Menu chapters and Video Freeze or skip

[Brianottawa]

I have downloaded patches, updates and whatever from Corel Support after upgrading my VideoStudio to X2. then uninstaqlled X2 and reinstaled it as directed (painful).

Now...I ask you all out there:

I loaded all my home vid cam clips onto a time line, added my transitions, text, audio effects...AND added the chapter markers along the time line. Save it, and created a Video File. Support told me to closed the project, and open it and go straight to Burn Disk or create disk. Problem is: It only gave me the option to have one chapter (despite me having placed the chapter markers in the time line). Why did it only let me show/create one chapter (which was the whole DVD)? Do I have to load smaller segments into a project to create chapters, even though the whole DVD is made of many multiple clips that I have added to the time line?

Also...I had about 108 minutes on the DVD, and I found that when I got later into the DVD (maybe half way) the picture would freeze for a few seconds, then skip a few more seconds a head...and then shortly after that freeze again...the DVD was not running smoothly. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for you help!

[Ken Berry]

Welcome to the forum, though it sounds as though you are in a bit of a mess!

First, I suspect that there might be a confusion of terminology here. By the sounds of it you are thinking of 'chapters' as being distinct videos whereas, like a book, a video 'chapter' is just a demarcated area of a much larger whole. In video editing parlance, the 'book' or the whole project is called a 'title' and a 'title' is divided into chapters -- but they are only reference points that you later use your DVD's player's remote control to jump to in the single video.

If you want to have a series of separate videos which can be played separately, and then you can choose another one and play it, then you have to divide the project into separate bits and render each bit as a separate new video. Then in the Burning module, you insert these new videos, each of which is a 'title' in its own right, and each of which can then be broken down into 'chapters'. The chapters can be created, as you have with your single project, either in the Editing module, or separately in the Burning module if you are creating a menu.

If creating the latter, then you have a number of choices: you can build a menu which shows the 'titles' on the front page. You can choose which one you want to start with, and play each one separately. You can start one playing and then have the whole DVD play continuously, or you can set it so that one title plays, and then the menu is displayed agains so you can choose another title.

You can also have a sub-page of the menu for each 'title', showing icons of the jump points where the chapters of that title begin. You can then jump between the chapters in that menu, but not between the different titles.

In fact, you can also create a menu of just the chapter points if, as you have at the moment, only one video 'title', and not bother about creating a main menu page at all.

As for your other problem, it is difficult to say with the information you provide. For instance, are you burning to a single layer or dual layer DVD. Dual layers are a bit iffy, and sometimes get a bit jumpy in the way you describe. But also, when burning to a single layer disc and you have used too fast a burning speed, it can get jumpy too. Indeed, some DVD players are just plain picky and may not like the brand or batch or type (+ or - or RW) or even the colour of the dye used on the DVD -- I'm not kidding!

Finally, our general recommended workflow is to complete your editing, then, when still in the Editing Module, convert your project into a DVD-compatible mpeg-2 with a bitrate commensurate with the length of the video you are trying to fit on the disc (for instance, you would probably have to use a bitrate of under 6000 kbps for your 108 minute project, and use Dolby or mpeg layer 2 audio as well for it to fit comfortably on a 4.3 GB single layer DVD). You then open the burning module and insert that new mpeg-2 and burn.

Well it sounds as though you did the first part of that in the sense of creating a new video file of your project (though you don't actually say what kind of video file you created, much less what format your original video had). But then it sounds to me as though you used the project file in the burning module, and not that new file. If so, we normally recommend against that since too many users have had too many problems doing so. In the interests of fairness, though, I would have to add that quite a lot of users do it with absolutely no problem.

Anyway, come back with a bit more information and someone may be able to help further.

[Brianottawa]

Hi Ken, thanks for taking the time to write your reply. Your insights and those of the user community is very much appreciated. I had hoped burning a DVD would be as easy as burning a music CD, but it is clearly not.

