[Marc Brown]

> Wow. There’s so much misinformation in that post, I feel I must specifically address some of the “observations”:

With all due respect, I did preface by saying these were my experiences alone.

> Encore has no difficulty in importing menus from Photoshop, and never has.

For a specific example, load up a menu in Photoshop, make a few layers invisible, save it, and import that into Encore.

> Any crashing you saw in this error was likely a system problem of some kind, and not a common problem.

Possibly, but immaterial, since the main point of my post was to help out folks Googling for answers, should their experiences match my own. Submissions of differing experiences will have no bearing on that. I will admit that a secondary point was to express an opinion about the state of Encore as a usable commercial product. I didn’t invent all the issues I’ve had with the product, and I can’t help but regard with some mirth the idea that Encore’s stability is less questionable than that of my or anyone’s hardware or OS.

> Why should Encore automatically turn off visibility when you convert a text layer to a button?

Simple. Encore’s own default color scheme for buttons has the non-highlighted opacity at 0%. This strongly implies that the developers of Encore knew that a user’s typical desire for buttons would be to have them invisible when they are not highlighted or activated. But this foresight is defeated if the very pixels utilized by the buttons are, by default, drawn over by text.

> Your points 7, 8, 9, and 10 are all really the same thing – transcoding status. And I’ve never seen any of them.

Point 8 can be tested. “Transcode now” an asset. “Save as” the project to a new name. Exit. Restart. Load newly-named project. Investigate transcode status of previously transcoded asset.

Point 9 can be tested. Load any raw audio and video (into a Blu-ray project, to minimize variables). Use them in a motion menu. Set transcode settings to two-pass H.264. Set a loop point. Do not transcode either. Build the disc. When completed, the audio will reflect its new transcoded status. The video will not. Confirmed a half dozen times. However, this ties in with point 17, so I’m willing to drop it, with the caveat that I regard Encore’s menu transcoding shenanigans as dubious, bordering on flawed. Once Adobe allows one to properly make use of AVC for menus, all this will be moot.

> If the asset is MPEG-2 or H.264, then the chapter has to be on a GOP. That could be up to 1/2 second away from where you set it, which is what you’re describing.

I can only speak from experience. I had Encore create my .M4V from raw video, using chapters at specific frames, with which it should theoretically have generated i-frames. I then created a new project and used the Encore-generated .M4V as an asset, and assigned the chapters to the same specific frames as before. Encore did not indicate any lack of validity for the chapter points; indeed, it showed the frames properly in the timeline and monitor. But half of the final disc’s chapters were half a second early. I feel confident in concluding that Encore is at fault here, either for failing to generate i-frames where it was told, or failing to accept some i-frames as valid for chapter points. In either case, a built-in i-frame indicator would be a welcome – I would say foregone – feature. I haven’t used any other DVD authoring application which so thoroughly lacked the means.

> You obviously were using the wrong selection tool.

I suppose I can’t blame you for assuming I was unable to grasp this facet of the various Adobe products. Nonetheless, I was. None of the various selection tools were able to find the buttons, I assure you. If I still had Encore and my various project files available to me, I would have been more than happy to forward an example project.

> There are certainly times when an author would like the stream order to match what’s in the Flowchart, but again, that’s not the only use case, and the Flowchart isn’t the ideal method for this anyway, since DVD navigation hierarchy is not timeline-only.

If we want to carry it that far, then obviously the true solution would be for Encore to give the user control over what gets muxed / burned in what order. But since Encore does not enable this, the next best thing – perhaps only in my mind – would be to follow the flowchart, since the point of the flowchart is the organization and play order of the assets. I would argue that ignoring the flowchart in favor of the order of construction of timelines is a lesser choice.

[Marc Brown]

Shrug. I already gave mpeg2 a whirl, thinking perhaps Encore was doing the dual stream thing exclusively with AVC material. I used the .M2V that encore itself generated (for no apparent reason) during a previous build. It still re-rendered the menu, and it still developed two menu streams.

I like how it says the disc is going to be ~700MB and then the result is double that, thanks to this undocumented flaw.

