Menu with animated subpicture: doable, but...

[DaRat]

(I had this post typed in halfway when H+ crashed my comp as usual (see below :D) so it's a poor reproduction of my longer guide (well, sort of). :-/ and now I can't think of any "intro" for this post... :D)

There is a another thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?threadid=37074) discussing this topic, but it went dead and I don't want to resurrect it. :D (I guess new topics get more attention, at least I hope so)

[there was lots of bullshit about my ego, skills and stuff like that... :D]

So, i imported my subpics, made my highlight layer, copied it over, etc. I finaly got to the point to compile. I got the same error as the others, the one screaming about the HLI buffer but quite suprisingly Scenarist compiled the project. It still had errors, the biggest problem was it didn't had any buttons, neither in sw plaxers (I use mostly pdvd 5) nor in my H+ (driver 2.41). :devil:

After a few more unsuccesful tries I searched with google, searched the forum, read through dvd-dem. but found nothing about the minimum duration/space between highlights. Anyway it's unclear if I have to make the highlight certain long (eg: a cell has to be .4 secs at least) or if I have to leave some space between highlights. The first could not be true since I can make a 1 frame long highlight, no complains about it, and the second is just ridiculous since we all saw/did titles with kinda animated subpictures (think about the Spidey menus here). So there should be some issue when both of theese conditions met, short highlight layers with no real space between them. No info. :(

I guess you can have a new highlight layer every nav packet, meaning at least 10 frames. I did a encode with /i/i/i/i.. frame distribution, the mux engine put 10 gop in a vobu, quite a shock (exactly what S tells us about minimum cell length!). :D Anyway because the highlight is stored once every vobu it is safe to assume you can update the highlight (colors, button positions, etc) only on a vobu level. Okay, i tried this, imported a subpicture every 12 frames (video was 3/4 n/m), made and copied over highlight layer, compiled. No matter what I did Scenarist froze after the error. Anyway this is only about 2fps for the sp stream, so I left it there.

Next trick was to manualy edit the highlight start and end times for every vobu, also set "1" for highlight srtatus (guess it means "new highlight in town" or something similar). This was quite a fun to do, so I decided to make a 5 sec clip, it had a reasonlable 12 vobus. The H+ crashed the whole comp right away (well, not THAT fast, i guess after the first vobu or so), pdvd on the other hand displayed it but the highlight was flckering twice every second (PAL land, 12 vs 25 :D). I tried setting highlight status back to 2 but then I got the same result as the original Scenarist compile: highlight only on the first frame... :(

After that I checked the settings for a normal motion menu. It had the highlight from the begining to the end, same setting each vobu so I did this to my li'l test thing. Suprisingly enough all five seconds works flawlessly in pdvd, subpicture is animated, buttons selectable and have navigation between them. Altough pdvd incorrectly displays the colors, it does the trick. The H+ is a another story again, it plays the first 3-4 secs fine, then it freezes, sometimes crashing the computer. But it works in software.

One explanation could be for that behaviour is the decoding chip is overwhelmed by the qty of data it gets and has to display, in the sw simulation window the playing of the subpicture layer is smooth but takes almost 7 secs. Probably the inferior cpu of the player(it is at least compared to a pc's) simply cannot maintain the 25fps rate of the subpictures and when the gap became too big it freezes. Or i dunno.


Anyway, here's what I did for my test: a 5 sec render (125 frames), compressed with cce, vbr multipass, N/M=1, GOP header every 1 frames, subpicture rendered also, imported with sst script, set to forced start, highlight layer made for the first frame (2 buttons, links between them) then copied over 124 times, first highlight layer deleted (so Scenarist will treat this as a "no highlight" and won't complain, anyway we will edit this later), compiled the project, set highlight start and end times, as well button end ttimes as video start and end times.


edit: download the whole project from my next post.


