Button over video, button & subpicture question

[Séamus]

Hi, I'm doing my first button over video in Scenarist and I'd like to be sure of a couple things
First off, I'm adding a subpicture and button to a cell
Now for the subpicture you can set 3 different colors and their opacity
Display color, selection color and action color

When watching the original movie, I can estimate the colors of the subpicture, but isn't there a way to look up the original colors and opacity in the IFO or something ? To have the exact same ones as the original.

Second...the subpictures for the buttons seem to be included with the subtitles that vobsub ripped. Since they have no place there, can I just remove them from the subtitles after importing? And then use them in the cells to make the buttons ?

Thx,
Seamus

[jel]

the colour information is actually in the .vob not the ifo. you can use vobedit to find that information although it takes a bit of effort.
see my post here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=66622&highlight=hulk) for some tips to finding that information and also read OxPs infinifilm guide http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/mpg/infinifilm.htm
the problem you will have though is extrapolating that information to set the colours in scenarist.
as for your second query.
for BOV to work you must have a forced subpicture of the exact same duration and start/end time as your BOV substream for you to create a button in the highlight layer, so no i would not think you should be deleting them from any stream ;)
out of curiosity, which movie are you dealing with?
j

[Séamus]

I'm working on Monty Python and The Holy Grail (disc1)

You see my thing is if these "buttonovervideo" subpictures are also present in the subtitles then they will be seen as part of the subtitle.

Since you can enable/disable the button over video from the menus, it sounds unlikely that they should be part of a normal subtitle stream

To clarify: Where I come from is DIF4U that leaves me with the bmp's of the subtitle streams, the bov subpictures are in there as well and will be imported as a subtitle stream. :confused:
(fyi, I do scenarist manually)

---
On another note, regarding forced subtitles, you tend to have a normal sst and a forced subs sst, what I do is, I only import the normal sst and then flag the subs that are part of "the forced subs sst" as Forced in the Data Editor, is this correct? Cause it always works.

[jel]

hmmm... well you should have subpics in your normal subtitle stream to correspond to those in the BOV stream, however they are usually blank - although i have seen dvds where the author was clever enough to insert a normal subtitle to correspond with the BOV.
so please check the subpics in your normal stream and confirm that they have the same pic as the BOV and are not blank - if they are and they are not supposed to be, you can simply 'paint' out the image with the background colour.
as for your 'other note' - yes that is right - well at the very least that is how i would do it :D

[RB]

Some general thoughts about Scenarist subtitle colors and BOV.

Colors:

The problem with .SST files generated by VobSub/VsRip/VsConv is that they don't specify the original color indexes. That's because Scenarist doesn't have a "Import Palette" option like Maestro. So when writing the "Color" statements into the .SST, VobSub tries to find a color in the default Scenarist palette that most closely matches the color in the original DVD palette and then writes that color index (that is, an index into the Scenarist default palette). This works quite well most of the time but sometimes it doesn't. That's also why you should always check "Copy Color Table" in IFOUpdate or the colors may get messed up.

Now the way around that I'm using is the Maestro format and converting that to SST :). VsConv writes the original color indexes in this case (save with -f "maestro"). Then all it takes to convert this to an .SST is inserting the missing
PA (0 0 255 - - - )
E1 (255 0 0 - - - )
E2 (0 0 0 - - - )
BG (255 255 255 - - - )
in the header, swapping the first two numbers in each Color and Contrast statement (Maestro expects a color/contrast index order E1, E2, P, BG but Scenarist is E2, E1, P, BG) and adding 1 to each color index number (Maestro is 0-15 but Scenarist is 1-16) and finally rename the file to .SST. I've written a batch file that performs this conversion in case anyone is interested.

Now in the preview in Scenarist the subtitle colors may look totally wrong but that doesn't matter because we now simply don't copy color tables in IFOUpdate and when everything is put back together the colors will be OK because we kept the original color palette and also specified the original color indexes in Scenarist.

