Making a comp. DVD with DVD-Lab Pro..

[Superstar]

I'm trying to make a compliation DVD with DVD-Lab Pro, and I can't figure out how to have the seperate parts of the DVD together so I can make a menu of them.
There's 5 parts of this compliation DVD, all seperate VHS recordings. I had to make 5 different "movies" in DVD-Lab Pro to import them all in, so I can have them all in this project..
I can tell they are all in here because with all 5 parts imported, it says my DVD will be a total size of 4.65 GB, so I know that part is right so far. My problem is, I made a main menu, the one that pops up when you first put the DVD in, and I made a link that says Play, so I linked that to the first part of the DVD, which I wanted it to be, and the problem is the chapters..I want to link that to a seperate page and when you go it, you can see all 5 of the parts on the DVD, and select which one that you want to watch. I'm having a problem with that because when I right click on chapters from my main menu, it will only link movie 1,2,3,4,5 seperately, I can't figure out a way to have them all together on one menu..how do I do that?
When I go to the connection tab, it shows that they will play in order, 1,2,3,4,5 so I know that is right also, but I just can't figure out how to bring them all together on one page so I can make a chapter selection..
In DVD-Lab Pro, when you're making a DVD out of 1 VHS video, you go thru the video, and select where you want chapters to be, well for my project, I can't figure out how to merge all the seperate recordings into 1 so I can split them up into chapters...each "part" is a seperate movie part, and I can only go thru each movie part seperately, and I can't make chapters that way because they are all seperate recordings..

[admin]

Have you read my DVD-Lab Pro guide?

There is a section in it specifically on how to make chapter menus.

[Superstar]

Yes I read it, that's how I found this site. From what I can tell in your guide, it looks like that just shows how to make menus for a single video, which I already know how to do. What I'm trying to do is bring 5 different parts, or movies I guess, into one menu and then be able to select which part you want to watch..there's 5 different parts, and each one will be the chapter, so there will be 5 different chapters..
I want the main menu to say play and then I'm going to make another button that says chapters, you click that and it takes you to another menu where all 5 different parts are there and you can select which one you want..but since I had to make 5 different movie tabs in DVD Lab, I can't figure out how to bring them all together so I can list them all together in the menu that will appear when you click chapters from the main menu...

[admin]

If you have had five separate movie objects, you should be able to link them on the same chapters menu page. But you will need to create the chapter menu page manually, as opposed to using the "Add scene selections menu" function (which seem to only work for one movie object a a time). I don't go over the exact instructions in my guide on how to manually make chapter menus, but as I mentioned in the guide (step 5): "Alternatively, you can just use what you've learned from this guide so far to manually make your chapter menus ..." - everything you need to know has already been explained in the section on how to make the main menu. To start, create a new page for the chapters menu and link the "chapters" button from your main menu to this new page. Then use the "Insert Chapter Still" button to add in the chapter links. When you use this function to select a chapter point from any of your movie objects, it will insert a still picture (a frame from the movie object) and automatically link to it. Don't forget to also make buttons to link back to the main menu, and if you run into trouble, just refer to the section on making the main menu and apply it to the chapters menu page.

What you can also do is to make DVD-lab pro see your 5 video files as one video file. You can do this by joining the files separately using an external program, or in step 2 of my guide, drag and drop all 5 videos into the same timeline (basically have all 5 videos as "Movie 1", as opposed to having "Movie 2", "Movie 3" ... "Movie 5"). Then you can create chapter points at the start of each of the videos, but from the project's perspective, it's all just one movie.

[Superstar]

I tried to do the drag and drop step, I dragged and dropped the first part into the movie timeline, and I went to drag the 2nd one onto the same timeline and it said "Video Track already exist. Do you want to replace this video track with this new file and keep all other settings? "


The second step seemed to work for me...I could create the still images for each part, which is what I wanted...unfortunately I couldn't seem to create a motion menu..is there anyway I can do that inside of DVD Lab, or would I have to use a different program for that?

