I have 12 short films on two menus of six each. I would like to have on my opening menu a "play all" button in which all are played, one after the other. Is that possible in DVDA and if so, please tell me how I go about making it happen
you know, I am so sorry now I paid out good money for DVDA. It really doesn't do anything sophisticated at all. I'm going back to Ulead Movie Factory. DVDA just doesn't make it. I hope there's a decent free upgrade soon.
Burt Wilson
You do realize that it WILL do what you want? You just have to have ONE file instead of TWELVE. You then make the play all button point to the file. For the individual sections, you can specify the In AND Out points creating the single play buttons. OR you can only specify the IN point to create a start here an play to the end button (i.e. a standard chapter point). Yes, it lacks end actions. But it will still do what you are wanting it to do.
you see that just sucks. That needs to be corrected, at least be able to create a playlist, then make a link to that playlist! can't be that hard. lets go sonic foundry - lets not be the gay happy family DVD Authoring package.
If you do a quick search, you will find one feature request over and over - end actions. That's also what you are asking for. Until DVDA gets end actions, the two options are:
1) create ONE file
2) create a MUSIC DVD - which will play all segments back to back but then you lose the menuing options.
At DVD Workshop has end actions (you can set the end action for each clip to either return to menu or to go to next clip). But note that if you have separate clips to "play next" you can't access *only* that clip from the menu (assuming you have a thumbnail linked to each clip) -- the clip will play but then go onto the next clip.
The advantage of using the DVDA method is that you can have it both ways -- play all or see only a specific clip and return to menu. If that's what you really want (as opposed to a hollywood style menu system where you jump to a chapter and then play to the end - what I described with DVD Workshop, and which is something you can do in DVDA by setting chapter points but not out points), you should look for a program that will just join your clips into one without re-rendering. Check out www.dvdhelp.com links to such tools.
Given this ridiculous shortcoming in DVD-A, but also given its strengths, I have stuck with DVD-A, but do one of the following:
1. Render everything as one file.
2. If files have already been rendered, or are being used from another source, I use either TMPGEnc or MPEG VCR (from Womble) to combine existing MPEG files into one. These two programs do this combination quickly, without any re-compression (which would, of course, degrade the quality).