Creating random scenes in Scenarist

[Damo]

I'm starting a project on a scale I've not attempted before and need a little advice on if this is possable or not.

What I want to do is have say 100 5-10sec video clips, and have them randomly selected while some audio is playing.

To complicate matters, the audio has 'fast sections' and 'slow sections' and what would really make this project stand out is if I could tag some of the video clips as been either 'fast clips' or 'slow clips' (ie, the music is currently in a fast section, therefore only video clips that are tagged as been fast shall be shown.)

This then leads to how do I define what parts of the audio are 'fast' or 'slow'

BTW a fast section of audio would be were the beat is at full volume, and a slow section is during a music break down/build up.

Thanks for any help

[SomeJoe]

Random selection of short clips of video is possible with register programming, but there is no way to make the audio continuous across a change in the video clip.

That's simply the way the DVD spec is designed. Audio/subtitles/video all are bonded together -- you can't independently change one without also changing the other two.

[Damo]

Thanks

So if I edited 10 videos with the same audio, and programmed Scenarist to seamlessly randomly branch between these 10 videos (with audio already bonded) it would be very time comsuming, but would work?

[SomeJoe]

To my knowledge, I don't think you can seamlessly branch with the necessary register programming to randomly select the next portion of video. Seamless branching generally is programmed by using a continuous video broken into cells/programs using chapter markers, and having multiple PGCs define different paths through that video. If you add programming commands pre- or post-cell or program, I think it can no longer seamlessly branch.

Further, even if you could, if you randomly select a cell/program to branch to (thus, there can be several possibilities to branch to from one cell/program), the only way the audio could be continuous is if all of the possible cells/programs that you could branch to have the same audio. This would drastically increase the permutations of video and audio you would have to include on the disc to allow a semi-random nature of playback.

Unless I'm missing something, I believe that what you want to do is not going to work. Perhaps someone more familiar with Scenarist and in-depth DVD authoring can think of a way, but I don't see it.

[Damo]

It was a long shot, worth asking non the less.

Thanks for your advice.