I'm shooting a graduation ceremony tomorrow night. I'll have to keep this in mind when I get to the dvd design. Thanks.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, or maybe you have one of the studio versions, but deleting a link on a scene/chapter menu doesn't effect the marker set in the timeline, at least for me. Maybe it only happens when you import them with the vid or something, but haven't come across it myself.

FWIW... Assuming you have all your chapt markers in place already, Off the top of my head I think I'd try something like this [I've not tried this so please be careful]: I'd save-as the project under a new name, then at least temporarily move the title vid under a dummy menu in the organization tree -> under the main menu I'd import the video again, so it's in my project twice -> Save all the markers in the original timeline (now under the dummy menu), & import them in the copy under your main menu -> delete all the markers you don't want (i.e. H-Z) & create a scene menu -> repeat for each grouping -> import all markers a last time, delete the original video -> drag and drop your scene selection menus wherever you want them -> tidy up any links etc...

Thanks for the replies.
The suggestion from GENERAL ADMISSION is just what I was looking for...

Avoid the automatic "Scene Selection Menu", and create an empty menu, then populate it by creating a few buttons and linking them (in the "Action" tab) to the chapters I want them to go to.

Note to M.Smart--- this may be what you want, too.

Thanks again.

I didn't explain myself in detail. The timeline markers in my video were not lost. What I lost were ALL my chapters menus, simply by deleting the BUTTON on the main menu linked to the chapters. Here is what it looks like:
http://img255.imageshack.us/my.php?image=dvdarchscreenel6.jpg

Everything under the highlighted Chapter folder, comprising the vast majority of my design work, vanished. I loaded the project again right now to test the issue--it happens every time.

To me this is a serious program flaw. My hard work shouldn't disappear unless I specifically delete it. Prior to DVD Architect Pro I used DVD-lab. In that application I could delete buttons all day long and nothing else was removed--just the button.

@earthrisers

Glad it worked out for you.

Yup, that's the problem I was having, too, and was the "root cause" of why I posted this question. It would be convenient to create chapter marks to my heart's content, then let DVD-A create a Selection Menu for me, and then delete some of the buttons from the menu without disturbing the functionality of any of the remaining buttons. But deleting a chapter button from the automatically generated selection menu does, indeed, mess up the navigation.

I agree that it's a nasty flaw, even if there's a workaround (i.e., avoiding the automatic Selection Menu and creating your own buttons to point to a subset of the chapter points you've created). The workaround causes a fair amount of extra work.

Don’t know if this will help or not... I think you might be mis-understanding DVDA a bit since AFAIK there are no flaws or limitations with DVDA's scene/chapt menus.

It sounds like you’re creating your scene/chapter menus as a submenu of another menu page... For “Organizational” purposes DVDA uses something called sub-menus - they are not part of the DVD-spec or anything, and will not be something special on the DVD. When you create a submenu off a menu page, that submenu only exists as part of that menu - if I remember correctly you don’t even have the full set of button properties on the link. Deleting the link & deleting the submenu are pretty much the same thing.

You can OTOH create as many chapter/scene menus as you want irrespective of any menu page - just create the scene menus from the organizational tree, which is where you want most of your assets anyway. You can then handle your new scene menus the same as any other asset, drag/drop to move them around, change groupings or whatever. You can create buttons to point to anything, including any of your scene menu pages.

Creating scene menus in DVDA is a timesaver since, even if you alter all the buttons, you didn’t have to create the links between pages or create empty buttons to start with. It also sets the menu type, which is something in the DVD spec... If you create your own scene menus from scratch, I don’t know of a way to designate them as scene menus in DVDA – without that, you can’t get to your scene menus from the scene menu button on the remote.

"let DVD-A create a Selection Menu for me, and then delete some of the buttons from the menu without disturbing the functionality of any of the remaining buttons."

AFAIK that's pretty much how it works -- When you create the scene/chapt menu you can go to any of the pages and delete links, even in the tree without displaying the menu page at all. While DVDA tracks the links themselves, multiple scene/chapter menu pages are pretty much independent, & can be treated just like any other menu page.

RE: DVD lab FWIW, Excellent program but Apples & Oranges in the way DVDLab & DVDA are used. DVDA has a pretty high abstraction layer - DVDLab doesn't. In DVDLab what you see is what you get - In DVDA most of the details are purposely hidden.

I have written to Sony about this for as long as DVDA has been around. My contention is that once a link is established between a menu button and a timeline marker -- whether done explicitly by the user, or whether generated by the "Insert Scene Selection" function -- that link should stay intact and unchanged, even if other markers are subsequently added or deleted.

The way it works now is NEVER what anyone wants to happen. It is just plain wrong. It means that any time you want to add additional navigation points, you are looking at ten minutes of work, rather than five seconds. Same with deleting navigation points.

Like you, I often like to have dozens of chapter stops that a person can navigate to by pressing the Chapter + button on the remote, but I don't want to have hundreds of buttons scattered across dozens of menus.

Go ahead and submit this as a feature suggestion to Sony. Sometimes they listen ...

