Short films from 2 DVDs to a new DVD + adding logo. Help...

[stewie]

Didn't really know where to post this, so I'll try here.

Here's what I need help with.

I'm getting a couple of DVDs from a client containing several short films on each disc. My job is to make a new single DVD from some (possibly all) of these short films and add my client's company logo in the upper right corner of all the films. And it should be easy for my client to either loop the whole set of films or program to shuffle them around in an infinite loop.

Any suggestions on how to accomplish this? Some good software that I can use?

[Baldrick]

You must reencode all the video if you want a permanent logo. You could use virtualdubmpeg2 to directly open vobs(if several vobs use vob2mpeg to join) -> add logo filter -> output to avi or frameserve -> encode to dvd -> author a new DVD.

[stewie]

I'm guessing I could output the vobs to DV AVI in VirtualDubMPEG2 and then add the logo in Premiere. Perhaps that would be the easiest way?

What I was looking for was really a way to add the logo without having to reencode the video so many times to different formats (vob to avi to mpeg2 to finished dvd). Mainly because that's so enormously time consuming. But perhaps there is no such way...

[Abond]

Probably there is a way, though I am not sure how to accomplish in detail. It should be possible in theory to make a forced subtitle stream with the only one subtitle which has the duration as the movie and a positioning in the upper right corner. Though it sounds also time consuming...

[manono]

Yes, making a subtitle out of it would be the way to go. I don't think that making a Forced Sub out of it would be strong enough though, as they can be turned off at the remote, can't they? You can set it with a PUO (Prohibited User Operation) to keep it from being turned off. I'm aware of some English language movie DVDs released by a French company that have French subs that can't be turned off because of PUO (and they're not burned into the video). These are otherwise good quality DVDs, and it infuriates the English speakers that buy them. Doing it that way would mean no reencoding of the video.

I know how to get the subs into the DVD and how to set the PUO, but I don't know how to turn a bitmap of the logo into a substream. There must be a fairly easy way to do that, though. Maybe someone else knows.