BOV:

I had problems such as Scenarist not creating any buttons when I simply imported the BOV subpictures from an .SST. Normally this should work because the subs will fall right into place in the "BOV cell scene", but for me anyway, it didn't always work. What I now always do is simply dragging the BOV subs into the data editor and specify "subpicture with forced start" when Scenarist asks. The big difference here is that subs imported this way don't have a "display stop" property compared to those imported from .SST. Now you drag them into the track over the scene (cell) that will have the button(s), drop them there and they will automatically "snap" to the end of the scene. Edit the "Start time to video" to start the sub exactly at the scene boundary. Create the buttons and bingo, works 100% of the time for me.

I know the latter is contrary to what many other people/guides say in that BOV may not work if the sub is too close to a scene boundary. I now believe this may be correct for subs from an .SST (with display stop), but for my "no stop" BOV subs seems to guarantee success. It even makes sense if you ever tried to author a simple still/motion menu in Scenarist using a button sub imported from a .SST. If you try this and compile, Scenarist will barf with a message like "Subpicture for highlight stream cannot have display stop" or something along these lines. Now one can conclude that a menu cell and a "BOV cell" (which is nothing more than a motion menu) should be quite the same thing and have equal requirements... Also in all the screenshots in the Scenarist manual where they describe how to create menus, the subs are always "(no stop)" (this is what originally put me on this track).

Just my two cents :)

EDIT:

About finding selection/action color and contrast indexes for BOV: simply use MenuEdit (unregistered version is enough), it will give you the original indexes for selection/action (select the button and click Edit). Much easier than finding this information in VobEdit.

[jel]

@RB
once again, thanks for the valuable tips. would you mind if i paraphrase your advice for the guide i am writing?
I've written a batch file that performs this conversion in case anyone is interested. ...well you know how much i love batch files :rolleyes: :D :D
one question though.
when you have multiple subtitle streams have you found that you need to do this step What I now always do is simply dragging the BOV subs into the data editor and specify "subpicture with forced start" when Scenarist asks. The big difference here is that subs imported this way don't have a "display stop" property compared to those imported from .SST. Now you drag them into the track over the scene (cell) that will have the button(s), drop them there and they will automatically "snap" to the end of the scene for every subpicture, in every substream, that has the same cell times as your BOV subpics or can you simply adjust the start/end times to match?
so basically, does scenarist care if the other substreams have a "display stop" when the BOV stream does not?
cheers
j

[Séamus]

ok thanks a lot RB

BOV:
What I understand now is to drag the bov subpicture in the Data Editor, choose Subpicture with Forced Start, and then drag it over to the Track Editor, to the right cell
Question is, do I leave the bov subpictures in the subtitle stream or do I delete them to be on the safe side ?

COLORS:
And about the maestro color format...I use DIF4U which runs vobsub automatically, it needs to stay enabled in order for the calculations to be correct.
Should I re-extract the subs later with this "VsConv" and leave the sst from dif4u for what they are ?

thx

(and yes I'm interested in the batch :p )

[jel]

do I leave the bov subpictures in the subtitle stream or do I delete them to be on the safe side ?you will have to delete them prior to adding the new subpics. scenarist will complain if you overlap subtitles - well to be more accurate, it wont let you, period.

DIF4U already rips the subtitles with vsrip and uses vsconv to convert to .sst format. but yes, by the sounds of RBs method you would have to re-rip the subs manually. but i will leave that explanation to RB :D although i assume that by checking "Copy Color Table" in IFOUpdate you wouldnt have to re-rip anything as the resultant colours should be fine - you do however have to check the opacity settings in scenarist.

[influenza]

I think RB is quite right here:


I know the latter is contrary to what many other people/guides say in that BOV may not work if the sub is too close to a scene boundary. I now believe this may be correct for subs from an .SST (with display stop), but for my "no stop" BOV subs seems to guarantee success.

I also remove the stops from the subs and it works fine, no overlay problems etc. I just import the subs from the sst and then delete the stops. which is also possible of course. Quite some work tho if you have multiple sub streams.

Since I still have a BOV title sitting on my HD I might give RB's method a try next time :)

and Jel:

for every subpicture, in every substream, that has the same cell times as your BOV subpics or can you simply adjust the start/end times to match?

not every scenarist version supports this :( But 3.0 does ;)

oh and a bit off topic maybe but: I think removing the stop from the subs also solves the sub across scene thing: so a sub will be visible even if you jumped to the chapter. Didn't test that, but I believe it does. So maybe there's a way to delete those stops when importing a script or so, which would be nice and solve some problems.

