looping menus in Scenarist

[JIM E]

I am using Scenarist to author a DVD. I want to play a 10 second clip and then show the title menu. And I want the audio to carry over from the clip to the menu. I simply can't figure out how to do this. The best I can do is to create 2 tracks, one with the clip and one with the menu. I set a post command in the clip that makes it jump to the menu. This presents two problems though. There is a short, half second pause between the clip and the menu. I don't want this, I want it to be fluent. Also, the audio doesn't carry over from the clip to the menu which I want it to do. Any help would be appreciated.

[freestyler]

I would try this: make your menu a video file, essentially two menus - one motion, one static - have the motion menu be the clip fading into the menu, and have your static menu be the menu that the movie comes back to (main menu).

That's a more seamless workaround that you could consider.

[JIM E]

I tried what you said, but there is still that half second pause in between the tracks. Does anyone else know a solution to this?

[adam]

If you set the items to seamless it will remove the pause but you probably won't be able to get the audio to play seamlessly.

The correct way to author such a disk is to make a single track with the motion part and the still pic all together. I mean physically encode it all to one mpeg stream. After it gets to the still pic, it esentially just plays that frame over and over again until the audio ends.

You can easily do this with any NLE video program like Adobe premiere.

If you don't have access to such a program you can use TMPGenc. Just make sure that the last frame in your motion part will work as the menu still. Just add this motion clip as the video and then load your audio source. TMPGenc will repeat the last frame for the duration of the audio.

In Scenarist, you can insert a chapter point at the beginning of this still part and then have all links point back to it. This way the motion part only plays the first time you start the disk. So when you, say jump from the chapter menus back to the main menu, you don't have to watch the intro again...unless you want to.

[JIM E]

OK. That's all well and good. But the video will still cut off as soon as the audio ends. How do you make it so that the menu will play indefinitely?

[adam]

You just make the appropriate links. If you just want the entire motion clip to play endlessly then on the Scenario tab click on the "cell" button and drag and drop the line back to that PGC.

If you want it to only play the intro, then endlessly play the still part, then insert a chapter point where the motion part ends. So now you have 2 cells. Then you can just click on the "cell" button for the 2nd cell and drag and drop the line onto itself. (generally you don't want to link a cell to itself but for your purposes it is fine.)

This is just basic authoring. When clip A finishes where do you want it to go? Back to the start of A? Ok fine, than link it. Just connect the dots.

[JIM E]

Almost perfect. The only problem now is that the first frame of every clip is is always shifted down a few pixels by Scenarist. I just noticed this now. So when the video has finished playing, and the still menu plays (the last second of the video clip is the same picture as the still menu), it looks the whole picture shifts down a pixel or two. It may not seem like much, but it is highly noticable. It does this to the first frame of every clip (or maybe the first few frames. Can't tell).

[adam]

I can't imagine how Scenarist could be making the clips shift. Are you sure that the motion parts aren't just slightly different from the still parts?

Did you do anything differently to the one asset that you didn't to the other? For instance, if you encode in CCE with the top field first option enabled it shifts everything by one pixel, which could definitely cause something similar to what you are seeing.

[JIM E]

I did everything the came for both clips. I even tried it with differents clips. Like motion clips. For the first split second the picture is shifted down a little bit, and then back to normal. I checked the clip in WinDVD just to make sure that it wasn't my clip that was doing that. It worked fine in WinDVD, so Scenarist must be causing it. One solution that I found works is to make the still clip about 10 secs long, then insert a chapter at about 8 secs so it just played the last 2 secs over and over again. Since this way it never does play the first few frames of the clip, the picture doesn't shift. However, this means that I have to make a 10 sec clip as opposed to a still picture. It would be better if could use just the still.