DVD Lab PRo: Problem with Easter Eggs and aliased buttons.

[Pentajet]

I would be extremely grateful is someone can help me with this. This is not a request for a fool proof guide or step-by-step tutorial. I am just asking for a suggestion as to what application is thebest to do what I want to achieve below. This is what I want to do:

Join 3 movie segments into one DVD title with multiple (two) audio tracks and four user-defined chapter points. Create 7 different DVD titles using this procedure and then joining all 7 into another DVD title conserving audio and chapter points on the smaller ones.

The DVD should look like this:

VTS01:

seg1 - seg2 -seg3 - seg 4 - seg 5 - seg 6 -........ - seg 38

Title 1: seg1 + seg 2 + seg23 + seg 38
Title 2: seg1 + seg 3 + seg24 + seg 38
Title 3: seg1 + seg 4 + seg25 + seg 38
....
Title 7: seg1 + seg8 + seg29 + seg 38
Title 8: Title 1 + Title 2 +.... + Title 7
Title 9: seg 10 + seg 18 + seg23 + seg 30
Title 10: seg 11 + seg 19 + seg24 + seg31
...
Title 15: Seg 18 + Seg 20 + seg29 + seg37
Title 16: Title 9 +.....+ Title 15
I also want to add a command to one of the menus in my DVD such that if the user presses a combination of keys (right + OK in this case) this will trigger a special feature on the DVD (a short movie).

Which application do you recommend for this? I was thinking about Adobe Encore but what I want (above) isn't listed in its features. DVD Lab Pro 2 also has a "Movie Segment" feature but it only supports one audio track and doesn't allow the user to specify chapter points. Any input would be greatly appreciatted.

[bigotti5]

Your assets consists of single segments (1 to 38)?

[Pentajet]

Yes. It's a big m2v that I split in 38 segments and I want to combine them in titles exactly as described above (such that segment 1 for instance will be the first item in the first 7 titles)

[bigotti5]

Set the big m2v into one movie in DVDLab pro. Create your chapters.
Create 16 branches (movie play-lists).
Insert needed chapters into each branch (doubleclick on each branch).
Every branch represents one title

[Pentajet]

THANKS - I will see if it can be made to work like that (I'm working on it). Thanks very much for the fast and helpful response.

[Pentajet]

OK - IT WORKED great. But I still have two problems:

How do I insert the "Easter Egg" on DVD Lab pro? There isn't any obvious function that does it and the manual (unless I overlooked something) doesn't say anything about it.

And secondly the buttons on my menu look awfully ALIASED. I am using motion menus so the buttons are only used when highlighted or selected (which is what I want) and I set both to single color (again exactly what I want) anti-aliased. But nevertheless they look awful. I have no clue what the problem might be. I designed the buttons in Adobe Photoshop & Imageready.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[bigotti5]

And secondly the buttons on my menu look awfully ALIASED. I am using motion menus so the buttons are only used when highlighted or selected (which is what I want) and I set both to single color (again exactly what I want) anti-aliased. But nevertheless they look awful. I have no clue what the problem might be. I designed the buttons in Adobe Photoshop & Imageready.

If you work with "External Subpictures" and "Antialiased" in Dvdlab the subpicture should appear as
http://members.aon.at/video.digital/sublab.png

black - opaque
blue - 60% opaque
red - 30% opaque
white - transparent

use only these four colors for your subpicture, use blue and red in photoshop for antialiasing

How do I insert the "Easter Egg" on DVD Lab pro? There isn't any obvious function that does it and the manual (unless I overlooked something) doesn't say anything about it.

Create a button on the white area of the subpicture, link to your special feature. Disable "Button Auto-route".
If "right+enter" should work from every button you have to route the right arrow from any button to your egg button.

[Pentajet]

MANY THANKS again for your precious help. I will try it. Nice to see their are people as helpful as this (I was getting mad with this stuff!).

;)

[Pentajet]

It worked! (the anti-alias part - I just finished it and I will try the Easter Egg trick tomorrow). Again many thanks for the big help. I also found a Photoshop plugin called "DVD Subpicture" by Chris Linke that will do the anti-alias part automatically.