[RB]

OK, I'm attaching the batch file, some mod please validate it. Just create a shortcut to it on your desktop and then drag and drop the .SON file to be converted onto the shortcut. It will create the .SST file in the same directory as the .SON file.

Now as for how to get the .SON file... I'm not using DIF4U but I suppose it creates .SUB and .IDX files somewhere using VsRip. You need to use VsConv.exe (in your DIF4U directory) to extract subs from the .idx file in Maestro format. It's command line, just run it to get available options. For example

vsconv -f "maestro" -i "d:\somedir\somesubs.idx" -o "d:\someotherdir\subs.son" -id 0 -forcedonly

[influenza]

Dif4u creates the idx files, so you can use em. But it also outputs bmps and sst files directly. If you want to use this script be sure to name the output correctly so RA can pick it up.

Well, since I qualify as some mod (just as you RB :) ) I'll validate the attachment ;). That is if you attach it :D

I better make a folder for all those usefull scripts RB produces, thanks for that.

[RB]

Hmm, thought I did attach it :) Another try... hmm, says it's already attached. OK, download here: http://home.t-online.de/home/340044300675/son2sst.zip

[Séamus]

OK, another quick question
As I'm still new to BOV I think I have to add one subpicture stream that will become my BOV stream? All normal subtitle streams must have a blank subpicture that correspends with the BOV stream?

Is the BOV stream also in the original title listed as a normal subtitle ?
:confused:

Then if all this is correct how is the author possible to make a menu option to turn off the BOV ?

[RB]

Originally posted by Séamus
OK, another quick question
As I'm still new to BOV I think I have to add one subpicture stream that will become my BOV stream?

The BOV subpictures can be in any stream, along with other subtitles. But it's usually a separate stream that contains at most a few other real text forced subs like when people speak in a foreign language.


All normal subtitle streams must have a blank subpicture that correspends with the BOV stream?


Yes, and it needs to be forced like the BOV subpicture.


Is the BOV stream also in the original title listed as a normal subtitle ?


Yes. It's really a normal subtitle, it's just there so that Scenarist can create the highlight layer and make the button visible.


Then if all this is correct how is the author possible to make a menu option to turn off the BOV?

Actually, you can't really turn it off. The button and highlight layer is present no matter what subtitle stream is selected, it's just that the button is not visible when a non-BOV subtitle stream is selected. Take any BOV DVD and with BOV turned on, write down a timecode where a button is displayed. Now play the movie with BOV turned off and press the Enter key at that timecode. Surprise :)

[Séamus]

OK, thx, that helped a lot

What I learned from doing this, is that the BOV stream can be active while any other subtitle stream is active.
They just can't overlap, a blank subpicture has to be in place

But it looks like the author did try to overlap, I'll explain
In one of the bov scenes both subtitle and bov is active
a subtitle is playing at the same time of the bov, only the bov can not be seen now
At least this is how I see it in PowerDVD

[Séamus]

To show you what I'm up against
you can find a screenshot at www.kleir.be/bov01.jpg

a scene at timecode 20:22;20 and a scene at 22:24;04
(originally this was 22:24;10 but Scenarist changes scene times for a reason I've yet to find out ;) )

Anyway in this cell there should be a bov in Subpicture 1
But subpictures 2 -10 have a normal subtitle there, I shouldn't just replace them with a blank here.
So I'm supposed to align the start/end and duration of all the subpictures, but don't exactly know how

(At timecode 22:24;11 there's a 2frame subtitle, the same as the previous one. )

If you could still find the time to give me some tips here :p

[jel]

But it looks like the author did try to overlap, I'll explain
In one of the bov scenes both subtitle and bov is active
a subtitle is playing at the same time of the bov, only the bov can not be seen now
At least this is how I see it in PowerDVD
well to paraphrase myself although i have seen dvds where the author was clever enough to insert a normal subtitle to correspond with the BOV. it happens on 'spiderman' where instead of there being blank subpics corresponding with the BOV there are 'normal' subpics at the same point.
a scene at timecode 20:22;20 and a scene at 22:24;04
(originally this was 22:24;10 but Scenarist changes scene times for a reason I've yet to find out )
someone please correct me if i am wrong but i believe that has to do with setting chapters on the nearest 'I' frame when re-encoding.
by the screen shot i am assuming that substream 1, will contain the BOV subpics?
add them using RBs method, then highlight the corresponding subpic in the next stream, and you will see some info in the bottom middle window (sorry cant remember its name right now) and it will show you start time and duration. set both to match your BOV subpic.
repeat as necessary for each stream.