Menus:

So I think I have my terminology correct. Every time I hit the 'record' button on and then off on my video camera it creates a video clip or file that along with all my video clips eventually get down loaded into a folder on my computer hard drive. In VideoStudio X2 I take all these home movie clips and add them to my time line in my project, adding my transitions to give the cut a nice even flow to all the files or video clips on my timeline. The 'Project' is my 'Title'. Like the Title of a movie. In this case Dec 2006 - July 2007.

What I want to do is have a DVD that is just like a movie DVD: Have an opening Menu at the begining of the DVD that shows the various Chapters within my home movie, ie: Christmas Day, kids birthdays, Summer vaction, pool party, ect. I expect that if I hit play it will play through all those things without interuption as you would expect with a regular Hollywood movie, but if I wanted to go to the menu I could select a scene, or if I was watching the home moive I could press "go the the next chapter" and it would go to the scene.

What I did during the edit mode is I went to the little "Add /Remove Chapter Point" at the begining of the time line and I went along and marked where I wanted to start my Chapter points along the time line of my 108 minute home movie. I have no idea what a cue point is...it is not defined in the Help anywhere...the 'Help' assumes I already know what a cue is...I don't. I don't have a clue about a cue...LOL!

So after I add my Chapter Point Marker (little yellow triangle), I expected that the software would know that I want to consider this a new chapter within my time frame. Aparently that is not the case, because when I went to burn to disk, the I was able to select the style of my Main Menu, and it only showed one chapter under my Title Heading. So that is how I came to have only one chapter on my DVD. If I hit scene selection or advance to the next chapter, I could not do that. I had to just do a Fast Forward to move along. Can you creat new chapters at this point? I noticed that the name of my 'Chapter' also happened to be the name of my whole video file that I created.

What do I need to do to create a time line that is recognized to have multiple chapters...like Christmas; Kids Birthdays, Summer vacation...?

Skipping Burning problems:

Whoa...lots to consider when burning a DVD...this has been my frustation from the begining. I am used to popping a CD in and burning music, no worries. With a DVD, I expected the same ease of use.

I have a Memorex DVD disk, DVD-R, 4.7 GB 16X. I have no idea if it is a dual layer or sngle layer, although I think it is a single layer. I also have a DVD+R. I have a new BlueRay disk player, and my computer is maybe a year old, new HP with LightScribe DVD writer. When I burn a disk I just selceted DVD...I don't think it's anything special...are you suggesting that I need to slow down the speed of the burn? I assume that is a step I need to do when selecting the type of burn? My DVD burner is an HL-DT-ST-DDVDRRW GSA-H30L SCSI CdRom Device.

I hope that provides you with enough detail of what I have done, and what I am trying to do. Thanks Agian Ken and all for any insight you can provide.

Cheers!

[Ron P.]

In the Burn Module, are you selecting the Add/Edit Chapter, then in the Add/Edit Chapter window, selecting the Auto Add Chapters? From the next window selecting Insert Scenes as Chapters should detect your chapter cues, and insert them. However one weakness in VS, it does not retain the Labels or names you may have given your chapter cues in the Edit module. So you will need to do that again in the burn module if you're going to use a Chapter Menu and want to use more meaningful names for them. In the burn module your chapters will be named Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and so on...

[Brianottawa]

Brilliant...thanks Ron. I can't recall what I did at that stage exactly, but I will look for that when I get to that step again. I did name the chapters, so I will take note and see if they stick when it comes to that stage...auto add will be something to look for. Thank you.

[Ron P.]

Brian,
I hope that VS will retain the Chapter names, however I've tested this every way I know, and VS just refuses to retain the names. I would think this to be very easy to implement, since VS at least retains the chapter points...

[Ken Berry]

EDIT: I now see that Ron has beaten me to the punch while I was typing out the following! But I will leave it as is for the extra information I hope I have provided!!

