Adding Menus and Chapter to standalone DVD-R

[Jera]

Hey Guys,

Trying to add meus and chapters too some concert videos that were VHS-standalone DVD-R transfers, and realizing it's not as easy as I thought.

A friend of mine does it with Sony Architect, and said that there is no re-encoding so there is no generation loss. What do I use for Mac??? Tell me that the PC is not superior in this instance??

Thanks in advance!

Chris

[Frobozz]

I've used CaptyDVD 2 for this because it has motion menus with sound and lets you choose the chapter points and create a chapter menu with thumbnails and text descriptions. First you must extract the MPEGs from the DVD in order for CaptyDVD 2 to author a new VIDEO_TS.

This application is bundled with the LaCie Fastcoder that - last I looked - is being closed out for $49 on the LaCie site. It also is sold for $70 at www.pixela-1.com.

An alternative is to use Toast 7 which can create a chapter (or scene) menu using existing chapter markers from your DVD. The chapter menu has no text, however, and you don't get to choose the thumbnail image for each chapter, either. If your weren't able to place chapter markers at the start of each song using your standalone recorder, then Toast automatically places them at 5-minute intervals which wouldn't serve your need.

[pixel zombie]

Toast can do this but it's very flakey as it sometimes likes to re-encode even when the source files are ripped from a DVD...you could also look into myDVDEdit but that progam isn't easy to figure out...

[Jera]

I've used CaptyDVD 2 for this because it has motion menus with sound and lets you choose the chapter points and create a chapter menu with thumbnails and text descriptions. First you must extract the MPEGs from the DVD in order for CaptyDVD 2 to author a new VIDEO_TS.

.

What's the best way yo extract the Mpeg's from the DVD without losing any quality in video and sound? I read on Apple's page and re-encoding would lead to genereation loss, which I want to avoid.

Can you do chapter marks in Capty DVD?

Thanks!

[Frobozz]

You can use MPEG Streamclip, Toast 7 or Cinematize to easily extract the muxed MPEGs from the DVD with no re-encoding. There won't be any loss of quality.

CaptyDVD has a feature for placing specific chapter markers anywhere in the video. It then has an option for creating a chapter menu. It's not quick to learn. For example, you're not told that you need to place a chapter marker at the very beginning or your movie will start playing from the where you placed your first marker. When you use the MPEG video for motion menu clips, it plays too fast. I can help you through that mess or you can just choose not to use clips from the video in your motion menu.

One other thing: With either Toast or CaptyDVD when you press the title that comes up on the main menu, you go to the chapter menu. When you press the first (or any other chapter) the movie starts playing. So it always takes pressing twice to start the movie's playback.

One thing you need to do is choose Save as Disc Image or Save as VIDEO_TS rather than clicking the burn button. That way you can preview the menus and how the disc plays using DVD Player before burning any discs.

[Jera]

Thanks!

MPEG Stream clip worked great, fast too.

Imported my mpeg2 and ac3 into DVD Studio no problem. Building the menus now.

Thanks again!

Chris