Twilight Zone subpicture problem in scenarist

[RF]

Alright, I'm about ready to shoot myself.

Late last year I did a few pretty advanced projects in Scenarist and I had gotten pretty comfortable with the in's and out's of the program. Unfortunately, I haven't used it since for anything but the most basic reauthoring.

Today I decided to reauthor Gladiator with an animated main menu and animated chapter menus ... right from the disc. I broke up the vts_01_0.vob into the separate menus using DVD2AVIdg (frankly, I don't know if there's a better way to extract the individual menus - video & audio) from that file.

I took a screencap of the main menu and loaded it in photoshop, then put blue (0,0,255) rectangles over the "play" and "scene selection" words of the menu. I removed the screencap background (so that the blue rectangles were sitting on a white background), flattened the file and saved it as mainOverlay.bmp.

After importing my m2v file (with pulldown applied) and ac3 file into Scenarist as assets and setting their drop-type to drop-frame, I added a language folder to vts01. I turned my m2v and ac3 files into a track and dragged them onto the language folder in the Scenario window.

NOTE: my main menu is actually broken into a pgc with 2 chapters, where the first chapter is the intro to the menu and the first part of the menu and the second chapter is the part of the main menu that will loop. Both chapters should have the subpicture.

After this I imported my mainOverlay.bmp into Scenarist as an asset, specifying that it should be a subpicture with forced start. I set its drop-type to drop, went to the track window, and dragged the subpicture file into the timeline. It appeared.

Now here's where things started to get weird. When I went back to the scenario window, I double-clicked the NSM flag at the top left of the cell box. The Simulation window opened and my blue boxes from my subpicture appeared, but they were slightly off. When I tried to adjust their color so that they would not be opaque, the color wouldn't change. I put a button around it and tried again ... wouldn't change.

I went back to photoshop and fixed the position of the blue boxes, flattened the pic again, resaved with same filename. Went back to scenarist, removed the subpicture from the tracks and from the data window then reimported mainOverlay.bmp as an asset, setting it as subpicture with forced start. I set the drop-type, dragged it into the appropriate tracks, went to view/simulation, the sim window popped up ... but now I can't see my subpicture. If I click on the "original subpicture" button at the top of the Sim window it shows it (but not the menu background), but when I click on the button to the right or left of that the subpicture disappears. I don't know why it's not displaying. I've tried resaving the subpicture file, restarting Scenarist and even restarting my PC.

Am I forgetting something ridiculously simple or is there something really weird going on?

[jel]

i could be worng but it sounds like you have not set your transparencies correctly.

doom9's excellent menu guide to scenarist may help give you a refresher course :)
Scenarist NT Guide (http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/mpg/scenarist.htm)

out of interest, why are you rebuilding the menu manually in scenarist?

cheers
j

[RF]

out of interest, why are you rebuilding the menu manually in scenarist?

That is the good question. After re-encoding the video, creating the new vob files with scenarist, moving the vob files to my video_ts folder and running IFOUpdate, I tried reading the directory with PowerDVD using "open DVD file on hard disk drive". That worked fine. I went through everything and it was all working.

Then I used imgtool_89 to make a drive of the appropriate folder that held audio_ts and video_ts. Then I created my image file. When the image file was done, I burned it.

When I put my DVD in my DVD player, it said "no disc". I brought it back and tried it on my PC with PowerDVD... didn't play. Loaded the image with daemon tools and tried playing it in PowerDVD ... didn't play. I restarted my PC and then remade the image ... didn't play.

Basically, PowerDVD recognizes that something is there, but when it auto-plays (or when you press the play button), it acts like it's about to play but it only happens for a split second. The play button goes grey and the other buttons light up (like would normally happen when something starts to play) but after half a second the buttons grey out again and the play button lights up.

