[Christopher Smith]

I don’t do lots of dual-layer discs, but I’m pretty sure the process is in the manual. File/Advanced Burn/Format, and then at the bottom you say what you’re outputting to. You can export to Hard Drive, which will produce the images for each layer of the DVD. Then you just burn one layer folder to each DVD-R.

Make sure you tell Toast to make a DVD-ROM in UDF format. UDF is critical.

Christopher Smith

CBN WorldReach

[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

[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

[Christopher Smith]

You say that the time code stops when the video halts. I would suspect there are no \”dead frames.\” Rather, the player is struggling to read the next data. On Apple\’s DVD Player, a message informs me at such times, \”Skipping over bad sectors,\” or similar words. I believe your console is trying to read the disc, but just isn\’t telling you what it\’s doing.

Christopher Smith

CBN WorldReach

[Christopher Smith]

If the problem shows up on CRT but not computer, it sounds like an interlace issue. The other possibility is a framerate conflict, which wouldn\’t show on LCD. I must admit puzzlement why your reference NTSC monitor doesn\’t reveal issues, though. Do the timeline Sequence settings match your source video?
Somewhere there\’s a conflicting setting; nothing to do but keep looking, unfortunately.

Christopher Smith

CBN WorldReach

[Christopher Smith]

Another question: how are you delivering your project to the replication company? A dual-layer DVD won’t give them an accurate layer break for their glass master. Please excuse me if you are already making a DDP or DLT for them; those are the only format which will give the replicator a good image.

Christopher Smith

CBN WorldReach

[Christopher Smith]

Vicki,
I’m glad you got things working. It sounds like the jpg in the video track somehow displaced video vs audio? Not sure, but sometimes we never know why our solution solves the problem!

Christopher Smith

CBN WorldReach

[Christopher Smith]

Set the End Jump of the video to point to Chapter 1 of the video, and it will loop. I haven’t tried this, so perhaps you can’t End Jump a track to itself. If that is true, then use a small Slug file (black video & silence) of a second or two, End Jump from video to Slug track, then End Jump from Slug track to Video:Chapter 1. You can set First Play of the disc to the Slug track, and the disc will not only loop, but it will self-start.

Christopher Smith

CBN WorldReach

[Christopher Smith]

Kelly,

You must flag the video as 16:9 in the DVD authoring program. For example, using DVD Studio Pro, you select the track in which you’ll place this video asset, go to the Inspector panel, and select the dropdown to say “16:9 Letterbox.” The video in that track will now be displayed to fill the width of a widescreen monitor, and letterboxed on a 4:3 tv set—basically, it horizontally fills whatever display it finds, and letterboxes as needed.

I hope that the choppiness you observed improved with encoding to MPEG-2 in Vegas itself. If not, welcome to the art of DVD authoring! You’ll have to use trial-and-error to find the settings which will produce the video quality you desire.

Christopher Smith

CBN WorldReach

[Christopher Smith]

[Mike Welker] “I still can’t figure out is how to get the script to respond to whatever language/subtitle stream is selected at the start of playback.”

You write a script (“script B”) & point the end jump of the main movie to script B. You must also write Script A, which is the target of each of your menu buttons. So, viewer clicks on “English Movie” button, and it goes to Script A, which sets a variable to 1. That “1” signifies “English audio with subtitles.” Then it sends the player to the English movie.

If the viewer clicks on button “French movie,” it goes to Script A which sets the variable to 2, and then plays the movie with French subtitles and audio.

Script B simply looks to see what the variable is set to, and sends the player to the appropriate credit roll track based on that number.

Christopher Smith

CBN WorldReach