@RB
as i asked earlier, would you have to remove the (with Stop) attributes from the corresponding substream BOV subpics using your method, or does it not matter?

[influenza]

I asked d3s7 to remove the stop attribute for subs when using scenaid. Hopefully this is gonna help too. :)

[Séamus]

Yes substream 1 is the BOV stream

I already figured out how to change the start/end and duration

I now imported the rest of the subtitles which I initially left out (it has 25 subtitles +the bov stream :scared: )

I'll see what comes out of it and I'll keep you guys posted :D

thx

[influenza]

25! wow that's gonna be a lot of work

[Séamus]

yep, and I'm guessing there's over 30 buttons :mad:

[RB]

Originally posted by jel
@RB
as i asked earlier, would you have to remove the (with Stop) attributes from the corresponding substream BOV subpics using your method, or does it not matter?
I always do this as it seems logical. To remove the Display Stop just set data end time to 00:00:00:00 in data editor.

@Séamus
Of course the "dummy subs" in the non-BOV subtitle streams don't have to be blank, they can be any valid subtitle, just make sure they start and end exactly where the BOV sub starts/ends.

[influenza]

Of course the "dummy subs" in the non-BOV subtitle streams don't have to be blank, they can be any valid subtitle, just make sure they start and end exactly where the BOV sub starts/ends.

What I find very annoying about BOV is that you won't have any subs. SO I usually put in the buttons in the subpicture stream of my own language. This way you also solve the dummy subpic 'problem'

[Séamus]

Wanted to let you guys know how my project was going along :)

Not so good actually :mad:
So, as you know I first imported only 10 subtitle streams and then made the BOVs. But upon importing the rest of the subtitle streams I noticed that the last 4 streams do not match at all, for any of the buttons.

These are director's comments streams. 23 - 26
www.kleir.be/bov02.jpg

I'm not sure what to do with this
The thing is, in the orginal movie, the Bovs do not work with stream 23-26 either.

thx

[Arky]

Hi Séamus, I would like to help here, but I am not entirely sure what you mean when you say that your subtitle streams "do not match at all" with your BOVs.

I am a little confused because, as I am sure you are aware, you cannot display seperate BOV sub pics simultaneously with another (i.e. language/words) subpic stream.

Hence, can you please clarify what you mean by your subs "not matching". Thanks. Hopefully we can solve this problem :)


Arky ;o)


P.S. From what I can gather from the filenames in your screenshot, you are authoring a 16:9 project (apologies if this is an incorrect assumption). Have you taken account of this aspect ratio when creating your BOV subpics?

[Séamus]

First of all, I know BOV and subtitle can't be active at the exact same time, but they can both be enabled at the same time, meaning...
-subtitle-subtitle-bov-subtitle
On the original movie, the bovs appear between 2 subtitle subs
So they're kind of mixed if you know what I mean

And yes, this is 16:9 (all subs are imported as 16:9)
But as you see in the screenshot streams 23-26, how am I supposed to align them with the other streams, should I shift the subs and change the duration or something ? (Scenarist says something about unable to create highlight because not all the streams are aligned at the bov point)

Thx for the help
My first BOV title turns out to be a nightmare :angry:

[Arky]

Thanks for clarifying that, Séamus.

Yeah, I agree that BOVs can be placed in between subs. Just making sure, not trying to teach you to suck eggs or anything.

I am accustomed to DVD SP 2, more than Scenarist, but can't you zoom up on your asset tracks? If so, is it not clear if a BOV is conflicting (i.e. trying to display at the same time) with each of your last four subtitle streams? Surely it would be readily apparent within the timeline? Again, I am not trying to teach anyone to suck eggs here, I'm just trying to eliminate possibilities, so may I ask if you had to manually edit all your other (working) subtitle streams to make room for your BOVs, and perhaps overlooked doing the same with the last four streams? Only you know the exact procedures which led your project to the current stage, so it is quite difficult for an outsider to guess where the problem may have arisen from.

