applications with thumbnail timelines?

[ricnews]

I just tried TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.5 for putting together a DVD. One feature I really liked is the way it presents a timeline for settings chapter points in a video as a series of thumbnails of the I frames in the video. I found this a good approach for finding scene changes, although the navigation could use some work. Unfortunately, I found the menu creation abilities too limiting.

Are there any other DVD Authoring programs (but not in the professional class) that use this appreach for defining chapters or that have some other system for aiding in detecting scene differences?

Thanks,
Ric

[Dimmer]

If the menu creation abilities is the only thing bothering you about TDA, you should look a bit closer. Not only you can create a custom menu, but also change the appearance of every element by resizing it and/or replacing it with a new graphic file. Go to Edit Menu Theme and double-click on every element to see the possibilities. Certainly it's the only program in its price range that allows creation of animated menus.

[ricnews]

Maybe I just don't understand the interface. I've only got 1 video file in the project, for which I've defined a number of chapter points.

What I'm trying to do is have a main page with 3 buttons. One of them starts the video from time 0. The second buttons starts the video from chapter 3. The third button opens the scene selection menu, which may be divided into a sub menu to jumpt to a range of chapters more quickly.

Is it possible to do this in TMPGEnc DVD?

If so, how do I assign a chapter to a button? I could only manage to assign a track to a button. I suppose I could use the mpeg splitter tool from TMPGEnc 2.5 to cut the movie in two pieces at the chapter 3 start frame. Then I'll have 2 tracks which I can assign to different buttons on the main page. Although, I'm not quite sure how I'd combine chapters from both tracks into the same submenu. I'll play around with this.

I tried a trial of DVDIt by Sonic and found it to be pretty complicated. I think I may stick with TDA as I find it much more intuitive to work with the other programs I've tried, especially in the timeline view.

All that's really missing are resizeable windows. Why aren't all windows resizeable? (That's my pet peeve about UIs)

[Dimmer]

Originally posted by ricnews
If so, how do I assign a chapter to a button? I could only manage to assign a track to a button. On the Create Menu screen, click Display menu settings, select Main menu and Track menu. Main menu refers to title menu, and track menu is a chapter menu for each track. In the same window, go to Chapter Display tab and select the chapters for which you want to have the thumbnails. You can also go to the Motion Menu tab and have some fun.
Originally posted by ricnews
What I'm trying to do is have a main page with 3 buttons. One of them starts the video from time 0. The second buttons starts the video from chapter 3. The third button opens the scene selection menu, which may be divided into a sub menu to jumpt to a range of chapters more quickly.
Is it possible to do this in TMPGEnc DVD? This is a tricky one because it's not possible to do this directly. There are only two levels in the menu hierarchy in this program (title and chapter). However, you can create a dummy track with few images converted to MPEG so you can use them for thumbnails. After building the project, you'll have to change the button links as desired using VobEdit/IfoEdit. These two programs are your best friends at these tasks.

Actually, a while ago when I didn't have better tools and the older versions of TDA didn't have custom menus, I used to create nice menus in DVDit and the main project in TDA adding one extra dummy title at the end. TDA creates each title each title in a separate titleset, and I would replace the last dummy one with the VTS containing menus built in DVDit. Then I would route the buttons to the desired titles/chapters through unused VMG PGC; TDA creates many of those. If you see what I'm talking about, you should be able to figure this out. Unfortunately, step-by-step guide would be too long.

By the way, that's all DVDit is good for. Apparently, it purposely creates non-standard DVD, and when you build a large project it often returns an "Unknown error" after half an hour, so you have to start all over again.

[ricnews]

That sounds fairly complicated. Probably once I pass the learning curve it won't anymore but ideally I'd like to find one app where I can do everything on the authoring side. I have no problem doing the video editing encoding in another app like TMPGenc 2.5.

I went back and played with TDA splitting the video into multiple tracks, but because the menu system is too rigid couldn't do what I wanted.

I didn't like DVDit, and as you mentioned, even in my brief experiment with it it did crash once, so I'd certainly hate to spend hours on it and lose everything.

I played briefly yesterday with Ulead DVD Workshop 2, which seemed much more user friendly than DVDIt but has a much more flexible menu creation system than TDA. It looks promosing.

That chapter creation module in TDA, though, really spoiled me for the typical system used by other programs. It's a simple idea that really works. I'm leaning towards using TDA to find the chapter points I want then copying down the frame/timecodes for reacreating them in another app like Ulead for the menu creation. Although, when I tried this with DVDIt the timecodes I got from TDA didn't correspond to the same frames in DVDIt, which perplexes me. I also tried to calculate timecodes from the frame numbers but couldn't get them to coincide with the timecodes displayed in TDA either. It's possible I don't understand the timecode syntax. My assumption was "hh:mm:ss;ff" (hours:minutes:seconds;frames), where there are 30 frames/s in my NTSC video file. Is this correct?

Or is there any way to save the chapter point info in the video files itself so it can be retreaved in another app?

Thanks again,
Ric

[Dimmer]

Originally posted by ricnews
That chapter creation module in TDA, though, really spoiled me for the typical system used by other programs. It's a simple idea that really works. I'm leaning towards using TDA to find the chapter points I want then copying down the frame/timecodes for reacreating them in another app like Ulead for the menu creation. Although, when I tried this with DVDIt the timecodes I got from TDA didn't correspond to the same frames in DVDIt, which perplexes me. I also tried to calculate timecodes from the frame numbers but couldn't get them to coincide with the timecodes displayed in TDA either. It's possible I don't understand the timecode syntax. My assumption was "hh:mm:ss;ff" (hours:minutes:seconds;frames), where there are 30 frames/s in my NTSC video file. Is this correct? There are two options to display NTSC timecodes: drop frame (formatted hh:mm:ss;ff) and non-drop frame (formatted hh:mm:ss:ff). This is to compensate for the fact that NTSC video is really 29.97fps. Drop-frame format skips two timecodes (not the actual video frames!) every minute, so after 00:00:59;29 goes 00:01:00;02. Non-drop frame format counts the frames as if it was 30fps video, so after about 40 minutes into video you start noticing that DVD player's clock is getting more and more inaccurate compared to a wall clock. TDA always uses drop-frame format. Search around, it's been covered in the forums.

Chapter info is saved in IFO files, not the video itself. There is a number of freeware programs that can extract chapter timecodes from a DVD into a text file; check the download page.

[ricnews]

Thanks for the info on timecodes. That makes more sense now. So I guess I'd need TDA to write an IFO file if I wanted to import its chapters elsewhere. I imagine if I create chapter points in TDA and use the simplest menu structure, writing the DVD file structure to a directory on the harddisk, I could import it into another authoring program with the chapter points intact, and just rework the menus.

Thanks,
Ric