After messign about 13 hrs straight with this please excuse me, I cannot focus on nothing, not even what I'm writing... :D :D If you think this is stupid or you have a comment or would like to add something or just want to write a few words or even if you only want to make your counter spin, make a comment. :D

[RB]

Amazing, many thanks! Do you feel like sharing the project?

[DaRat]

Oky, here's the scenario (http://darat.uw.hu/button_test.zip) with everything you'd need. Place into any directory and then subst the "button_test" directory as "Y:" and you should be fine. Also there is a "0.bak" directory containing the working version.

Also I noticed that my H+ won't like the simple 25fps subpic stream, it simply crashes the comp but having one such stream is totaly legit. So I guess the card itself is the root of the problem (reverting back to older drivers won't help)... :-/ Unortunately I don't have MIB or Ghostbusters so right now I cannot test if thoose work tough the Spidey chevrons are doing just fine. If any of you have a H+ and can get your hands on MIB, GhostBusters or any other title (ecven the Demystified demo disc is fine) using animated subpic stream could you verify if the H+ wcrashes on thoose too? Pretty please? :D

Also I'd like to ask if anyone does some testing with it on a standalone (I will on several different models) please post the results here. Thanks. (since I really don't know yet how this behaves on a standalon I'd like to warn you: test at your own risk! :D:D:D)

[RB]

Thanks! Will report back soon.

[Clown shoes]

Will start testing now DaRat, then get back to you.

Clown Shoes

[DaRat]

(note: I typed it last night just wanted to correct it heer and there but after a bit of testing I had to make major modifications for some parts. :D Also I use Scenariist 2.7.0.0241)

Thanks for your testing guys. I still did not had time to do some testing on standalones tough. :(

Here are some new info on the subject: it seems that whatever you definie in the first nav pack (where you set the status of subip to 1) sets the highlight nformation as long as you have the subpicture status set to 2. This means it seems to be quite enough to change the start and end times in the first nav pack but this is only a wild guess based on the behaviour of pdvd. Because of this behaviour it's it seems pretty solid that you cannot have a animated highlight.. :( More precisely you can have one, by changing subpicture status to 1 and set new coords to buttons but in this case the highlighted button will blink each time you assign a new highlight layer. (however it turned out this goes for pdvd5 only!)

It also turned out that you won't have to copy-paste the highlight info all along the timeline, just create your buttons, links, commands, etc then copy-paste the highlight info for one more frame, delete the first one (so you have a highlight layer only for frame2 -> no stupid hli_buffer error msg) and voila! Saves a sh*tloads of work for you since you won'T have to set each button command frame by frame. (but this won't matter as you can see above) Again, quite interestingly Scenarist will create a highlight all along the clip with start and end times for frame2, but changing it in the first nav pack will fix all your stream. (while S creates the highlight info for all nav packs you still have to modify all of them, see below)

Other news, sad ones. Did a few tests with other sw players. WinDVD5 puts out the highlight correctly (tough it needs all the nav packs highligh start/end times adjusted, this could mean it's might be possible to create a "animated" highlight) but the subpicture itself is crap. Every 5-8th subpicture is shown only (does this pile'o'crap play the mib or gbers or any such title correctly?). On the other hand cinemaster2k shows the subpictures just fine but the highlight is all messed up, renews highlight info every frame so it's crap, again. WinDDV4 won't output either, i don't have pdvd4 right now.

This leads to 3 conclusions: 1) animated subpictures (especially with highlight info) are against dvd-specs (obviously wrong, at least the first part) or 2) scenarist is not able to output a normal vob with animated subpictures (unlikely) or 3) except pdvd doesn't worth crap and won't comply to dvd-specs. Either way i'd like to see how this performs on various standalones (namely sony, panasonic, philips and some cheap noname players) so we shall see if it's the problem of the sw players, problem of S itself or it's b.a.d. altogether. :D

[D3s7]

Originally posted by DaRat
The first could not be true since I can make a 1 frame long highlight, no complains about it, and the second is just ridiculous since we all saw/did titles with kinda animated subpictures (think about the Spidey menus here).


