Bummer. Thanks for the info. Still looks like a great upgrade so far, though.

From appearances, this looks possible in DVDA2.

I've been playing around with it, not yet burned it to DVD, but here is what I did.

I have a test project with several menus.
I added several short AVI's to the project.
I added one of the AVI's 5 times (Globe.avi)

I then renamed (in the project ) each of the duplicated AVI's to a unique name (Globe1, Globe2...)

I then edited in/out points of each Globe AVI in the timeline.
After I had edited the Globe AVI's, this is what I had left:
I had one with 4 chapters,
one with no chapters, and three others that were just small sections of the Globe.

When selected, each one of these Globe AVI's plays uniquely - according to the way it was edited on the timeline -setting the in and out points of each.

On one of the AVI's that was edited to be just a part of the original - I modified it's end action so that it started the clock.avi (not one of the 5 Globe copies).
I had added Clock.avi to the project, just not linked to it.
I then modified Clock's end action to start up Globe5 (another short section)
[This is how you would make multiple unique chain of events, with only one source file]

Optimize disc claims that it is only going to put one copy of the GLOBE AVI. (The renamed Globe.avi's are not referenced in Optimize)

I did not use DVDA 1 - so I don't have this to compare it to.

Is Optimize disc lying, and it will really duplicate the original Globe.avi 5 times?
Or is this really now possible with DVDA2?


After writing the above, I even added 10 more copies of Globe, renamed them - edited them so that they had different behaviors, and Optimize did not increase the size of the disc at all, and just reports one instance of Globe.

Is this just a problem with Optomize? Am I missing something here?

From what Optimize is reporting It appears that so long as you put enough pointers to the original material, you can have multiple, and still have only one copy of the material on the disc.

I sure hope that Optimize is being truthful...

Chris

I hope you’re right. I just tried this in DVDA2 and it appears that you can add a file multiple times and set different in and out points and the optimizer is smart enough to just burn it once. I haven’t burned it yet either. ;-)

~jr

I'm creating a disc now.

I took one 90 minute AVI, and added it about 12 times to the project.

There are 3, full length 'copies' of the AVI on the disc - each one with different chapter settings. In preview, they play fine.

There are two other 'versions' of the AVI, on the disc.
I set in/out points to create 8 sub-sections. (version A, and version B)
I set the end-action (EA) of A1 to A2, and EA of A2 to A3 - left A3 to return to most recent menu.
I set the EA of B1 to B2, B2 to B3, B3 to B4 - B4 returns to the most recent menu.

In preview it plays just like I asked it to, in the order that I asked it to do it - BUT, attempting to go to the previous 'chapter' or reverse past the beginning of the current file segment does not work.

If this is an accurate representation of what will happen, it is not optimal, but I can live with that.

On prepare to burn, I was informed that the audio would be converted for all 12 segments that I had added, but the optimizer still only listed the AVI once.

This disc is encoding at 8KB, and if I watched each individual selection, I would be watching for more than 6 hours.
There are still a couple of hours rendering to go... Hopefully, it will work at least as well as preview.

[edit] The disc behaves the same as DVDA preview.
You can put as many 'copies' and 'versions' of a single source file in as you want - (I've only tried it with AVI's at this point) and DVDA 2 will store it on the disc only once.

Chris

Express and JohnnyRoy -- you have saved my bacon! I've just created and tested a disc that works just the way I need it to. I never would have tried this technique if you hadn't said something. It seems counterintuitive, but it works!

I added my 90 minute (4.2 GB) file, created the chapter menus the "normal" way, then added four more copies of the full video to my main menu. I trimmed each in the timeline to show only the parts that I wanted for the "skip-around" path -- the first new instance was made my text link to start the ski-path, and for the other three instances I deleted all the text, so they became invisible text links. I then used End Actions to daisy-chain them together. Finally, I used the L/R/U/D navigation properties of all the *visible* menu links to make sure that moving the cursor never takes you to my three invisible text links. (This invisible text link thing seems to be the way to put Easter Eggs in your DVDs, too, except that I'm not a big fan of hidden content in general.)

Optimizer said my DVD would be 4.6 GB in size, which is one-fifth of what it would be if all instances of my source file were included. The disc actually burned to about 4.3 GB, and plays just as expected in my two test set-top players.

I don't know whether to regard this as a clunky way to do what I need, or to marvel at the undocumented intelligence of the Optimizer! I'm leaning toward the latter, because I'm so happy that I can now do this technique! Thanks again for your valuable help!

Sony, you really ought to put this kind of thing in your documentation. It REALLY makes the difference when using this product, but only if people know about it!

This is really amazing news. The ability to do this opens up all sorts of possibilities. I assume this is not only intentional on the part of the Sony/Sofo engineers, but probably took a lot of work. The documentation department should work to understand this feature and include it in future releases of the documentation. Also, for those tutorial writers out there, this provides fertile ground for all sorts of tutorials.

I agree completely. There is some really great code under the hood here. It shouldn't be an insider secret! There's some amazing flexibility here!

On an unrelated note, the new 2-pass MPEG encoder is working REALLY well for me! It takes longer, sure, but I'm getting fantastic results.

If you have two or more media assets that have exactly the same video stream, audio streams, and subpicture steams, they will only be added to the disc once. (They can have different in/out points, chapter markers, etc.) Each will be their own title but all use the same data on disc.

dvddude glad to be of help.

Acually, you had a significant part in this discovery too.

Your question brought up one of the reasons that I bought DVDA2 (I did not buy DVDA1, because it could not do anything important that my other authoring app already did) - I wanted to have multiple views with only one data instance.

I was really disappointed when you were told it could not be done. (I agree, this is not exactly how you wanted to do it, but you get pretty much the results you were after)

That is just the kind of thing that gets me going - so I set out to determine if there was any way possible to 'make it work'.

I'm glad it works, I 've done a few with it now...

I was particularly interested in doing a 'play all' and play one at a time, like you find in 'deleted scenes' on comercial DVD's. This method is perfect for that.

Again, had you not posted the question, I would have not been motivated to find a solution for a while.

[edit] Dvddude, I just re-read your post, and I now understand something that I did not.

You do not have to have menu links to media to make this work - you do not need to add them to any menu - just add them to the disc.

When you add the other instances of the files, just add them at the disc level (drop them on the top level in the project view) .
They will be available to your end-actions, but they will not have a direct link anywhere on the disc (hidden, in your case)
Also, with this, you will not be required to edit the button behavior to exclude your hidden links - in your case, it is even better than you thought.

Chris

dvddude,

Are you indicating that you have initiated the VBR two pass encoder from within DVDA, or from Vegas?

(I hope DVDA also, but I do not know how to get to it [in DVDA] if it is there!)

From Vegas. I love the workflow from Vegas to DVDA, especially the chapter marker import.