transition video not working for chapter select?

mickbadal wrote on 6/3/2007, 3:24 PM

This is a wierd one. I created a menu-based dvd in DVDA. Standard setup - main video stream is a single MPEG with multiple chapter markers added in DVDA. There's a main menu, and I added a "scene selection" menu (right-clicked the video, selected "add scene selection") which consists of 7 pages, 6 chapters per page.

I wanted to do video transition effects when the user selected play all or scene selection, so I created two empty text-only buttons, one titled "Play All" and the other titled "Chapter selection". The "Play All" button routes to "Video 1" which then routes to the main video's chapter 1, and the "Chapter Selection" button routes to "Video 2" which then routes to The Chapter menu, page 1. (The default buttons created by DVDA don't seem to allow changing the target media, so I got around it by creating these empty buttons).

I prepared the image, and tested it using a DVD player on my computer. Both transitions videos work fine.

I then burned the image to a DVD, and tested the DVD on two different DVD players. The transition video for "Play All" (Video 1) works on both, but the transition video for "Chapter Selection" (Video 2) doesn't work; the DVD jumps right from the selection of the button to the chapter menu, and never shows the transition video. Again, both transition videos work fine in the prepared image when I test it on the PC, so I don't think there's anything wrong in my project setup.

Does anyone know what I might be missing here?

Thanks in advance,

Mickey

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 6/3/2007, 4:50 PM

This may or may not be the problem, but when setting up navigation for this sort of situation, I assume that you double-clicked on media asset (in the left-hand pane in DVDA) and then set its end action to point to the next media.

That much I assume you did.

However, what I often forget to do is, immediately after setting the "End Action," is to click (in the right-hand "Media Properties" pane), on the "Remote Buttons" option (you won't be able to select this if you have selected the menu's background media; you must have selected one of your media assets). About halfway down, click on the "+" next to "Menu." Then, set its destination to the same as your End Action.

What happens is that this setting controls what happens when you press the button on the remote (which many people think is controlled by "End Action," but it is not). If you want the navigation for the remote control to follow the same logic as end action, then these two should be set the same.

I think I will write Sony and suggest that they include a way for these to be synced together.

mickbadal wrote on 6/4/2007, 6:04 AM

Thanks so much for your reply. However I'm not sure if this is addressing the issue I'm experiencing, and I realize that my initial email may not be clear. Let me walk through the steps I did:

The project setup is - the root of the project, followed by two videos "Video 1" and "Video 2" off the root of the project (these are my transition videos), followed by "Menu" (the main menu), followed by "Scene Selection" submenu (a DVDA auto-generated scene selection menu, consisting of 6 pages with 6 chapters per page).

1) I Selected "Menu" in the left-hand pane (the main menu). The menu appeared in the middle pane.

2) I added an empty button to the menu; the button appears in the middle pane. I selected the button, and named it "Scene Selection". The button's properties now appeared in the right-hand pane.

3) In the right-hand pane (button's properties), I selected "Action", and changed "Destination" to "Video 1".

At this point (as I understand the DVDA world), I have it setup so that when the user selects the "Scene Selection" button I created, it should play Video 1.

4) Now I selected "Video 1" in the left-hand pane. Video 1's media properties appeared in the right-hand pane. In the right-hand pane (Video 1's properties), I selected "End Action", then changed "Destination" to "Scene Selection (Page 1)" (the first page of my scene selection menu).

Again as I understand the DVDA world, this final step should set it up so that after Video 1 plays, the DVD displays the first page of the Scene Selection submenu.

But when I test the DVD in two DVD players, and both times when I select the "Scene Selection" button, the DVD goes right to the scene selection page 1, without ever playing Video 1.

The interesting thing is, I followed the same steps above for a "Play All" button - the button's destination links to "Video 2", and then "Video 2" links to the media file containing all chapters. That works fine in the DVD players.

It appeared like your suggestion was attempting to solve something going wrong *after* the "Video 1" transition video plays, which is why I wasn't sure if you understood my question.

Please let me know if what you're suggesting is indeed the solution to this problem, or if not, if you have another solution.

Thanks!
Mickey

johnmeyer wrote on 6/4/2007, 7:27 AM

If you can post the DAR file on an ftp site, I'll download and take a look. I use Yousendit.com for free ftp of small files. I don't need any of the media files; just the DAR.

mickbadal wrote on 6/5/2007, 9:43 AM

Thanks John, though I'm going to hold off asking for more of your time until I do a little more testing. I tried setting up a different project in this same way, and the transition into the scene selection menu works fine in the DVD image rendered to my HD when I play it with WinDVD on the PC. (Whereas the original project doesn't work when played on the PC - it skips the scene select transition). So I need to do a little more digging in the original project and/or re-render it, perhaps something is "goofy" there.

If I can't figure it out after another pass, I'll ship the DAR over to you. Thanks for offering to look into it.

Regards,
Mickey

mickbadal wrote on 6/6/2007, 6:02 AM

Hi John,

As you suggested, I tried selecting the transition video (Video 1), "Remote Buttons", expand "Menu", and setting the Destination to "Scene Select (Page 1)". I rendered the DVD and it still didn't work - the main menu jumps right to the scene select menu, without playing the transition video.

However, I actually came up with an alternative that does work, and in my opinion has less of a delay between the transition video and scene select page 1. This is what I did - tell me what you think of this idea:

- I set Scene Select (Page 1)'s Background to be a video that flows in this manner: "screenshot of main menu > video effect > chapter menu background image". I then set the loop point to where the screenshot of the chapter menu background begins. What I liked about this is, when I had earlier tested the original approach on the PC, it seemed there was a noticeable delay after the transition video played while the scene select page 1 loaded. With the approach I'm stating here, the transition video flows immediately into the scene select menu, with no delay.

- The one drawback to this approach was that when you navigate from page 2 back to page 1 (I'll call it "backward nav") the video is played again, and in my case that was out-of-place since the video is supposed to be a transition from the main menu to the scene select. To get around this, I made a duplicate of the entire Scene Select Page 1, and set the background to just the screenshot of the scene select background image (rather than the transition video). I then routed Scene Select Page 2's "backward nav" to this duplicate page. That way, the normal Page 1 (with the transition video) is only used when the user comes off the main menu.

That's my solution for now. I realize it may appear to be overkill to the experts such as yourself, but it seemed to have a payoff in guaranteeing no delay between the transition video and scene select menu, and I was sick of trying to figure out what was going wrong with the other approach! On the other hand let me know if you think this is an approach that others could benefit from, and I'll create a new post for it.

Thanks,
Mickey

johnmeyer wrote on 6/6/2007, 6:35 AM

The DVD spec doesn't make it easy to achieve advanced effects like you are creating and therefore sometimes even simple things seem to require a kludge. If you look at the forums at the DVD Lab site (the authoring program many people used to go to before DVDA 4 in order to get scripting and other advanced features, without paying the $$$ for Adobe Encore), you'll see lots of the same discussions.