Any insight on how you did the Spidey menus? I'm working with Zeul on them (author of numenu4u) and getting the HLI kill scenarist errors w/ the 1sec no gap between highlights..

[Arky]

You might find this (http://www.tfdvdedit.com/public/102.cfm) of interest. It looked great on a 62" plasma at NAB.


All the best,

Arky ;o)

[dgoodbourn]

If you're in the UK, check out the 'Bad Girls Season 4 box-set', and 'Dick & Dom In Da Bungalow'. The 'Dick & Dom' disc has an animated highlight/subpicture all the way through the feature, and the 'Bad Girls' set has animated highlights on most menus (a bit like the spiderman 1 flashing).

D.

[Arky]

Back To The Future 1 (PAL, Region 2) has a couple of nice animated subs throughout the main feature (I particularly like the animated Delorean with exhaust smoke, which drives diagonally across the screen), if you enable the optional 'Interesting Facts' feature.


Arky ;o)

[NavPak]

24 season 1 (region 2) has animated highlights too but they aren't the simple highlights like spidey. Didn't house of horrors have some killa menus too?

NP_2

[D3s7]

I was thinking more about reauthoring it in Scenarist...

Apparently 2 highlight plays much be > 2seconds which is difficult when the subs are 1sec long each :)

still working on that

[dgoodbourn]

@ NavPak: 24 season 1 (region 2) doesn't have animated highlights in the true sense of the word. They have standard still highlights which are using the reveal video behind trick. Looks great, but you can only do it on a solid colour background, so slightly limited.

@ D3s7: What version of Scenarist are you using?

D.

[D3s7]

2.7 primarly but I have 3.0 as well..

both seem to suffer from the 2sec item....

[DaRat]

Originally posted by Arky
You might find this (http://www.tfdvdedit.com/public/102.cfm) of interest. It looked great on a 62" plasma at NAB.


Thanks for the link, Arky! After all I was on the right course with the nav packs, of course TF's copy-paste method is much-much more user friendly than editing each navpack by hand. :D However I still suffer from technical issues with this method. When I make a 25fps subpics stream for my video (and not even definie a highlight) pdvd plays fine but that's just it. H+ crashes and takes the rest of the comp with it (there's not even a memory dump screen), windvd freezes or exits (seems random :D), cineplaya and other players plays the video fine but can't keep up displaying the subpictures. I tried to mux with IfoEdit, same results. I seriously doubt that two different muxing engines (one being a pro application and the other being freeware) makes the same mistake.

Arky or anyone else who has a title with real animated subpictures could you please, pretty please check if the feature works in windvd? That would answer me all my questions. Many thanks in advance.

[NavPak]

24 Season 1, ok cool.

The animated highlights (Spidey 1, R2) work on mac dvd player but I'll check on Win software players tomorrow if no-one gets back to you,

NP_2

[DaRat]

Thanks NavPak, but Spidey's subpictures are 1 per sec (or something like that if I'm not mistaken) and it's ot a problem for neither the H+ or WinDVD. The problem arises only when the sp stream contains shorter subpics than the gop at the specified time. (<< my best guess after trial & error). I never seen a true 25 fps subpics stream but now I'm desperately try to get hold of one. Thanks anyways.

[mpucoder]

Well, I don't know if there's a PAL version of the DVD Demystified demo disk. On my (NTSC) disk there is a true 30fps subpicture stream.
Last time I checked with WinDVD (which was when I got the book and disk) it worked OK.

edit: I just tried it with crappy NeroVision and it works. Sorry, I don't use software players. The only reason NeroVision is there is it was bundled with my burner.

There is a trick to making the subpictures so that they work at high framerates. The trick is each subpicture except the last has no duration, ie there is only one SP_DCSQT to define and start the subpicture, but no delayed second SP_DCSQT to turn it off.
The subpictures must be multiplexed properly, too (IfoEdit will not).