What you have done is prepare a Title -- and not a Chapter -- menu! As I noted above, there are a variety of menu types you can prepare, quite apart from the wide assortment of templates for them. You have a single project/title, so when you go into the burning module, VS sees only one title and hence it only places one thumbnail on the first menu page. However, if you look carefully at that same first page on which you have inserted your new file made from rendering your project, you will see up towards the top left corner a little yellow box with 'Create Menu' beside it, and it is ticked by default. And above it is another button 'Add/Edit Chapter'.

If you click on the latter button, a new screen will appear with a preview screen showing the first frame of your video and a 'timeline' down at the bottom with again a thumbnail(s) of your existing chapters. Now, since you have inserted chapter points in the Editing module, you should have a number of thumbnails showing for each of the chapter points you inserted. You can click on each and the first frame of that chapter should now show in the preview screen above. And you can create new chapters by moving the jog slider under the preview screeen, and clicking on the 'Add Chapter' button to its left. Or delete existing chapters or vary the start points of each chapter.

When satisfied you have the chapters where you want them, you click OK and that screen closes and you are back at the first page again. OK so far?

You then click 'Next' and this takes you to the page where you select the template for your menu. But again, if you look carefully, there are two tabs across the top of this page: Gallery and Edit. If you select the latter, you then get a page where you have a wide variety of possibilities for varying the template, adding music background to the menu (including different pieces of music for each page), different background image or video, changing the shape of buttons, adding 'titles' (in the sense of names) to the thumbnails etc.

But about half way down the left hand side, there is an 'Advanced Settings' button. This is the important one in your case, since you in effect don't want the main first page of your menu (i.e. the 'Title' page with only one thumbnail). So once you click on Advanced Settings, simply un-tick the 'Add Title Menu' box. The image on the preview screen should now show a list of your chapters and you can click on each of the default names and change them to what you want.

Note that, depending on how many chapters you have created and which template you have chosen, there may be more than one menu page, and you can navigate between the pages using the buttons. Note also that the 'Layout Settings' button allows you to either apply the same background, music etc to all the pages, or to individually customise each page.

After you have finished doing any other edits you want to the menu, you can preview what the menu will look like by clicking on the small white remote control icon to the bottom right of the preview screen. This will open a new screen where you will view the complete menu in operation. And if it looks correct, you can then burn the disc and when you play it in your DVD player, it should behave the way you want.

Now to the disc side of your problems, a 4.7 GB (really a 4.3 GB one, depending on bits and bytes! ) is ipso facto a single layer disc. A dual layer disc, as the name suggests, allows twice that amount to be burned to a disc (i.e. around 8.6 -- or 9.4 -- GB).

Your burner is fine, and in fact I have a couple of computers with precisely the same burner. It seems happy with a wide variety of brands and types of DVD blanks (i.e. both + and - and RW). But the burning speed is -- at least in the opinion of many (though not all) of us here -- also important. Regardless of the rated maximum speed of your burner or blank disc, many of us recommend that you burn a video DVD at well below that speed. I tend to use 8x or 12x Ritek blanks, and with these I never burn a DVD at anything faster than 4x. For faster rated discs, in fact you may not be able to get down to 4x, but in that case you would choose, say, 8x for a disc which is rated at 16x or 20x.

The theory of the slower burn speed is -- putting it simplistically -- that at a slower speed, the burning laser has a longer opportunity to burn the signal more 'firmly' into the disc. This in turn will allow a wider variety of reading lasers in stand-alone DVD players, to be able to read that firm signal, and thus lower the chance of them jumping about (or stopping) when the signal has been less firmly embedded. From the way you describe it, this seems to be what is happening in your case, so a slower burning speed might help.

But another little lesson in DVD Burning #101 is what I also referred to above, and that is the bitrate of the video itself. Essentially, there is a formula along these lines: the higher the bitrate, the better the quality will be. But its converse is: the higher the bitrate, the less video you will be able to fit on a disc.

