Motion Menu Question

cspvideo wrote on 7/9/2005, 8:17 PM
I've been experimenting with animated menus. In some cases I use a still image and composite in some animated scenes with various treatments. Here's what I want to know. If I create about a minutes worth of animation and I loop the menu is there a way when it reaches the end of the animation event to keep the DVD player from going to black with just the DVDa icons on the screen? Can some sort of image be there until the player is ready to resume the animation loop or is this a player dependent issue?

Thanks all.

Comments

ScottW wrote on 7/10/2005, 7:50 AM
It's player dependant and from what I've been learning, to some degree is a function of how DVDA does things.

For example, in DVDLab Pro, I can create a menu with 3 cells:

|---intro cell---|---loop cell---|---exit cell---|

The intro cell provides for the delayed buttons feature finally available in DVDA3; the buttons appear when you enter the loop cell. The exit cell is only executed when you select a button (this is something DVDA3 does not have).

So far I've not found a player that doesn't provide an almost seamless transition from the end of the loop cell to the beginning of the loop cell, or from any point within the loop cell to the exit cell - though I've no doubt that there are players out there that would show the loop/exit points in an undesireable fashion.

Some of the things I've been reading suggest that because the loop and the jump to exit is within the menu (or PGC), most players handle the transition much better.

--Scott
bStro wrote on 7/10/2005, 8:04 AM
If I create about a minutes worth of animation and I loop the menu is there a way when it reaches the end of the animation event to keep the DVD player from going to black with just the DVDa icons on the screen?

Guessing the audio is an AC3 file you rendered in Vegas? Sometimes (always?) when you render a file out to AC3 in Vegas, the audio's length is a few frames longer than the video. It's not too noticeable in regual videos but pretty obvious in looping menu backgrounds. The solution is to either chop off a few "frames" of the audio in Vegas, add a few frames to the video, or render your audio to WAV instead of AC3, and bring the WAV files into DVDA. Not sure if DVDA would render this WAV to AC3 properly or not; I shouldn't think so since it uses the same encoder, but this is the solution I've been seeing.

Here are some threads about this issue.

Rob
cspvideo wrote on 7/10/2005, 12:35 PM
Thank you for the tips. I magnified the timeline in Vegas to make sure the video and audio length are identical. I'll try the audio suggestion and reder it as a wav file and let DVDA do its magic.

Paul