Making a movie - scenes and DVD playback

ingvarai wrote on 5/28/2009, 5:08 AM

I posted a similar topic before, now I try with another wording :

I am making a movie, which consist of scenes.
Scenes are fine in the DVD menu, for the user to pick from. But most important is that the entire DVD plays back as if there were no scenes. In other words - it finishes one scene and starts with the next one without the user notifying it at all, technically seen. What I mean - no pauses, no stutter, no on-screen notifications, just a smooth playback.

I can achieve this by putting one single large MPG file on the DVD. But my project is divided into scenes, so I would prefer use one MPG file for each scene. This I have tried, but the playback pauses, and ugly notifications appear ("Now playing #2").

I hope someone has experience with DVDA (version 5) and can help me with this! I have studied the DVDA help, and I do not think a Music Compilation is the way to go, as someone has suggested.

I can also use one large MPG file, if there is a simple way to join MPG files without rendering again in Vegas, - and let med build a menu and select scenes. Maybe markers is used for this, I am not very experienced with DVDA.

ingvarai

Comments

farss wrote on 5/28/2009, 5:19 AM

For what you want markers are the way to go and yes, a single mpeg file is what you want.
Your problem is caused by the player having to move to the head to the next file to continue playback. You can minimise the problem by arranging the physical order of the files to match the order in which they're played. I've done this and it worked quite nicely EXCEPT I designed the whole thing so there's a fade to/from black where the join is. In fact it fades to static black for six frames out and in. You probably can't do that in your case though.

I don't know how much luck you'll have joining the mpeg files, maybe someone else can help with that. VOBMerge might work, only used it on VOB files to date.

If you go back to your whole movie place a marker at each chapter / scene and make certain you tick the "Insert I frame at markers" box on the second tab of the MC encoder dialog box. A DVD player can only jump to an I frame. If where the marker is isn't on an I frame it'll jump to the nearest one, might not be what you want happening.

Bob.

ingvarai wrote on 5/28/2009, 5:40 AM

Bob,
you came to rescue me.
Ok - one single MPG.
I somehow think I remember that it is possible to drop another Vegas project on the time line. Isn't it?
Then, could I have let us say project compiled.veg, where I drop and align my Vegas scene projects, apply markers and render all out to one MPG file?

Then, another solution perhaps, if I drop several MPG files ont the time line, will Vegas recompress them (time consuming) or just push them out as is - to a single MPG file (assumed fast)?

ingvarai