What Is A Safe Menu Transition Length?

[Cheesus]

I've made a still frame menu. When the user presses the play feature button the menu links to a brief transition. The transition is the same still used in the menu but it has another subpicture which is immediately highlighted in select mode (it's a pair of red eyes that appear for a truely terrifying effect ;) ). There is then a forced action command for the button which links to the main title.
I've made the transition a slide show menu which plays for 13 frames before the forced action is selected. Is this too short a length of time to have allowed (any longer and I feel it loses it's effect)? Scenarist, in the past, has given me warnings before about cell length under 2 GOP's being problematic for some DVD players (presumably older ones) when multiplexing. In this case there was no warning, so I'm assuming it's OK and it works OK in three different players but I just have some lingering doubts. Obviously, the last thing I want is for a player to get to the transition, throw a fit and then not play the feature.
Thanks in advance for any advice that follows.

[DaRat]

Why dont you simply create a another still with the red eyes on? You can set it to any length safely.

[Cheesus]

Thanks Da Rat for your reply.
I can make the slide show play for as long as I like, I just want it to play for a short period of time because of the look I'm trying to create. By using a subpicture I get to use two different shades of red, one the selection colour, one for the action colour, so it kind of creates the impression the eyes are lighting up, in a very limited two tone way. I'm happy with what I've done, just worried about the technicalities of it with certain DVD players.
Is the length an issue then? I was hoping, because Scenarist didn't warn me about it, that it wasn't.

[Cheesus]

Turns out that the length of the slide show of 13 frames was an issue. I found two DVD recorders, an LG and a Panasonic that I'm assuming share the same chipset, that refused to play the transition and stood the player down. If you pressed play again it played the feature. However, it did play correctly in a first generation Toshiba, a Sony and LG players.

Why dont you simply create a another still with the red eyes on? You can set it to any length safely.

I don't see the distinction between doing this and what I actually did. To make another still that auto actioned after a certain length of time don't you have to make a slide show to do this? And if so, the only difference I can see is that the still I made has a subpicture. Also, I've used black frames in slide show cells of 13 frames at the end of PGC's as a way of stopping the user jumping between other title folders (by using UOP's) and a way of skipping to the end of a PGC, without any issues. Can somebody explain the difference between the two situations?

Cheers

[Cheesus]

Did some more tests to try and get to the bottom of the problem of cell length. I lenghtened the slide show out to 25 frames this time and the DVD worked fine in the DVD recorders this time around.
I've just recently got access to a Mac (I should probably be whispering that word here) and thought I try the same project out in DVD SP, not expecting the result to be any different. But to my surprise the transition, set to play for only 12 frames, worked in the players my Scenarist authored DVD wouldn't. :devil:
The only difference was that DVD SP allowed me to set a length for my still menu transition, so I didn't have to make a slide show frame. I can't begin to say how disappointed I am that DVD SP ($500) has done something that Scenarist ($20000ish) couldn't. I also found it disturbing that Scenarist never gave any warning, with this project, that something was potentially a problem.
I examined both IFO's in IFO edit and the cell lengths for the transition were how I authored them. I thought DVD SP might have automatically lengthened the cell out to two GOP lengths but, after I'd managed to sort through the millions of dummy menus to find the transition, I found it was still 12 frames long.
What's the go here, anyone got any idea's?
BTW, I've been pretty impressed with DVD SP but how it operates behind the scenes, with massive scripts and lots of dummy menus, is extremely clumsy and a bit of a turn off.

[iJump]

hi cheesus

i know that the minimum length for a vobu is .4 secs (mpucoder said this somwhere).
this also seems to be true of a motion menu (cell = 12f ntsc). btw, i don't think you mentioned if you're doing ntsc or pal.

here's a link about slideshows. not directly about them but alot of other nice topics too.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=96351

[Cheesus]

thanks IJump
I'm using PAL. so from what you are telling me and from the information I've gathered, in theory the transition should work. This is more to do with variables set top boxes have in playing certain material, in a perfect world they should stick to the spec.
Oh well, just goes to show you that the only way to be sure is to test the disc on as many DVD players as possible.