Hi: Can someone include helping steps to undestand the professional menu creation process in DiscWelder Chrome-II? Does anyone know how the menu's were made in the retail DVD-A discs? Are they made in DiscWelder or imported using some other software? I got some feedback from the thread below but it is not enough. http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/319771
What exactly do you need to know? Depends on the author. What you will find is that the menus as used in Chrome need to be in 2 parts. 1 - Background Image. This is a full colour image, and can be many forms but I recommend using TIFF files as these are uncompressed. Using JPEG files will inevitably (in Chrome, anyway) lead to reduced quality. 2 - SubPicture Highlight image. This is a 4 colour indexed file, and the 4 colours MUST be White 255,255,255 (Background), Black 0,0,0 (Border), Red 255,0,0 (Emphasis One, or Caption) and Blue 0,0,255 (Emphasis 2, or Foreground). It is imperative these are indexed, as the 4 colours are then remapped to the colour of your choice for the actual look of the button. The mapping is important because it tells the compiler what you intend. Creation of these I always do in Photoshop. There is also a special plugin called DVDSubpicture that you can get for setting the colours correctly. This plugin will take your standard design and apply this to it, giving you an exact 4 colour map that must then be indexed. You should always design your menus in Square Pixels. For both PAL & NTSC 4:3, this is 720x540. Once designed, you then scale to either NTSC (720x480) or PAL (720x576) giving you the anamorphic image that the compiler will need. The menus will look squashed in the editor, but this is perfectly normal. For 16:9, you create/Edit at 854x480 for NTSC & Scale, and at 1024x576 for PAL & scale. You will need to understand how DVD-A structures work, and how they are laid out - or you will run into trouble with illegal linking, and will basically not be able to connect certain buttons to certain targets & will not know why. If this happens, your structure is wrong. There are also some nasty "Gotchas" with Chrome, caused by it's Abstraction Layer getting in the way: 1 - If using long MLP streams with Track Points, you cannot set "Active" menus, as it will always default to the initial screen. This is a bug. 2 - You cannot go from title space to Menu space in DVD-A. It's not allowed. (Situation will arise with Active Menus (to use the Minnetonka parlance) where you want to set a link returning to the title menus. DVD-A specs make no provision for this so we have to use a cheat - add a 1 second "dummy" silent track. Set the menu button to go to this & it will execute end action & take you to the HOME or TOP menu. Sadly, it doesn't work well in Chrome, as you cannot set GPRM, SPRM or If/Then/Else type navigation via scripting. This is a serious hole in the application IMHO. (I only ever made 2 commercial discs in Chrome - after that, I gave up fighting the Abstraction Layer & bought Sonic's DVD-Audio Creator instead) 3 - when importing a Video_TS stream, you cannot select the audio you want from this stream. It will always go to stream #1 and to switch, use of the AUDIO button is required. This is a howler, as it means you cannot use multi-stream VTS (The DVD-A specs allow for 2 Audio streams here, one say LPCM, the next DTS. You cannot pick the DTS stream at all, meaning you have to either drop the link (out of spec) or create an out-of-spec VTS timeline. It's a serious issue, and makes things very difficult. Chrome can produce good output, but needs highest quality input or the stills will look awful. More than 12 to 15 stills per track & they will go to MPEG-2 and it will look horrible. PGC menus seem to end up as MPEG-2 regardless of what you do. Check with Minnetonka Audio that you are on the latest build too - the earlier builds had a lot of bugs, and most are now sorted. Write to support & they will get you a link.
Wilkes: Thanks for the information. It gives some overview of this software's capabilities. As you are aware that there are 2 options: automatic menu creation and custom menu. At this point, in order to simplify things, I used auto menu. Problem is that once a track is selected, the software does not have option to select the track image or insert the track info when the track is playing. Another issue is continuous vs. hierarchial. Even though you specify continuous, the tracks are not played continuous. It stops after playing the last track of that group. I do not see any benefit of using any one of them. Do you know their features and difference? I wonder why menu creation is the most difficult part of authoring?
The continuous over hierarchical in the generated menus is for display purposes only, and has nothing to do with playback apart from governing how you access the content. The reason it won't go from Group 1 to Group 2 is because in Chrome you just do not have the ability to set the necessary custom commands to make this happen. Same reason you can only set a single animated intro to be displayed just the once, and not use GPRM to set button highlights etc. It's a limitation of the programme. What it does do, it does well - as long as you are aware of it's limitations. Menu creation is indeed the hard part - it's a design & layout job but a vital one. Learning the layout of DVD-A is going to help you too - one of the problems with Chrome is that it assumes this knowledge. You certainly can set a slide to show when a track is playing. Just put it into the track as a track image. You can put buttons on it too.