[dgoodbourn]

It is possible to get a seemless display of subpictures from 1 to 2 frames long, but you have to be clever in your encoding, and not all software will mux it either. But I've done 2f long subpictures with highlights, and had no problems with any software players that I tried. It did have some issues with a couple of set-tops, but so does Spiderman, it's just the very cheap players.

D.

[welshbird]

Originally posted by dgoodbourn
If you're in the UK, check out the 'Bad Girls Season 4 box-set', and 'Dick & Dom In Da Bungalow'. The 'Dick & Dom' disc has an animated highlight/subpicture all the way through the feature, and the 'Bad Girls' set has animated highlights on most menus (a bit like the spiderman 1 flashing).

D.

Nah these discs were badly authored ;)

[dgoodbourn]

That's a bit harsh Welshbird, do any better yourself :angry: if you can!!!

[welshbird]

Originally posted by dgoodbourn
That's a bit harsh Welshbird, do any better yourself :angry: if you can!!!

:stupid: :D

sticks and stones blah blah blah

[dgoodbourn]

You are indeed a funny welshbird!

[welshbird]

Originally posted by dgoodbourn
You are indeed a funny welshbird!

yes but I'm funny Peculiar not funny ha ha :sly:

[Crazyjoe]

Finally I now have come to a project were I would like to implement an animated highlight for the mainmenu. Therefore I studied every thread I could find about this topic in the forum.

I'm working with Scenarist 2.7 and first tried the various tips described here. Sadly, none really worked. Animated subpics are at all no problem, even with 25fps or 30fps. But as mentioned the problems arrise together with a highlight layer.

I tried a 25 fps highlight....no chance. Scenarist wouldn't even compile the project. But without crashing. Just error messages indicating that there are no suitable highlights for the subpics (although subpic start/end times and highlight start/end times match). Then I tried it with a gap of 1 to 2 frames between the subs and the highlights. Scenarist crashed all the way with complaining about the highlight buffer.

Then I tried something else. A 10 frame gap between the subpics. Highlight only for the first subpic. I compiled that (therefore no errors or crashes). After that I edited the highlight end time in the only available nav pack and changed it to be one single highlight from the beginning to the end of the motion menu.

At least here I had a small success. The highlight works perfect with WinDVD Platinum and on my standalone Pioneer DV-525. Sadly it doesn't work with PowerDVD XP at all. It displays only the subpic. No highlight information.

Right at the moment I don't know wether I should be happy, because it works even on my standalone, or not, because it doesn't in PowerDVD (but to be honest, what does really work in that crap software player?).

I don't think that the Spiderman DVD should be a reference for Scenarist users, because obviously Columbia as a Sony Pictures company would use their authoring system rather than Scenarist. So I think Scenarist (although being an absolute Pro tool) isn't really able to do animated highlights. :(

[dgoodbourn]

Have you tried a different version of Scenarist... say, 2.5.1.0211 ;)

Trust me, Scenarist can do animated highlights. It's just very time consuming. Also, become familiar with an exported script. You'll be seeing a lot more of it if you need to create animated highlights quickly.

D.

[Arky]

It's beyond me how all of you can afford to do this with Scenarist - if I want to do this, I have to make do with DVD SP to mux animated subs. Nice to see people still striving to author animated sub projects, though.


Arky ;o)

[Crazyjoe]

@ dgoodburn

I haven't tried it with version 2.5 so far, because i'm too lazy to install a second Scenarist installation. ;)
I know that Scenarist believes me everything I tell it in a script, but could you give me some hint what to edit? I mean I can't think of anything to do with the highlights or the subs in the script I couldn't do in the program itself. And I nearly did everything I could in the latter case. With the result to really nicely crash the program. Problem is that nevertheless Scenarist still has to compile all that.... :(

@ Arky

I thought every DVD author to be an idealist. ;)

[dgoodbourn]

Version 2.5 will sort out your compiling problems. And you're correct, you can't really do anything in the script that you can't do in Scenarist, but if you have to manually set button commands over hundreds of cells, it can be faster and easier to do some kind of search and replace in the script. ;)

D.