Perhaps you could open your problematic subtitle streams in an editor, and manually check the timecodes match those of the working sub streams at the positions where the BOVs are supposed to appear?

What happens when you preview your project from the timeline? Do the subs still fail, or do they appear to work ok?

To be honest, I think you have already come to a logical conclusion ("should I shift the subs and change the duration?")in the sense that it might be sensible to cut your losses and just go ahead and manually edit your problematic streams so that they do fit. There's no sense in you wasting valuable time.

I apologise that I have been unable to give you a definitive answer - I would very much have liked to. It is very strange that all your other streams are working, but not your last four (although, obviously, it is common for different languages to require different sentence lengths and thus different display durations for the viewer to be able to read them in time). Well, I wish you the best of luck, and I look forward to seeing a post from you, saying that you have succeeded! :)

Kind regards,


Arky ;o)

[influenza]

What you should do (or could do) is: open the sst for one of the tracks that is alligned properly (the forced one) and compare this to the sst of one of the non alligning. The timecodes (for the buttons) should be the same. If they are not something strange has happened with the extraction of the subs. If they do something's wrong while importing.

Good Luck.

[Séamus]

Substreams 23-26 are directors commentaries
In the original movie bov does not work when one of these subtitle streams is selected, which would explain things.Bov is not meant to work with these streams.

The problem is that Scenarist complains (when building the project) if I leave them like they are.

[influenza]

isn't there a different setup between pgcs or so? Maybe you can send me the ifo so I can take a look at it

[jel]

in the sense that it might be sensible to cut your losses and just go ahead and manually edit your problematic streams so that they do fit. There's no sense in you wasting valuable time. i would tend to agree with Arky on this one ;)

correct me if i am wrong (i havent had a chance to test this personally) but by editing your BOV bitmaps to have no end duration (by removing the stop) they will 'snap' to a scenes start/end times and cannot be modfied.
now this will work on the majority of BOV titles as the BOV start/end times are usually authored so that they are the only subpictures to fall within a scene. however this is not the case with this title.
so....
what i would suggest (given the work you have already put into this) is to alter substream 23 to 26 to suit.

substream 23: looks pretty close. simply add the largest subtitle with (no stop) to that scene and adjust adjacent subpics duration to start/end outside of this scene time
substream 24: again pretty close, so repeat as above
substream 25 and 26: this is where you may have problems as there are two (relatively) long subtitles that cross this scene. open up the respective subpics in a picture viewer and see if they are the same or not. if they are the same, simply delete one of them and make the other (no Stop) and add to the scene. now if they are not the same, personally i would adjust the first subpic to be (no stop) and add to the scene and i would manually adjust the start time of the second subpic to start after the scene (eg. @ 00:22:24;04) and to end at say 00:22:25;00 and adjust the following subpics start time so there is no overlap in times (eg change start time to 00:22:25;01)
now admittedly this will result in the second subpic only being displayed for a short time but at least it will be displayed.

sorry its not a perfect solution but it should work.

good luck
j

@influenza (and i mean no offence in my question - you are after all a BOV guru) but....
i am a bit confused as to the importance of the different pgs? i was under the impression that regardless of pgc structure it was the tracks highlight that was critical for BOV and that unless you had a seperate track for the commentary, then all substreams must have an aligned subpic for BOV to work?

[Séamus]

influenza: I sent you a pm with the ifo file

I will try it like you said jel
I will adjust stream 23-26 for every bov moment

and I haven't even created half of the bovs
There's over 30 bov's in the movie :rolleyes:

[influenza]

@Jel: yes you're right (talking bout scenarist). I've seen some dvds that have a let's say strange layout. Multiple pgcs with different characteristics like pgc1 has other subs than pgc2 . Obviously authored with something else than scenarist.

But in this case that couldn't be the case, so I'm sorry for the confusion ;)

@Seamus: looked at your ifo, and it's not very special. So I can't draw any conclusions from it.