I'm sorry John, I'm just dense I guess & not getting it... :-(

If you don't mind and have a chance, I'm curious what it is that's broken - maybe I'm screwing up my DVDs, & if so would obviously like to know about it, seriously. And of course not taking a position for/against DVDA - to me a program is always what it is, & I use DVDA because of it's sub handling, warts & all.

IF I don't use sub-menus, and I don't, I frankly don't see anything in DVDA that works differently than the few other authoring apps I've used/tried. I just quadruple checked to see if I could spot what I'm overlooking, & do really feel dense because I'm not spotting it.

I created a simple no-menu DVD project, set 18 random chapter markers (for 3 pages of 6 scene/chapter menus), and in the Project Tree created a scene menu. I've drug individual pages around, I've deleted links on one of the pages, with just the links being deleted - no other changes I've seen. I've created a regular menu page & drug scene/chapter menu pages onto it to create links that I've then deleted. I've just checked a 5th time, really, & I guess I've got some sort of mental block on this one.

Thanks

Here's what John's referring to:

1. Add a media item to your project. Give it four chapter markers.
2. Insert a scene selection menu based on that media item.
3. Go back to the timeline and insert a chapter marker between the 1st and 2nd chapter markers (just an example, any two markers will do).

What you'll find is that the buttons on the scene selection menu are now out of wack. Beginning with the 2nd marker (in the example), they all point to the wrong chapter. This is because the buttons point to marker numbers (which you've changed), and DVDA doesn't update the buttons after you add / remove markers. The reverse would happen if you delete a chapter marker from a media item with an existing scene selection menu.

That said, I don't think this is the same as the issue the original poster is describing. Sounds to me like the original poster is saying that he's created a scene selection menu, and that deleting buttons from that menu also deletes the chapter markers that those buttons were pointing to. With regard to this problem (if I understand it correctly), I'm in the same boat as you, MPM -- I have never seen that behavior in DVDA.

Rob

bStro, you described MY problem perfectly. However, if what you say is what the original poster was reporting, then I haven't seen this either.

Thanks Rob!

IF I understand the original poster correctly, I have been able to duplicate this:

Starting with a single video DVD, I add a menu -> in the tree drag the video onto the menu folder, which places it below the menu & adds a button to the menu -> select that button & going to the Insert menu, click to insert a Scene Selection Menu... The new Scene Selection Menu is created as a sub-menu of the original, seems to exist only on or as a part of that menu - put another way, it's not really a button linking to the Scene Menus, but the menu set itself. Deleting what *looks like* the Scene Menu button deletes the whole scene selection set of menus.

Thanks to you, Rob, I think I also understand what John was talking about - had me worried for a while thinking I'd messed up a bunch of discs & wondering how to get them back. I can see how it would be nice to have more than what I consider a more-or-less Word-type macro for scene menus... OTOH, I usually exploit that feature to add chapters after the fact to place cells where I need/want them, then go into the DVD with PGCEdit and delete the extra chapter numbers.

Say I've got everything done & want to place a cell for the layer break, I can do that knowing the scene menus won't change, then just remove the extra chapter number. Ideally if they fix it so you can update the scene menus, DVDA will then be sophisticated enough to let me place cells without having to set them as chapters.

MPM, at the risk of hijacking this thread, quick question: Do you have PGCEdit "fix" the DVDA output? PGCEdit often complains when I open a DVD prepared by DVD Architect. It offers to fix the disc. Do you think it makes a difference? Or is it mostly "inside baseball," meaning it is reporting mostly arcane deviations from spec that would only be interesting to someone on the MPEG standards committee?

Re my original post...
I just ran a couple of experiments, and canNOT reproduce my original problem.

I know that I experienced it much more than one time before; maybe (and I hope this is it) those earlier times were before I installed DVD-A version 4 [but I could swear it wasn't that long ago...]

Anyway... all is well here, now.

Hi John

I hit cancel on the message box in PGCEdit, & haven’t had any problems with those DVDs, or the ones that never get opened in PGCEdit. r0lZ explains it a bit here (better than I could I think): http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-108232.htm .

WIth a simple DVDA DVD in PGCEdit you can right click on the VMG section at the top of the PGC Selector - just looked it up, & that sounds better than saying the title set list on the left - click on Domain Streams Attributes and it’ll bring up the same message window you get when opening a DVDA DVD, offering to fix the number of streams. If you click OK, messages come up that there are no menu audio or sub-pic tracks, but that the value is set to one each. Since there are no real VMG menus with DVDA, IMHO saying these streams are there when they’re not can’t get you into trouble

I have had problems with one player when I first started using PGCEdit I *think* because I let it do the fix, so I haven’t bothered since, but I never fully tracked it down - my problems could have been coincidental. DVDA doesn’t use the VMG domain the way a lot of other authoring apps do, so my guess is that while the fix is probably correct for all those other DVDs, something about DVDA DVDs is just different enough to cause trouble. Then again I could just be being superstitious...

@earthrisers - Cool!

Given what you are saying, and what I was able to get from that post at doom9 you referenced, I guess I'll go with "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." So, I'll ignore the PGCEdit warning when dealing with DVDA discs.

Thanks!

Dumb question (mine, that is) Does the auto-ripple feature affect why your markers move up when you delete a previous marker? I thought it was only for video but maybe it affects markers too.