Help with what software is good for menus and chapters

[shashgo]

I have a movie that I want to create a DVD out of. The movie has two parts, first part is the event and the second part is the interviews.

I have so far been using pinnacle studio 12 ultimate, and I did make a dvd with three menus, M1 (the main one) pointing to M2 and M3. M2 and M3 have a button to allow the user to choose the whole movie and also has buttons to let the user choose individual scenes.
And the menus work fine, except...

When I play the dvd and in M1 select play wedding, I am redirected to M2, which is correct. In M2, when I select individual sections to play, say Ch3, it plays all the way till the end of Ch3 as it should and then returns to M2 as it should. However, while Ch3 is playing, if I hit the previous / next button, the video skips to Ch2 / Ch4. This isnt the way it should be, it should go back to the beginning of section when I hit the previous button on my remote and skip to the end of Ch2, see the RTM marker and return to M2. And if I were to select Ch1 , if I hit previous while Ch1 is playing, I am sent back to M1(the root menu) and not to M2 which is hat should happen. Same thing happens if I select M3. So it seems like the links work from the menus to the chapters but the prev and next buttons on the remote or the computer player treat the entire DVD chapter sequence as one long sequence without paying attention to the Return to menu markers.

My timeline is like this

M1 M2 Ch1 RTM2 Ch2 RTM2 Ch3 RTM2 Ch4 RTM2 Ch5 Ch6 Ch7 C8 RTM2

M3 Ch1 RTM3 Ch2 RTM3 Ch3 RTM3 Ch4 RTM3 Ch5 Ch6 Ch7 C8 RTM3

There are no previous and next buttons on any menu



The problem in a nutshell is that the menu buttons and all the chapters and the RTMs work fine, but it is still possible to skip between chapters by using the previous and next buttons on VLC player or Media Player. So Im assuming Ill see the same behavior if I burn the movie to disk and play it in a standalone DVD player

Why is this happening and how do I fix it.

And if pinnacle12 studio ultimate isnt the right tool to do what I want, what would be a good software

[guns1inger]

I know you didn't get a response to your previous posts ( https://forum.videohelp.com/topic360931.html , https://forum.videohelp.com/topic361305.html ), but please stop with the new posts. It won't get you an answer any faster.

I don't know Pinnacle, other than by reading the many posts here, most of which would scare me off it for life.

The problem you have with your structure is that in order to play a chapter in isolation, then return to the menu, you have to treat it more like a title. Once you do this you lose the chapter skip functionality. If you want them to play like chapters then you have to treat them like chapters (i.e. remove the return to menu pointers), or put manual code in to cater for the skip commands. This could be done in a more complex authoring tool like DVD Lab Pro (but you would have to begin the project again from scratch), or by using a low level editing tool like PGCEdit.

[shashgo]

ok how do I convert all the chapters to titles. Ive used pgcedit to let one link play the whole sequence of chapters and that worked. The only thing is how do I use pgcedit to get it to do what i want to do, that is have one button to select all, and have other buttons to play each section, and at the end of playing the sections (whether single section or play all), return to the nearest menu

Right now all the chapter returns work correctly , except the one for chapter 1.

How can pgcedit help fix this?

[guns1inger]

You don't want to convert the chapters to titles.

If you have a single title, with chapters stops, you can use Prev and Next buttons to skip back and forth along the timeline. However, to play a chapter by itself, then have it return to the menu negates most of the standard navigation. What you have to do it basically write code for the DVD that takes over the navigation.

I use DVD Lab Pro, and to do what you are doing I would have a single title that has all the chapters, then create chapter play lists for each chapter. I can then have a play all button, and standard chapter menu (jump in and play from the start of the chapter to the end of the title), or the option to play each chapter on it's own, then return to the menu. After that it is a matter of changing the behavior of the Next and Prev buttons to go where you need them to go, if possible.

You also have to bare in mind that the DVD spec is a pretty simple beast. You cannot program it in an infinite numbers of ways, and often you have to spend a little time working out how to work around it's limitations. For example, in DLP is is quite easy to program the Prev button to go to any title you want, but not the Next button. However you can send the Next to a menu, so you may have to create a dummy menu to move it automatically to the next title.

You might also look at DVD Remake Pro to see if it has more options for working around the spec.

[shashgo]

I created separate projects for the two sections. And they work perfectly. Project1 is the coverage of the event and Project2 is the interviews.
The chapters, the menus, and the RTMs in these projects work perfectly.

Now what I want to do is to create a project where I combine the two projects and create a menu that has two buttons that link to the menus in each of the two projects. How do I do that?

[guns1inger]

You should have created both in one project. Put each section in it's own VTS, then create a VMG menu to link the two.

If you don't want to start again, try compiling both, then attaching to them. Look up attached VTS in the help file for details.

[shashgo]

gunslinger,

Thats what I had before. I had created both projects in one file. But I had a problem of the chapter RTMs not working properly so thats why I thought maybe doing the prjects separetly and then combining them might work. But now I dont know how to combine them.

The problem is that when I played the DVD (both projects done as one file) on a standalone DVD, the previous and next buttons on the remote control allowed the user to skip from one individual section to the next or previous one even when the user chose to play individual scenes. The other problem was that the RTM at the end of ch1 and at the end of the play all section caused a return to the root menu and not to the submenu that called them.

So if you can walk me thru how to create the project correctly I would be grateful

[shashgo]

Once I create the DVD structure in Pinnacle, is there a way to preview what the DVD would play as before doing a Make Movie and creating the DVD files on the HD

[shashgo]

I have things working pretty much the way I want them to work, except for one thing. When I select play all, I want the entire sequence of chapters to play, and after modifying the DVD structure through pgcedit, I can do that. The problem is that the video from each chapter to the next is not always continuous, that is, it is evident that there is a jump in the video events from the end of chapter 1 to the beginning of chapter 2. This I fixed by using transitions (the first one fades out while the second one fades in). This works in theory, well it works if I had selected play all. However, if I choose an individual chapter (say ch 2) to play, then the chapter starts playing with the transition, and part of the video of the previous chapter (Ch 1) is played which then fades into the video of the selected chapter. This is because the Chapter marker and the RTM is placed automatically together in the middle of the transition effect.



What I would like to do is to have a fade out transition at the end of a chapter with an RTM at the end of the transition,and then have a fade in transition followed by the next chapter and a chapter marking at the beginning of the fade in transition. This I have shown below



Ch1 marker fadeout the chapter (RTM) Ch2marker fade in the chapter

<------------------chapter------------------------>



how can i do this

Also, is there a way in Pinnacle to preview how the DVD structure would play without having to first run it through the make movie process

I want to fade out a scene without having it automatically fade in the next scene. I dont see any pure fade out or fade in transition effects in pinnacle, but is there a way to do what i want, and if so, how?

[guns1inger]

Fade to black at the end of the chapter, then back from black into the next. Drop your chapter point at the middle of the transition, which will be a black screen. I don't know Pinnacle, but I would be surprised if it didn't support the most basic of fades. However if it doesn't, fake it. Create a black png file and import than onto the time line. Drag it out to be a clip, and fade to it, then fade back again.