Tracks with different aspect ratios

[Noah Kadner]

That should pretty much happen naturally- if you set up your aspect ratios correctly the DVD player itself will do the proper letterboxing/pillar boxing and full framing as needed for both 4:3 and 16:9 displays…

Noah

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[Andrew Saliga]

DVDSP should do this automatically as Noah says. One tip I’d add is to make sure that there is a frame or two of black at the beginning of these tracks or the video itself. I’ve had the track start on a freeze frame of sorts while the DVD player switches to play at the correct aspect ratio.

For example, if creating a “play all” option, going from a 4:3 track to a 16:9 track may result in a a short lag where the 16:9 video is displayed at 4:3 before correcting.

Also note that 16:9 DVDs should letterbox on a 4:3 set and be full screen on a 16:9 set, but the major gotcha on this one is that this is a feature on most DVD players that must be activated via menu. Hopefully everyone realizes to enable this function on their DVD players, but I’ve realized most people don’t even notice when their TV images are distorted, know to adjust settings on their TVs, yet alone within the DVD player.

-Andrew Saliga

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[Christopher Smith]

[Sarah Soquel Morhaim] “what’s the best way to have a “PLAY ALL” function, in addition to a menu where tracks are selected individually that end jump back to the menu? … seems silly to double the content, plus can fill the disc up past capacity.”

Sarah,

Your second question hasn’t been answered yet. You have videos of different aspect ratios, so you can’t make them chapters of one track, and then create multiple Stories, one that plays all of them, and others that play one chapter and return to menu.
So, you will have to create scripts. When the user selects Play All, they are sent to a script that sets a PlayAll flag & then jumps to Video_1 (track). Each track has as its End jump to go to a script which checks for this flag.
Video_1 (a track) end jumps to Video1End (script)— if PlayAll = 1, jump Video_2 (track). If PlayAll=0, jump to Menu:whatever_button_you_want_highlighted
Video_2 (a track) end jumps to Video2End (script)— if PlayAll = 1, jump Video_3 (track). If PlayAll=0, jump to Menu:whatever_button_you_want_highlighted

Actually, you could put all the Video track end jumps into one script, and set a WhichVideo flag in a prescript for each track. It just depends on your programing style, whether you like lots of little scripts, or fewer large ones with lots of condition statements!

Christopher Smith

CBN WorldReach

[Eric Pautsch]

No need to script this at all. Actually using stories is perfect for this siutaion and also how most professional disc would be authored. The stand alone track would be the individual piece while a story of the same track would be apart of the play all. Once a story is created its a self contained title with its own end jump.

[Christopher Smith]

Thanks, Eric. Each video, itself a track, would have a single-entry story. Play All button plays Track 1:Story, which end jumps to Track 2:Story, etc. Thanks for giving us a new way of looking at stories.

Christopher Smith

CBN WorldReach

[Sarah soquel Morhaim]

Thanks for all the answers!!
(and apologies for taking longer than i’d like to say thank you.)