DVD Black trailer recommendations

DigitalSteve wrote on 5/26/2004, 9:20 AM
Hi all. I recently created a rather large slideshow DVD (about 500 slides/video clips) plus 3 videos using DVDA2. Came out real nice with no problems. We are making about 150 copies for students and instructors. It has a simple menu structure. A "run once" clip followed by a main menu which has 4 buttons to select one of 4 videos clips. When any of the video clips complete, the end action of each is to return to the main menu. My question is this. When a particular video segment finishes and goes back to the main menu, DVD players have different time lags from the time a video clip finishes playing to the time the main menu reappears. When played on a PC, it looks perfect. When played on various DVD players, there is a time lag, dependent on the particular DVD player you try it on, before returning to the main menu. If there is not enough black trailer appended to each video clip, I notice a weak "ghost" image at the end of the video with some DVD players, which is in the middle of a video fade-out, before it goes back to the main menu. I find myself playing with the length of additional black trailer at the end of each video clip so it goes to full black before returning to the main menu. When I do this, it may look fine with a particular DVD player, but on a PC, the length of the black trailer looks a little too long. Does anyone have recommendations on how to end each video clip so it looks good on a variety of DVD players? I'd like to use a fixed length black trailer so I don't have to experiment on multiple DVD players to get the best compromise.

Comments

kameronj wrote on 5/27/2004, 1:54 PM
I think you answered your own question....in a round about way.

There is no real way - that I know of - to please all of the people all of the time. What works well on one DVD player....looks 'not so good' on another. And what looks good on a PC, looks 'not so good' on the DVD player.

Play around with the black trailer all you want - and I'm pretty positive you will never get the desired result - unless you only make DVDs for one type of hardware (or have pressed).

Tis the nature of the beast.