) it has no upfront method to override the size the thumbnails will be (very bad) so the more thumbnails you want on a menu page, the smaller DVDA makes them. Worse you can't set any thumbnails parameters globally. A glaring oversite in my opinion which will become more obvious in my following example.

Each project, in fact each menu page you got to go through the same painstaking tortue to get the thumbnails to line up how YOU want them, rather than how DVDA thinks you should have them. VERY BAD "feature" for something that's suspose to be a "professional" grade package.

While the thumbnails can be resized after they are created, the process is a royal pain, takes way too much time and is imprecise requiring multiple steps and the need to fiddle. And you know I LOVE to fiddle, but not with things I should be able to set once and foget about.

Perhaps worst of all is the meddlesome "auto" caption text feature you can't turn off that constantly overrides choices you make on text size. It insists that DVDA, not you, resize the text to "fit" the size of the thumbnail even after you tell it to use a certain size, which normally will be larger than DVDA wants to make them.

Again the more thumbnails you have per page the smaller the text gets to the point of being laughable, it is so tiny. The best way I've found as a work around to this annoyance is settle on what you want to say with the text no matter how small it is then once you're sure undo the auto setting. This needless playing around with entering and needing to resize text over and over results in much unnecessary mickey mousing around time.

Resizing the thumbnails is as awakward in DVDA. If you never have more than three thumbnails per page or you always let DVDA do what it wants you'll think DVDA is great. Want four or five, maybe up to eight thumbnails per menu page, which easily fit, you'll start pulling your hair out with all the time you waste needing to undo what DVDA does automatically and you can't prevent or fix it until after the fact.

This poorly thought out "feature" negates all the time saved with the automatic creation of the thumbnails. Just to illustrate how bad this is consider the following:

You want 8 thumbnails on a single menu page. You tell DVDA that. It does it. However the thumbnails created are a fraction the size of the thumbnails you have on your other menu pages and are TINY in appearance. To change, you first need to to shift the bottom row of thumnails and captions down and out of the way, next realign the top row and position the thumbnails where you want them roughly. Now you need to one by one resize the thumbnails. While you can use the resize tool, its useless if you want all the thumnails to be the SAME size, which obviously if you're trying to create a professional look that's something you must do.

So you're forced to one by one enter the new size you want each thumbnail to be on the top row. Now fine tune their position on the screen. Repeat the process for the bottom row of thumbnails. Now go back and aligin the top edge of the top row, repeat for the bottom row, now align the left edge of the first row of icons with the second, on and on.

Need to edit any of the text? Well DVDA doesn't want you to. If you do that damn auto text pops in and resizes the text for you unasked. always making it smaller, almost unreadable Again, you need to reset.

Now repeat all this for EVERY menu page. If you have a complex project where you have a dozen or so menu pages, a royal pain in the butt and much time wasted. All easily fixed if DVDA allowed you to set the size of the thumbnails and REMEMBER that along with allowing you to make a template from the location of the thumnails without resorting to XLM or other Voodoo methods. This area need lots of improvement in my opinion because as it is now every time, every project you need to start over and engage in endless fiddling, which obviously defeats the automation features.

kentwolf wrote on 5/26/2003, 1:21 PM
I know that to get the look I want, I have a text file set up with all of the X, Y, H, & W values as well as font sizes for each menu item.

I go through each item on each page, ensure the exact X, Y, H, & W parameter and font size is set, and all looks great.

It's as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15... (you get the idea) :)

BillyBoy wrote on 5/26/2003, 3:43 PM
Which is exactly my point. You shouldn't have to go through steps 1-15... over and over. The software should allow you to set it up ONCE, set it, and forget it.

<funny story showing one dimensional thinking from a programming standpoint>

Way back mid 70's as the new kid, and the new accountant I got the horrible job of getting a mamouth month end report where you had to adjust for inventory billed but not received and inventory received but not billed, everything billed and received was a wash. Trouble was this report was HUGE, it generated a computer print out at least two feet thick, thousands and thousands of pages. It took a long time to generate and much longer to work with. That was bad enough but to do the job you had to first find the first mismatch which could be on page 650 and the offset could have been on page 10,459 for all you knew. To do this, you were faced with endless page flipping over and over, going over the same ground again and again. NUTS!

My new boss comes up to me at the end of the day along with the head of the computer department he wanted me to meet. He asks how is it going? I said the idea is to find only items that weren't both received and billed for like amounts right, all those that do match don't matter?

Right they both say at once. So I ask WHY is this report sorted by date first where some item can be billed weeks ahead or after being received and without flipping through the thousands of pages you don't know? Oh, we always did it that way was the answer as dumb as it was. I say, that makes no sense. How about if you first sort by items matched, strip them out, don't print anything for them. Then sort by product ID, then date. I look at them, they look at me, then they look at each other and we all start to laugh. Next morning, same report, now about a 1/4 inch thick on my desk instead of two feet thick.

The point is you need to know WHAT the problem is before you can find a good solution. Forcing a solution and attempting to solve the problem without first thinking about it is well... you know.

So having automatically generated thumbnails is great IF you don't need to change the size or move them or get them to be the same precise size and location as other thumbnails are on other menu pages. It reminded me of all that page flipping, oh it worked, but what a silly waste of time.
Baylo wrote on 5/26/2003, 4:41 PM
I agree totally with the general comments being made.

But, after working through 1 DVD that had about 38 chapters (5 per page) I eventually settled on this workflow:

Select all the picture (chapter) elements on the page and set the H and W parameters. Then select all the items that have the same X value and set that. Repeat for items that share the Y value. This way you only have to type each X and Y value once per page.

And so on...

Clearly this is not ideal, but I did find it quicker than making the settings for each item individually. Of course this only works if you have buttons that line up...

Mark
JumboTech wrote on 5/26/2003, 9:30 PM
DVDMF2 is quite a bit better than 1.

For speed in testing files on a DVD, I use DVDMF2. Since it accepts mpeg audio, it's just quicker than DVDA. I'm anticipating DVDA getting much better as time goes on. For a first version, it's not bad. DVDMF2 has a very good auto chapter feature plus you can edit the templates somewhat.

Al