Also, I now have 3 menus..the main menu, and 2 menus I added so that I could add the still images..how would I add background music to each menu, and what file extension should it be, and how long should it be? My current DVD is 4.65 GB and the limit is 4.7

[Superstar]

I did the second step, and authored and burned a DVD and when I was watching it on TV just now, I clicked one of the still images thinking it would take me directly to that part of the video, and nothing happened, it was like this on all the still images, I clicked them and nothing happened, what did I do wrong?

[admin]

I tried to do the drag and drop step, I dragged and dropped the first part into the movie timeline, and I went to drag the 2nd one onto the same timeline and it said "Video Track already exist. Do you want to replace this video track with this new file and keep all other settings? "

The second step seemed to work for me...I could create the still images for each part, which is what I wanted...unfortunately I couldn't seem to create a motion menu..is there anyway I can do that inside of DVD Lab, or would I have to use a different program for that?

Also, I now have 3 menus..the main menu, and 2 menus I added so that I could add the still images..how would I add background music to each menu, and what file extension should it be, and how long should it be? My current DVD is 4.65 GB and the limit is 4.7

Forget about trying to join the video files within DVD-lab Pro, I was mistaken in thinking that it can be done. You'll need to join the MPEG-2 files using an external program.

Yes, in the latest version of DVD-lab Pro (version 2.5 or later), you can create motion menus within the program (previously, DVD-lab only created an uncompressed AVI file and then you had to convert that to MPEG-2 M2V using external programs). The instructions are shown in step 5.

Adding background music/audio is easy as dragging the audio asset into the menu editing area (the same as what you do for background images). You're technically making a motion menu by doing this. When thinking about motion menus, don't think of each object in the menu as a video (or audio), what happens is the entire menu's background is replaced by a video file (as opposed to a still image), and this video file contains all the motion objects (and audio) - you can actually play this .m2v file in your media player and see all the objects in motion.

As for the file size, it all depends on the length and type of your motion menu (whether it has audio or not, for example). As mentioned above, even if you only have a very small object that has motion, technically, the entire menu is rendered as a video file so the size won't be small if the length of the motion is long. My 5 second motion chapter menus in the example I made was around 4 MB each, so multiply that by a number if your motion menus are longer.

I did the second step, and authored and burned a DVD and when I was watching it on TV just now, I clicked one of the still images thinking it would take me directly to that part of the video, and nothing happened, it was like this on all the still images, I clicked them and nothing happened, what did I do wrong?

Go back to DVD-lab and double check to make sure that each of the still images have links to the relevant video. Click on each still image in the menu editing area, and on the right hand side, select the "Link" tab to see where it is being linked to (it should say so under the "Button link" heading). Also check the Project->Connections area to see if the links are indeed there. If all that checks out, try the disc on your computer and see if the links work or not. If it works on your computer, then the problem is a bit tricky, since it should work on your DVD player too, unless your DVD player is not up to specifications (which can occur some times). If you have another DVD player you can try the disc on, do that and see what happens.

[r0lZ]

My current DVD is 4.65 GB and the limit is 4.7

Just to clarify: the DVD size is 4.37 GB. The "4.7 GB" size is a lie of the DVD+/-R manufacturers. They consider a GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes, but it should be 1024 * 1024 * 1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes. So, take care. Your project might be already too big to fit on a single layer DVD. (However, I don't know what "GB size" DVD-Lab has adopted.)

BTW, you can join the 5 parts of your movie without re-encoding them with Womble MPEG Video Wizard DVD. Unfortunately, it's a commercial and relatively expensive app, and it can only handle 1 audio and 1 subpic stream. Your 5 titles must also have exactly the same characteristics (same video and audio format, and same compression type and bitrate.)

[admin]

That's true about the DVD size, but DVD-lab pro chose to display the "lie", as opposed to the actual GB (1024^3) size.

As for joining m2v files, there is this really easy way using DGMPGDec (DGIndex.exe). Download the latest version of this free software here, run DGIndex.exe and then use File->Open to load up all the m2v files you want to join (in order, of course) - press OK to exit the file list. Then from the File menu, select "Save Project and Demux Video" and save it somewhere - this will create a .d2v project file which you can discard, but more important, it will give you a single m2v with all the loaded videos joined together.