Dealing with Multiple Media Files

2G wrote on 5/2/2004, 11:51 AM

Bear with me. I'm brand new to DVD Architect. I'm using ver5.

I have a project broken down into multiple Vegas projects and rendered as individual MPG files. I want to have one menu item on the first menu that says "Play Video" and another menu item that goes to scene selection (where each MPG file is a 'scene'). If I had only one MPG, I see how to do it. But DVDA wants to treat each segment as it's own menu item and go back to the menu after each segment.

I know the brute force thing is to go back to Vegas and create a composite project and render one big MPG. But I'm hoping there is a better way.

How do you make DVDA view multiple MPG files as one composite MPG?

Thanks.

2G

Comments

anthony-chiappette wrote on 5/2/2004, 2:09 PM

Don't know if you'd be able to do this in DVDA. You can have 2 buttons, I to play all videos, and 1 to go to a scene selection menu, BUT it gets difficult at this point:

1) When you create your "Play All" button, you will have to link that button to the first video in the series. In order to get the rest of the videos to play, you will have to open up each vieo in the timeline (double click the video in the project list) and choose the end action (what happens when the video is finished). For the end action of each video, you would need to link to the next video. On the last video, you could link back to one of the menus.

Now there would be a problem with the scene selection menu, because each video already has it's end action set, so if you choose any of the videos from the scene selection menu, it will play that video, and the remaining videos following it. You couldn't specify a new end action for the button on the scene selection menu.

DVD Workshop 2 is much better at this, because for each object you create, you can define a playlist which specifies what to play when that object is clicked, and as the last action you can specify a link to a specific menu.

anthony-chiappette wrote on 5/2/2004, 2:25 PM

Hmmm, maybe I was worng. As a test, I took a project I was working on, added a 2nd page menu, and dragged my videos from explorer onto the menu.

I went to the optimize DVD function, and it still shows the same project size, PLUS, I can specify different end actions for those videos, and create different chapter points.

I have to experiment with this some more to see what's possible. If you can add multiple copies of videos and use just the one source video, this would be great.

bStro wrote on 5/2/2004, 2:37 PM

"If you can add multiple copies of videos and use just the one source video, this would be great."

I haven't experimented yet, but this does appear to be the case. There's been a thread about it in the last week -- search the forum archives for "can end actions do this".

Rob

dvddude wrote on 5/2/2004, 4:04 PM

You may want to check out the thread at:

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=276957&Replies=8&Page=0

I DID create one large file, but then I needed to access it's parts very flexibly. It turned out that the hidden brilliance of the Optimizer coupled with the new End Actions were the answer.

2G wrote on 5/2/2004, 7:03 PM

Thanks for the info. This is really harder than it needs to be. Seems to me there should be a way to say "take these three mpg flies, concatenate them, and handle it as if it were one media file. That way, all the automatic scene selection menus, etc. would work.

Oh well.... nothing is ever that easy.

Thanks.

2G