Scenarist - Quick way to make PGC's?

[drpop]

A project that I have just inherited, requires me to use a LOT of PGC's that are very similar. And i am hoping that there is some trick, either in Scenarist itself or by scripting, that might make things a tad faster.

I shall try to explain further.

The project is essentially a DVD quiz. Each question is a PGC, and each of these is a single jpg slideshow (q1.jpg, q2.jpg.....) with a 3 button nav. Each PGC, uses the same sub-picture, and to an extent the same GPRM and virtual machine commands. The only difference in each PGC is the track source content, i.e. q1.jpg, q2.jpg..........

There are 500 of these PGC's in a single VTS.

I've had a play with copy/paste in scenarist's track and scenario editors, but i cant really fathom a way to simply change source material on a PGC by PGC basis. I dared delve into a script file to see if there was anything glaringly obvious in there.. but I got a headache very quickly afterwards.

So, does anyone have any ideas?

Thx

[drpop]

Ive changed the angle of attack on this project. I am now using multiple slideshows within the same pcg, and utilising cell commands. While this takes care of some of the replicating GPRM commands, i am still stuck with having manually add the subpics and highlights on every track.

Is the a way of mass applying the same Subpic and Highlight settings to multiple tracks? I've tried copy and pasteing a single track and manually editing the source file, but this just seems change the source file on every copied instance.

Ideally i would like to copy and paste, the sub and highlights from track to track. Anyone know if this is posssible?

thx.

[dgoodbourn]

Unfortunately, the only real way of doing this without manually adding the PGCs in Scenarist, is by altering the script. There are many ways this can be done, but you're gonna have to get your head around the script. Once you become familiar with what is needed to create a PGC with content from the track editor and commands, then it's very easy to expand that script to create a 500 page quiz. This sort of DVD is what Zoo Digitals' DVD Extra was created for. But it's very expensive. If you have the time, start working through the script section by section. It'll payoff in the future because you'll be able to do more with Scenarist.

Good Luck,
D.

[drpop]

thanks for the reply, I have been messing about with find and replace in the script file, but am running into a brick wall with the % characters in the script. Can you recommend a good script editor?

[dgoodbourn]

Not one that'll help with the Scenarist script. I just use wordpad some of my work. If you're just replacing commands in bulk there are a few tools which do find and replace very very fast. Just search the web! ;)

D.

[drpop]

Before posting yesterday I trawled around google and download a large selection of code/txt editors. Only one of these seemed to be able to deal with 'phrases' of text or sections of code/scipt, rather than simple 3 or 4 word replacment. That was HTMLkit (http://www.chami.com/html-kit/) .

This however interprated the % symbols in the script as something totally alien in the text replacement routine. As a solution I first replaced all of the % symbols for a $ symbol. Did all of my 1999 code replacements, and then converted every $ back to a %.

This seems to work, and am now in hour 2 of the biggest scenarist script import I have ever done.

Cross fingers.

[dgoodbourn]

Just as a side note, but what os are your running Scenarist on?

D.

[drpop]

windows XPpro SP2