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Buttons, animated menu, and loop point
So. I’ve been working on introducing an animated menu to my little home video project. I got the menu movie. I got the menu audio. I use Encore to create buttons. I set a loop point. I should mention that this is a Blu-ray project.
I am aware that Encore’s menu preview is and probably always will be a poor representation of what the final build will look like, particularly with regard to the constant pauses and whatnot, which are in abundance. There are two problems in particular I am trying to tackle.
1: Encore’s buttons seem to be “on” in a half-transparent fashion before the loop point has arrived. Obviously this defeats the careful planning which goes into developing a loop point. It’s difficult to judge whether this will happen on the final disc, because I can’t start throwing away BD-R discs just to test Encore’s bugs, and my efforts to burn test BD-R images to DVDRs (using ImgBurn) have thus far failed; the BD structure is there but they don’t automatically play, and while I can tell the PS3 to play the stream located in the STREAMS folder, that won’t do me much good insofar as testing this menu problem.
2: Once again I am encountering Encore’s known bug where it stops the build if it thinks (inaccurately) that the audio is longer than the video, this time in the case of the menu. Both audio and video were rendered by After Effects from the same project. As it happens, I’ve set it up so the audio will loop with sample-perfect precision, so obviously any trimming I end up doing to make Encore happy will destroy that effort and generate an audible pop when it loops. I’ll load the audio up and start trimming a bit at a time. Maybe I can figure out a magic formula: How many samples per second of audio do you have to lose before you defeat this old Encore bug which will probably never be fixed?
Any thoughts on 1 or 2? Would be nice to figure out why the ImgBurn burned BDR disc images aren’t automatically playing in the PS3, or whether I can breathe easy with regard to the buttons / loop point problem, or what I should be doing about the Encore audio bug.
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5 Replies
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Just an update on my own progress:
1: Encore seems to like the length of audio files after trimming only five samples. Whatever.
2: Encore definitely DOES add button graphics BEFORE the loop point, as is revealed by playing the m4v file it creates from the menu.
What the heck am I supposed to do about this? According to what I have read, Encore is not supposed to turn button graphics on until the loop point is reached. Yet there they are.
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Are you using a Mac. If so Leopard OS may contribute to the subpicture problem.
If you are using windows and you want to make a bluray regular DVD that plays on PS3, you have to edit the Index file in the BDMV file of a folder you generate with ENcore. There is a tutorial here called Bluray, regular DVD and PS3 which shows how to do this.
https://jmrser.com/Tutorials.html.John Rich
JOHNR
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Thanks for the reply. I’ll check out that tutorial video.
I’m using Windows. I am still having issues with Encore’s text. What is happening is Encore is introducing menu graphics when I type them in, but not getting rid of those graphics when I create a button from them.
This means that, say, I type in letters that are blue. Now when I turn that into a button, the non-highlighted state of the button is invisible, but invisible + blue = blue. The other two states (highlighted, activated) merely superimpose their half-opaque colors over the blue letters. And the remaining issue is that these blue letters are there from 00:00:00 till the end of the menu, regardless of the fact that I am using a loop point.
I’ve tried EVERYTHING I can think of to get rid of those letters or make them invisible. Deleting them (literally backspacing the text) from within Photoshop? Importing that into Encore causes the button to be situated in the upper-left corner of the menu. So that’s broken. Making the text 100% opaque from within Photoshop? For some reason, this produces the same result: The button is now in the upper-left corner.
I am at my wit’s end.
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Figured out a solution, yay. My small victory is that at least this frustrating problem was primarily the fault of the work-in-progress nature of Encore, rather than some kind of lapse of intuition on my part.
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You’re trying to, what – create a button that’s invisible (or at least text that’s invisible) until you select the button?
You’re going about this all wrong.
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