I thought it might be that the vts sector info in the ifo was messed up. That's happened to me before, but that problem only affected playback on my standalone ... the images and discs played fine on my PC. I tried fixing it anyway in IFOEdit ... though I can hardly remember if I was even doing it right (I loaded the IFO file for the movie and chose "Get VTS Sectors"). I saved it and then tried remaking the image file ... same problem. So, basically, I have no idea why it was playing fine from folders on my HD but wouldn't play from the image created from those folders.

If someone knows how to solve this problem it would eliminate some of my re-authoring woes on the movie ... of course, I really should brush up on this stuff again.

As for the Scenarist NT Guide ... I've actually read it several times and was trying to follow it earlier today ... I seem to be doing the subpicture process just as it specifies but I can't see the stupid subpicture.

[mic]

Just a guess, but have you tried using PGCEdit to creat image from your working layout, preserving gaps?

Also (hope it doesn't sound silly) does the orig. DVD layout still play, could it be just drive sort of error where one of those files got damaged or lost before creating image?

[RF]

Just a guess, but have you tried using PGCEdit to creat image from your working layout, preserving gaps?

No, I've actually never used that program before.

Also (hope it doesn't sound silly) does the orig. DVD layout still play, could it be just drive sort of error where one of those files got damaged or lost before creating image?

the folder on my HD still plays perfectly ... but any image I make of it doesn't play.

I don't know if this fact makes an impact or gives a hint, but when I play the folder off my HD, it starts with what seems to be a blank - or at least black - pgc that run for about 3 seconds and then switches over to the first pgc with some video with is one of the Dreamworks logos.

After making an image and trying to play it seems like it loads this first blank pgc and then immediately stops.

[jel]

RF

personally, i think the problem may lie in the ifoupdating process. software players can be far more forgiving of navigational/authoring errors than a standalone.

now i know you have done this many times before so anything i say next is in no ways meant to be-little you, so ...

as you have said, you have re-encoded the main movie and re-authored in scenarist ... did you also re-author any of the extras?

have you stripped any of the extras?

are you manually re-authoring? that is, not using ReAuthorist or Scenaid?

anyways, my approach is usually to create a seperate folder eg C:\DVD_BACKUP, then copy ALL unprocessed/untouched files, into this folder in to a sub-folder - VIDEO_TS
*i would also highly recommend updating to BatchUpdateIFO 0.9.0.10b (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=84319) as it is continually updated where-as IfoUpdate is not. it also has many cool features such as a batch mode*
then, using batchupdateifo, navigate you original ifo pathname to:
c:\DVD_BACKUP\VIDEO_TS\VIDEO_TS.ifo
and the authored ifo pathname to
c:\Scenarist_folder\0\VIDEO_TS\VIDEO_TS.ifo
now, make sure you have 'move files when updating' selected in batchupdateifo's options, and check your other settings, and hit 'update'
not only will batchifoupdate update your ifos, it will also move your re-authored files to your final folder for you :)

now, personally, i prefer to use ifoedits dvd-play function, to test the final output, then use the latest version of ImgtoolClassic (ImgTool Classic 0.91.5) avaliable in doom9's software page, to create the .iso and burn with dvd decrypter.

anyways, hopefully this solves your problem, if not, post back and we can try a few other options.

when i get the chance i will also have a look at your scenarsit menu problem as well

rock on
j

[mic]

RF,

Sounds like there's a prob with your layout from your description of 3 second delay & playback, so personally I'd recommend following jel's advice.

That said, in case it might help in the future if you're unfamiliar with PgcEdit, it's a program that performs advanced editing of ifo files and such. One of it's features is when creating an image, to preserve/restore gaps between a few files written to the DVD. There's a thread or two on this feature, & if I remember correctly, the original purpose of the gaps is to make sure back up files are readable & detected.

The files themselves should be identical between DVD & hard drive, and since something was breaking during image creation, thought it might help. It still might, but at best creating a working image won't do anything for delay prob.

If following jel's advice doesn't solve the prob for some reason, PgcEdit might be able to repair it, though how is best left to someone more expert in the program.