I do not have Sonic DVD-A Creator so it is out of question for me I have to work around my way using discWelder. I would appreciate if you could share or refer to resource where the users can get a good idea of DVD-Audio's structure/layout and capabilities. I did not find much except "dvd-audio.sourceforge.net" but that is too technical. FOR LEARNERS: The quickest way to make a decent DVD-Audio without the hassles of "custom menu" creation is: - Use a single group and fill in all the tracks upto 99 (if you want your disc to play continuous) and more groups if needed. - select "Auto Play" and "On-screen Menu" - choose the album/track properties with BLACK background (as black background will consume less LCD power and will save the pixel life of LCD). Though I will be using auto-menu generation, I would like to take sometime learning about "custom menu's" too. Wilkes or anyone: Could you be kind enough to include a short guide to create custom menu's (w/ active menu's) when you get a chance? Though, users can pick up the skills over time but this will reduce the pain and the resources during their experimentation. It will be great if you could include a template so that it becomes a good starting point.
You're missing the point. Probably my fault though for not explaining it properly. These 4 colours are only for use in the actual SPHL image. They exist so that the compiler can map correctly with the colours you choose. For example. You may have a set of text in Black for the main SPHL button look. Using the Black is ONLY for the actual image - you can - and should - remap these colours in the editor in Chrome (Overlay colours button). This allows you to set different colours for each state of a button: Normal (or unselected) Selected Active So you can map different colours for each state. This is only possible by using a SPHL image with known colours for the initial map, which gets replaced in compiling by your custom colours. The alternative would be using 3 different SPHL images - one for each possible button state - which would soon get well out-of-hand. Using a single known map - and resetting the CLUT of this map - is the easiest option, trust me. It takes time to get to understand how it works. And practise. DVD-A authoring is NOT easy.
This is close to impossible a thing to do. Not because I am being awkward about it either - it's just that all this stuff has to be planned & drawn out as a flowchart with Chrome, or you will simply get lost. Look at the way it handles this: 1 - Limited to 99 screens in total. This may sound like a lot, but it really isn't. 2 - No logical sequence available in the editor. Try ticking heirarchical mode, but it doesn't really help that much. 3 - No way I ever found to re-order screens once created. The sole way to keep track of them is by naming them, and this also gets complicated, quickly. 4 - No way I ever found - apart from the tick-box in the editor - of quickly & easily seeing where you are - PGC area or Track Related screens. This gets difficult when trying to set Navigation, as you will for certain try & make a link that is in violation of spec, but the only clue you will have is that the option to link where you want to go to is greyed out. You must work out what you want to do within your project before you start off. Trust me - this is the easiest way to work, and will save days in trying to fix a flawed structure. You need to know what your HOME (or TOP MENU) page will be, as this can always be got to from wherever you may be. Thing is, you won't be able to use things like traps to make the disc navigation fall through after playing, say, a bonus video off the EXTRAS page, fall back to the menu that called it. It will play the video clip & return to the Top Menu of the PGC Structure. As there is no scripting in chrome, you cannot set GPRM values to make it fall down to the EXTRAS page again. The easiest way - in the end - is to just try little things at first, onto RW discs as this will be cocked up - and cocked up badly at first (again, believe me - I know) and see what does & does not seem to function. Post back here for specific things when you cannot see it. But it is simply not possible to give a basic "This is how you do it" guide short of the details on preparation of the stills I have already given. Reasons? I don't know your structures. I will be quite happy to try & rewrite the various asset preparation details again - but I cannot go much further.
Hello Wilkes: I am not expecting to create hifi menus or professional menu's like the retail DVD's but a simple way to guide me when I play my DVD. I would like to have: 1. Main menu screen which shows the albums (can be groups if cross jumping between groups is possible) 2. Track Pages, when you select a track/album from main menu Instead of showing nothing (like auto menu creation), I want to include a decent image to disply with shortcut buttons to jump to main menu or album/group to select another track. and 3. to include something which will enable me to play all the tracks continuously (if I am using multiple groups). I don't expect to do more than that (no videos nor special features). If this is possible, please let me know and show us some direction. Thanks,
1 - Create as described earlier (resolutions & forms already given) Do not make it Active, do not associate with any tracks. This must be the first menu you create, as it will become the "home" page. 2 - For each one of these, simply create as described earlier. Make it an Active Menu, and associate it with a specific track in the menu editor. Link buttons as required. WARNING - if using either Long MLP streams, or LPCM with Track Points, you *cannot do this in Chrome*. There is a nasty bug caused by the way the Abstraction Layer imports audio directly into a group. The only way this will work is if each track is a separate set of files. 3 - You cannot do this in Chrome. Playback between groups in one go is not possible. This is because it requires scripting (using GPRM to set a state and Pre/Post commands to execute the scripts), and this is not available in Chrome.
