Q: How can I have video and stills in the same VCD?

[muzman]

Hi.

I want to have several video clips and stills (slide show) on the same VCD with a simple menu to access each. I use Roxio Easy CD Creator. I know how to do video chapters accessible from a single-layer menu (thanks to the How To Guides here). What I don't know is how to create a slide show and if it can be put into the VCD as a separate chapter. Anybody tried this before?

Thanks,
Murat

[burned_once]

I use Pinnacle Studio 7 for video editing, and making slideshows is really really easy.

One of the menus lets you switch the "album" from "movies" to "photos". Then you can select a whole folder at once. If you already have them in the order you want (say, by starting the filenames with datestamps like "2002-06-14 Baby's first step.jpg"), you can click on the first one, page forward in the album to the last one, shift-click on that, and drag them en masse to the timeline.

Before you do this, be sure to set the default duration for stills in the "edit options" menu (I use 5 sec, some people may prefer longer).

You can overlay titles and stuff -- I find it helps to date stamp every couple of months in a chronological series.

You can also save a lot of space on the CD by encoding the slideshow from within Studio, because it knows there's no motion and pretty much sticks to I frames wihout creating huge and unnecessry difference frames between them.

You can add a soundtrack, or save even more space by unchecking "Include Audio" in the "Make MPEG" settings.

That's Studio -- it's cheap, it has a lot of bugs in capturing analog material, the support is non-existent, but there's a good user forum on the Pinnacle website. Fry's was selling the full version for $39 after rebate last month, and I kicked myself for having sent $80 to Pinnacle for a lousy upgrade. If you buy it, try to find the 7.07.1 update. It's the last version that really supports 352x240 capture, but it can't be used for encoding MPEG-2 with motion - bad field order. If analog cap isn't a concern, the current version is supposed to solve the MPEG-2 field order problem but who cares - TMPGenc gives better quality for free.

[MOVIEGEEK]

In Nero check "Enable Menus" or Ulead MovieFactory is good.

[vitualis]

Nero stills menus are buggy and don't work on most software DVD players and even some hardware players.

You can definitely have both stills (e.g., high resolution menus) and video clips on the same VCD.

A good option (that is free too!) is to use VCDImager +/- a GUI (VCDEasy is a very good choice).

VCDImager is probably the most powerful and flexible S/VCD authoring package in existence and VCDEasy is quite a good GUI for the beginner.

There are some guides on using VCDEasy on this site under the "User Guides" part of the forum and also here: http://www.vcdeasy.org

For information on how to author VCDs with VCDImager: http://www.vcdimager.org/guides

Good luck!

Regards.

[jackhyde]

I have used Pinnacle Studio 7 for both still slide show and editing avi files. I set the output to AVI (Pinnacle's Mpeg output sucks). Than use TMPEGEnc to create the Mpeg1 or 2. I found that Uleads DVD Movie Factory does a nice job of menus for VCD,SVCD,and DVD and then burns the final creation.