After Effects looping menu shows black frame

[Jeff Bellune]

Burn a test RW disc and test it in a hardware and/or software DVD player. Encore’s preview is usually slower than “real” DVD players when menus loop, timelines change, etc.

-Jeff

The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0

[Lichai Cohn]

Thanks, but I already tried that. I have built the DVD and tried playing it back in VLC. I also burnt it and tried on a regular DVD-player, but both show that one frame black.

[Jeff Bellune]

Double-check the start/end frames of the footage in the AE composition, the composition length and the length of the work area. The work area won’t affect the length of the comp in Encore, but it will affect the RAM preview in AE.

-Jeff

The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0

[Lichai Cohn]

Thanks for your help again.

The Comp is 5 seconds long, however, when using the Page Down key to move one frame ahead to exactly 5 seconds (because I can’t seem to drag the CTI to exactly 5 seconds in time), I see a grey frame. I tried shortening the work area and trimming the Comp accordingly, but again the last frame is grey. In one of the tutorials here (on looping particles) I heard that a 5 sec Comp will go untill 4sec 24frames (PAL) because the first frame starts at 0sec. Is this where the problem is?

The footage is actually some Photoshop-layers with an animating mask uncovering parts of the layers.

I also tried creating a timeline from the After Effects file in Encore but when trimming the last frame off, the new last frame will be black aswell.

So it seems everything always ends with one black frame, what am I doing wrong?

[Jeff Bellune]

Is the last frame in the AE comp black? Or is it grey? This is important because black means that you have run out of footage. Grey means that you have navigated the cursor past the end of the comp.

The tutorial is correct; a five-second PAL comp runs from time 00:00 to time 4:24. This does not affect the rendered length of the comp it will still be 5 seconds) – it only affects the timecode display in the comp.

So what color is the frame at time 4:24?

-Jeff

The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0

[Lichai Cohn]

Thanks again.

In After Effects the last frame is grey, so I guess it’s just the CTI moving past the work area.

In Encore the frame is black.

[Jeff Bellune]

This seems to require some more troubleshooting in After Effects. Can you post links to the AE project file and the Photoshop file/layers? I understand completely if there are client privacy issues that would prevent that.

However, without the AE project, I’m just flying blind and can only guess at what might be wrong.

-Jeff

The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0

[Lichai Cohn]

I’ve uploaded the files here:
AE-project
PS-file

I’ve removed one layer from both files containing names of other people who worked with me on this (school)project. Those layers where static so I guess it shouldn’t make a difference.

Thanks again!

[Jeff Bellune]

I dynamically-linked the AE comp to a PAL Encore project, and then set the comp as the motion background for the menu. Encore’s preview played it perfectly with no black frame.

I did not build the project nor burn it to disc.

If you have rendered the motion menu and then adjusted the length of the menu, Encore may be using the old rendered file version for preview and build. Try moving one or more buttons on the menu, re-rendering, and then moving the buttons back (move, don’t undo) and rendering again.

Do you have audio for the menu? What is its length compared to the video?

-Jeff

The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0

[Lichai Cohn]

Thanks!

I just created a new Encoreproject to test the same two files with nothing else in the project. Here’s my steps:

I opened Encore (in the original I started by sending a project from Premiere to Encore) and started a new PAL DVD project without being able to change any other settings (all greyed out, but they were fine: 720*576, MPEG-2, 25 fps, Lower field first).

I right clicked in the project panel and hit import as menu and selected the PSD file.

I went to Adobe Dynamic Link -> Import After Effects Composition and selected the aep-file and the correct composition afterwards (menu_bg, there’s also a second version: def_menu, which I used to just paste a lot of copies of the menu_bg composition after another in case I can’t get this to work correctly for this project).

I double clicked the menu and from the Motion-tab I pickwhipped the Dynamic Linked After Effects composition from the video field.

Finally I right clicked on the menu and clicked Preview from here. Next I hit the button render currect motion menu or slideshow. 125 frames were rendered in about 10 seconds and the preview started.

And yet again I get that black frame. This is so frustrating…

I don’t use audio for the menu.