Scenarist - How to create track with short video and long audio

[TheJez]

Hi all,

I'm trying to create a track with just 1 second of video but about 2 minutes of audio. I thought the track would start playing with video & audio, then the last video frame would remain there until the audio finishes. At least, this is what I want to happen :-)

Of course, this is not what's happening. The track ends up to be 1 second long. When I try to change the 'duration' of both video and audio streams to the required 1:55;15, they just jump back to 0:01;00

What am I doing wrong ? Is it possible at all to do what I want ?
(Note: I don't wan't to make a slideshow. I want to indicate an exact track length in mm:ss:ff, and don't want to be restrained to the maximum slide length of 255 seconds...)

Thanks a bunch.

The Jez

[RB]

Can you use a slide show track? That is, just take a bitmap and the audio, create a slide show track from them, extend the duration of the bitmap to the duration of the audio.

[Dimmer]

That's right, Scenarist will cut down length of the audio to match the video.
Originally posted by TheJez
(Note: I don't wan't to make a slideshow. I want to indicate an exact track length in mm:ss:ff, and don't want to be restrained to the maximum slide length of 255 seconds...) And this isn't quite right: you specify slide show length as hh:mm:ss:ff, so this may be a good option for you, as RB already suggested. You're probably thinking about Cell still time, which is limited to 254 seconds. That's the time last frame will remain frozen on the screen when finished playing. You can't have audio playing during this time anyway.

[TheJez]

Ok, I will try to use the slideshow feature. I hope this works for my application. What I actually want to do, is create a kind-of audio-dvd, where I can put many audio cd's on a dvd. There will be a menu to select the artist, then sub-menus to select an album of the chosen artist. When the album is selected, the album starts playing. While the music plays, I want a still background indicating which artist/album is playing, which songs are on the album and which one is currently playing. Of course, I want to 'waste' as little data as possible on the still background. Also it is important to play the audio within an album seemless. I'd hate breaks in albums, especially if they are live albums.

Eventually, I want to create an application that rips the cd's, gets the album/track names from CDDB or freeDB, converts the audio to 48kHz AC3/MPEG audio, generates the required images for menus and backgrounds and authors the dvd in one go. (Maybe the hard work for the final step might by left to Scenarist by creating just a script that can be imported.) But first, I want to create such a dvd 'by hand' using any authoring program available, as a guideline for my own program.

Thanks for your help,

The Jez

[Dimmer]

Originally posted by TheJez
Of course, I want to 'waste' as little data as possible on the still background. Also it is important to play the audio within an album seemless. I'd hate breaks in albums, especially if they are live albums.Slideshows can't have non-seamless connections, so you'll get the pauses between the tracks. See my post in this thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=71146) solving this issue. Basically, you have to convert the stills into video and use it for regular video tracks. Naturally, this would waste some space.

[TheJez]

Thanks Dimmer,

I already thought of creating video tracks along the audio, but that would ruin my idea of putting e.g. 30 hours of audio on a single dvd. Running it through DVDShrink using the 'stills' compression method would reduce the video to I-frames-only, but can't this be done on forehand ?
I already tried to demux a shrinked I-frames-only video stream and then import it into an authoring program, but that won't work (invalid mpeg stream). This is quite logical when you think about it, but aparently the DVD standard allows such streams if muxed correctly... Can't find a way to do this in Scenarist or other authoring programs, though :-(

Thanks a lot for your help. It's much appreciated.

The Jez

[eb]

@ TheJez,

Sorry that is not connected with scenarist, but accidently I got the result that you are looking for.
On thread http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=76577
I received sample of .m2v video from Nokia PVR having aim to find solution how to convert it to DVD compliant file.
To get true time length of video play I muxed it with one of my ac3 records. And I was angry that I get (what you are looking for) insted of cutted audio acc. to video length.

And here how was it done:

I used ReJig program to author DVD, I put video (11s) and put audio (ac3 4 minutes) and got video required by you with last picture of video standing there up to end of audio playing.

sorry once more for non thread replay , but in this circumstances I think that it may be useful

eb