[Arky]

@ Arky

I thought every DVD author to be an idealist. ;)

:goodpost: lol ;)


Arky ;o)

[iJump]

@ Crazyjoe

I've had the same experiences as Crazyjoe with version 3.0. The problems arise as soon as you want to add the highlight layer.

@ dgoodburn

I would be very curious if you could elaborate on the way in which scenarist can do this. I gave up trying to do this with scenarist alone.

If I remember right, I added the highlight information later. I may have also moved a vob around like the guide on the tfdvdedit site says.

[DaRat]

@Arky: where's the fun in just clicking twice instead of making everything by yourself? :P


To be ontopic: create hli data for the first frame, make all your button commands (because it will be kinda hard to modify them later), copy-paste the hli data (so it will be there for frame 1 and 2) and delete hli from fram 1. I think the previews in S won't work (since S will make usable hli info only for gop #2) but the menu will be good once you make all the editing in vobedit.

[Crazyjoe]

Thanks for your help DaRat. I didn't have the time to make some new test sessions, because my new HDD consumed most of my time today. :D

Will check it now. But after an interesting conversation with dgoodbourn I came - again - to the conclusion, that Sonic really broke Scenarist. The problem is the mux engine from Scenarist 2.6 and above. It Sonic's and not Daikins anymore.

Will post back if I have new results. ;)

[Crazyjoe]

Now I've finally managed it. Animated highlights without using hundreds of tools after authoring. :D

It's a 2 fps highlight, because nobody wants to wreck his player, but i think the least of us want to implement a highlight animation which needs to be THAT smooth. ;)

And - if I haven't it mentioned earlier - Sonic is crap! What they did to the muxing engine of Scenarist is unbelievable. At the moment it isn't even able to mux things I can do with the program and which agree with the dvd specs! :mad:

To summarise:

Video encoded with N/M 3/4. Subpics with 12 fps duration, highlight for each subpic, no gap between the highlights.

Many many thanks to dgoodbourn at this point! You're the animated highlight god (next to DaRat ;) ). :p

[jel]

hi crazyjoe
glad to see you got your animated subpic working. well done.

however, as this is a family friendly forum, i must ask you to remove the profanity from the above two posts.

many thanks
j

[Arky]

@Arky: where's the fun in just clicking twice instead of making everything by yourself? :P

Hmmm...now who said I use DVD SP's abstraction layer?! :p

Scenarist is a great authoring system, but, unlike the rest of you Scenarist licencees (cough!), I can't afford £20k ;)

I only use DVD SP for muxing, then I post-author the VIDEO_TS build folder after the mux

Trust me, there's just as much fun to be had, doing it this way! :D


Arky ;o)

[Bish0p]

I'm surprised Simple Sublooper hasn't been brought up for Scenarist animated subpics. Combined with After Effects i've created and imported animated subpics in less than 10 minutes.
Hats off to Jk2

http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-37074.html

I've had no problems using this at 25fps with Scenarist 3.0.1.12

[dgoodbourn]

Animated subpictures isn't really the problem, I too have a small app to create a .sst file from a folder of .bmps. It's adding the highlight layer to have animated highlights that usually causes the issues. :)

D.

[Haris]

Does anyone still have the button_test.zip file posted in the 3rd entry of this thread?

http://darat.uw.hu/button_test.zip no longer works

H

[jel]

Haris,

i will email through the copy i have

to be honest though i cant remember whether i changed anything from the original ...

<shrugs>

[Haris]

Thanks Jel! I appreciate it,

I PM'd you another email address before I received it incase the file was too big, however it got through ok

:thanks:

[DaRat]

If anyone wants to use thoose should note that it's kinda fooked up, would have to reimport subpics (or modify the script) because they have end time set >> freezes players.

[mp3dom]

Please someone can send me the file? Thanks!