[Joe Bowden]

That’s what should happen – as long as the files are encoded the same.

[Joe Bowden]

If your video and audio aren’t muxed together and you see this, it could be that you have space between your clips.

Otherwise, if it’s already transcoded, there’s no need to re-transcode, except for audio.

[Joe Bowden]

In general, I try to make my “static” portion of a motion menu about 15 seconds. This minimizes the appearance of button highlights switching off and back on when the menu loops, and often 15 seconds is enough time for the user to choose a button, so they never see this loop.

[Joe Bowden]

It may be that the automatic button routing is messing this up somehow.

Have you tried unchecking “Automatically Route Buttons” on your originating menu? (you’ll have to manually route them)

[Joe Bowden]

Yes, there is a reason – the loop point must be at least a half second earlier than the duration of a motion menu, due to the need to correctly set a GOP for the MPEG-2 file that displays the “motion”.

But what are you using the Loop Point for? Its proper use is two-fold:

1. Delay the appearance of button highlights in the menu
2. Loop back to this timecode after the motion menu has completely played

Most commonly, one would design a motion menu video background in After Effects in which there is an opening animation, followed by the graphically-represented buttons being in a static position or opacity. The Loop Point in Encore would be set to the first frame where the buttons are in this fixed state. The end result is the motion menu plays the intro with no button highlights appearing, and then when the buttons are static, the highlight appears. Then the menu concludes playing, and loops back to this “static” state.

If you’re not looping or designing your menu in this way, then you probably shouldn’t be using the Loop Point feature.

[Joe Bowden]

Encore shouldn’t change the layout of the menu in any way except to hide the Previous or Next button, depending on the order of the menu.

So just to be clear – your originating menu has all its buttons with the appropriate button prefixes for all button types?

[Joe Bowden]

What’s your menu duration? And what are you trying to set the Loop Point timecode to?

[Joe Bowden]

I’ve successfully used this feature many times. The part where it got whacky has got me confused. You wrote:

The Previous button was in the place of the 6th Chapter button. The first chapter button was in the place of the Previous button, the second chapter button through the 6th were ‘one slot up’ – ie, C2 was in C1’s position, C3 was in C2’s position, etc..

What do you mean by “in the place”? Do you mean the buttons weren’t linked correctly?

[Joe Bowden]

Maybe it’s transcoding the audio? (multiple clips in a timeline must be transcoded to a single AC3 file to avoid drift)

[Joe Bowden]

Encore’s preview mode is inexact, and certainly doesn’t display the performance of a DVD player.

Burn a RW disc, and then test the menu in a DVD player.