[Marc Brown]

I’ve recently made an interesting observation. It seems that Encore does its “rendering menu” process, what it is producing every time, regardless of the encode settings or the desires of the user, is an .M2V file. With no audio. Is it a safe guess that it is then using this mpeg2 file to create its menu streams?

In any event, I’m currently making a new build, this time using a “don’t transcode” menu asset. As I’m watching, the first stream it creates is 00000.m2ts, the full menu stream. Then it begins working on 00002.m2ts, the main video, apparently saving 00001.m2ts for the truncated menu. Anyway, it clearly did not prevent Encore from deciding it needs to make two menu streams.

I don’t know what to say. I’ll believe Encore can make a Blu-ray menu stream with buttons temporarily off when I see it with my own eyes.

[Marc Brown]

Just an update. I’ve just recently played my various builds on a software player. As a test, I temporarily removed the shorter menu stream. If Encore’s build played the main menu stream fully before switching to the shortened version, then the software player should have proceeded without error. But the software player definitely didn’t like having shortened menu stream gone: Once it got to the critical point where the buttons appear, it froze playback, as one would expect if it was attempting to switch to a new video.

So there you have it. There is no doubt that Encore is building the menu to switch to a new stream once the buttons appear.

Perhaps it has something to do with the nature of button creation? Keep in mind that I build my buttons from within Encore.

[Marc Brown]

By the way, I just wanted to clarify a point.

You say it plays the full menu before switching to the shortened version. It may be that my discs are doing this also; it’s impossible for me to know for certain without doing something like burning a BD-R which is missing the shorter menu stream, to see what happens. But it is still a fact that once my menu reaches the loop point these two things happen: It pauses for about a second, and once it finishes pausing, the “play” triangle (indicating the start of a new video, on the PS3) appears in the lower left. To me, these two phenomena clearly indicate a switch from the full menu stream to the shortened one.

So I guess what I’m wondering is whether or not you see any pauses or other things when your menu reaches the loop point, regardless of whether it’s apparently still playing the main menu stream.

[Marc Brown]

Okay. Currently scrambling to finish up the new iteration of the movie based on the recommendation to go ahead and split the menu into two chunks (I’ll need it in-hand tomorrow), but once I’ve got that working, I’ll reconstruct a project with a menu that gets split and played badly.

I may also try some experimentation. For example, what will Encore do if I devise a menu using an asset it flags as “don’t transcode”? This one has already made me curious. You see, I’ve created a disc build using menu assets that I told Encore to “transcode now” prior to the build. So when Encore ultimately creates its two menu streams, what is it doing in order to create the shorter stream? Re-transcoding the already-transcoded video? Or is it referencing the raw original? Perhaps if Encore doesn’t have the option of referencing a raw original, it will give me a disc which plays the menu fully once, as your experience happily (and frustratingly) suggests.

[Marc Brown]

> I can confirm this is exactly what happens with Blu-ray.

I’m going to tentatively conclude that this means the menu button / loop point issue is an undocumented limitation of Encore’s Blu-ray implementation, and that there is no workaround.

If that’s the case, then color me astonished. Does nobody create menus for their Blu-ray projects? This problem would pop up the first time anyone used a loop point for any reason whatsoever. The menu pauses and the player starts a new video, with all the unwanted consequences that entails. It would be difficult to fail to notice such a phenomenon, particularly since anyone working with Blu-ray is probably giving image quality / integrity a high priority.

What makes this episode particularly disgusting – besides the fact that there is literally no way, in this particular case, for me to rework my menu to rescue all that effort – is that anyone who knows about this rather sad hidden limitation could save some disc space by changing their flowchart:

Full menu -> chapter 1

to

Menu intro -> rest of menu -> chapter 1

The stupid pause between “menu intro” and “rest of menu” would still be there, but at least Encore would not wastefully render almost the entire menu twice and then use only the first bit of one of those streams on the actual disc.

[Marc Brown]

This is Blu-ray. Although the two are effectively interchangeable in Encore. The DVD format certainly doesn’t exclusively possess the rudimentary capability of delaying the activation of buttons.

[Marc Brown]

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.

[Marc Brown]

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.