Why is this, and what can I do to fix it?

At the end of any media on a DVD, whether it's a movie or a menu, the DVD player has to move its laser to wherever it should go next. In the case of something that loops, it's back to the beginning of that media.

For some players, this is faster than others, but I've never seen one do so without at least a slight pause. It happens when playing commercial (aka, "Hollywood") DVDs, too, but people notice it more when it's a DVD they've created themselves.

As for how to fix it, drop your background video on a Vegas timeline, loop it a few times there, and render this out to a new background video. It will still pause eventually, but it'll run through the loop a few times first. Hopefully your viewer has made up his mind by then. ;-)

Rob

FWIW you can try and keep the transition at the pause as slight as possible through the design of your menu audio/video. You might include static frames at the start and end, keep the audio volume lower, and use fade in & out for the audio track.

DVDA also works a little bit counter-intuitively... Because of the way scripting is used to control playback, personally I've found a separate 1st play video makes for a slightly shorter pause at the menu restart, yet shows no increased pause between intro and menu *that I've noticed*.

If the end of loop pause *really* bothered you, you might experiment with a duplicate menu using the same audio/video tracks that plays at the end of the 1st menu [exit video can play quicker that menu looping], but to be honest retail DVDs are usually pretty sloppy about looping, so I really don't think viewers will notice.

Thank you for all the suggestions.

When I first made the menu video, I split through the whole thing (audio and video) at a point that made sense musically near the end and brought that piece around to the beginning--this meant the very first frame of the video now was exactly right after the very last frame (blending the rest of it in the middle was a non-issue). In Vegas and DVDA the audio and video would loop absolutely seamlessly. Perfectly. Kinda cool.

Once it got prepared and burned to a DVD the pause came in at the end (or maybe the start?) of the looped menu video. Normally I wouldn't care except this video was a bit captivating and flowed endlessly and people liked watching it again and again without the disruption of a break or pause.

So I took bstro's suggestion and looped the video and audio within Vegas a few times and went with that. It worked great, just had the pause after every few loops instead of each time.

I did however make an interesting discovery--when I played the "DVD" directly from the "prepared" folder on the hard drive, with no actual DVD physically in the player, I still got the pause. Kinda blows the theory about a laser repositioning itself.

MTP