These two are complementary, and the choice you make depends entirely on you. If you are more interested in quality than squeezing as much video as possible on to a disc, then you use a high bitrate. And roughly, a bitrate of 8000 kbps will give you very high quality output, but only allow around 1 hour of video to be burned to a single layer DVD using standard LPCM audio, or about 10 minutes more if you use Dolby or mpeg layer 2 audio. A bitrate of around 6000 kbps will allow about 90 minutes (or 100 minutes with either of those other two audio formats) of video which is still very good quality; and 4500 kbps will allow around 2 hours of video, though the quality will probably only be that of a VHS tape. Anything lower than that, and the quality drops off quite noticeably.

Hope that some of this has been helpful!

[Brianottawa]

Wow..this is great Ken, thanks. I can't even finish it without thanking you for providing so much information. I wanted to thank you right away. I am saving this and going to try this out and see what reults I get. I'll let you know.

[Brianottawa]

Hi Ken, I have read, and then re-read your notes above just to make sure I followed what you are saying, and again, many thanks, this has been just great. I am going to give this a try and see what happens. I will reduce my speed and my bit rate transfer...and I am sure that will work. Again, I am assuming this will be an option at the time I go to burn my DVD.

And with the menus, I will follow your advice exacty. I appreciate you taking the time to educate me on this. Looks like a great program...just not entirely easy to pick up from scratch.

I'll let you know how I fair.

[Brianottawa]

Ok...I'm off to a bad start. I started to trim out some of my movie to shorten it to the 1 hour mark. I was curious to know what the Mark-in and mark-out feature did, and then I tried to remove it, and all I seem to have done is shorten the feature, and now when I got to preview some clips the jogler and preview automatically skips right to the point and stops the preview. I don't know how to remove the mark-in feature, and of course the VS help is of no help what-so-ever. Groan...I am facing the proscpect of having to close the project without saving it and reopen and start the edits again.

I think I'll stay away from exploring features... you would think that you could remove this somehow. I don't see any red lines any where, so I don't know why this is still causing it to skip to that junction.



BTW...what are cue points..are they some how mini markers with a chapter?

Brian

[sjj1805]

Mark in - ignore everything to the left of the mark in point.
Mark out - ignore everything to the right of the mark out point.
Cue.Used during the editing stage as a reminder to the editor (you) where you want to align something - such as where a beat in the music occurs so you can align a still image (Making it 'appear' on the screen as the beat changes)
Chapter. - Whilst in theory these can be marked during the editing stage - I have found that most users find these a bit hit and miss. For some users they work, for some users they work sometimes, for some users they never work. It is better to create the chapters during the Authoring stage (Share | Create Disc)

For further information please view:
From Camcorder to DVD with Video Studio

[Brianottawa]

Excellent, thank you. So once you have put that mark-in and mark-out, can you remove them?

[Brianottawa]

Excellent, thank you.

So if I put those in and decid to remove them at some point, can I remove that?

[sjj1805]

Mark In and Mark Out are a part of the multi trim feature.
If you create a mark in but decide you wanted it somewhere else - re-align the playback head to the new position you want and press the mark in button again. This replaces the existing mark in point with the new one. Likewise for mark out.

On the Video Editor time line the similar options are termed trim handles. - these can simply be dragged left or right as required.

For further information please view:
Editing.

• Simple cuts.
• Multitrim
• Ad-Zapper
• Split by scene

[Brianottawa]

Oh...here's another question...I am starting to Creat a video File with my new re-edited movie. When I select DVD and it goes to MPEG Optimization ...it shows me some green 'status' bars, and the top one says 89.85% save time, and the seconf bar says timeline segment layout. The second bar is mostly green, but there are red portions that say they need to be re-encoded. Is that a problem? Should the second bar be all green before I burn a DVD, or will these red segments cause me issues? And there is a box that I could click that says: "always apply template settings. Should I be doing that?

I also noticed that there is a drop down menu box at this point that allows me to select NTSC DVD which also says 9200 kbps, but I can change that to select MPEG2 at 9200 kbps, but it makes most of the 2nd bar red and tells me I only have 7% save time.

Does this give you some clues as to what is happening or what I should be doing?

Thanks!