Real-life project - TV show on DVD

Strange MediaChange is a new division of Mediachance that we created to bring some independent features on the retail surface. Our first project is a whole season of an ultra lo-budget all-ages kids TV show satire called Cowboy Who?

Cowboy Who? is a kids show made by adults who would really rather be doing an adult show. There are dozens of show and commercial parodies. There is a regular feature "Trail of the Royal Mounted" which is an actual 1930s serial irreverently redubbed. There is another favorite regular feature "Think about it with professor Dave" which is an "educational" nature show filmed on location in Africa.

If you think it is impossible to create a whole TV show with just three people, a puppet and a zero budget and still produce a fresh and funny satire that is suitable for all ages then you are totally wrong. Watch for Cowboy Who? from Strange MediaChange coming to the store near you.

Process
As with any large project, authoring is done in few steps with testing in between these steps to ensure all is still fine. First we build a draft concept so we can see the big picture, test the actual movies and plan what and how many graphics/motion we need to create for menus. Then we can replace the draft menus with the original motion or still menus, test it again and see if it all fits into the concept.

Authoring Details
The DVD need to have a main menu where viewer can select to play all episodes or go to an episode menu. Episode menu will list all the episodes on DVD and each button will go to a Chapter menu for episode from where user can either play the episode or jump to a chapter.
At he end of each episode we will display a DVD-lab PRO logo and Strange MediaChange logo.

The authoring phase started at the same time while the motion menus were being produced so the first authoring Draft project used a draft menus to see and test the whole design.

Authoring Draft Stage

VMG Menu

It is always good to have at least one VMG menu, even that all can be done having only VTS menus. There are various reasons, one is that for molded discs the IFO and BUP files needs to be on different ECC block. A VMG menu will make sure the IFO and BUP files will be separated on different blocks otherwise Eclipse testing application that replicator use may flag this as a minor authoring error.

We will put our main menu as VMG menu and the episodes menu as a Root VTS menu

VMG Menu	Root VTS menu

Again, please note at this stage we use a Draft menus that will be later totally replaced by a motion menu once they are created and encoded in a NLE.

Lets bring all the episodes to assets.

Since I am all the time using a version of DVD-lab PRO that is in advance with official released features I have a Group by Parent Folder option in assets. (It will be in later PRO update) This groups all assets by its Parent folder. In my case all the episodes are in CW folder. This has one big advantage:

I can drag the whole Parent Folder from Assets to Connection window and it will automatically create all the movies and match the audio to them (the audio of each episode is named same way as the video).

I will also add few other additional movies - the DVD-lab PRO logo and eventually other logos when we produce them.

Creating the Play List

For Play all, I will create a VMG play list and add the episodes to it. First I added my DVD-lab logo (about 4 sec) then the 8 episodes that will go to the first DVD.

Chapter menus

The chapter menus will be placed in the same VTS after the root Episodes menu. So far we had created only one motion chapter menu which is fine for testing purposes, but the rest will need to be added later.

Since the show is off-beat lo-budget, we decided to go for a sort of menus that would emphasize this. The motion was designed in NLE then brought to DVD-lab PRO and a frame object had been drawn over each thumbnail.

This frame will be the highlighting. Normally on a still menu if you want the frame visible only as highlighting you would use the "Invisible normal" option on the frame. But here we have motion menu and none objects we draw will be merged with the motion unless we use Render Motion. So we can easily leave the frames as they are and they will anyway become visible only as highlighting.
There is also a text Play Episode and Back on the menu. The Play episode highlighting frame is set as a first button (it is bottom most in menu object layers). This is the button we want to be highlighted by default when we get to this menu.

Since the placement of thumbnails is really chaotic on this menu, it is necessary to check the button routing. The Routing is the way telling the player where to go from each button when user press the arrow key on their remote. If we have a buttons in a regular grid then it is obvious - left key would go to button on left etc., but in a chaotic placed buttons this may create situations where it is not easy to get to some particular buttons. We have to carefully check that and use the Simulation mode with the Remote window to check the flow of routing.

To do so we have to first switch off the Auto-Route then show the links with the button on the left of Auto routing.

With the Draw links tools we can then re-draw the routing from each button so it is a more logical and there are no orphans.

Then use Simulation and the Remote window to check the new logic of our routing.

In such chaotic menu as the above, you would need spend some time to get the best and most logical routing.

Connecting things

Here is the spider. (1) is the main VMG menu, (2) is the Episodes root VTS menu and (3) is the only one Chapter menu we have, we will later need to add 7 additional chapter menus.

Each movie end links to a DVD-lab PRO logo (4) and the end of the logo goes to the Episodes menu (2). This way if we watch episode by episode, always at the end of an episode the DVD-lab logo will be displayed. If we use Play all then the DVD-lab logo will be displayed only once on the beginning (see Creating the Play list)

There is also another DVD-lab logo(5) placed on VTS 2. As you can see the First play links to it and the end of the logo links to the main menu (1).

This way when the DVD is inserted in player a logo will play first, then we will go to main menu. At this moment these two logos (4 and 5) use same video, but on final product that may be different. Maybe we will put a Strange MediaChange logo as first play. I wanted to separate this from the rest of the movies so I placed it to the VTS2.

Remembering the position of buttons

By default the menu will always highlight first button. That is not really good for the Episodes menu, since when an episode finish and return to the Episodes menu we would like to have highlighted the button of that episode.

For the Highlighting of Episodes menu we would use GPRM0

In the First Play and also in VMG main menu we re-set the GPRM0 to the first button

GPRM0 = 1

Then in Episodes VTS menu we write this in custom PRE command:

GPRM12 = GPRM0
GPRM12 *= 1024
SetHL_BTN GPRM12
GPRM11 = 6
GPRM15 = 6
Break

The GPRM 11 and 15 are from the dynamically added commands that we cut off by the Break command so here I put them back, just to be on safe side.

Here is the same but in VM block where we called the GPRM0 'HighlitingEp'

So what it does is that it multiply the GPRM0 with 1024 and then use it in SetHL_BTN command.

That's not all, now in each movie we set in PRE command the GPRM0 register to the value 1...8

Episode 1 - GPRM0 = 1
Episode 2 - GPRM0 = 2
etc...

This way when for example a Episode 3 will play and it either finish or we press Menu button on remote, the Episodes menu will see the GPRM0 = 3 and it will highlight third button.

Per-Partes Draft Compile

So we have our draft put out, now we can compile it, burn it and test it on different players. At this moment it is a draft and we are looking if there is no sync issue on the episodes, if they are the correct one, if the audio is correct with the episode and all these bugs that may come during encoding of the many episodes. Just don't assume everything is OK, test it.
Since we have DVD-9, we could burn this to a DVD DL but that isn't best choice. First the DL media are still expensive and secondly they are not as widely supported by players as DVD-R. We may be chasing a fake encoding issue that can be in fact related to DL burning and not to encoding.

For this I have in my working DVD-lab PRO (and it will be available in next official update) a special Customized Test Compile option.

It is hidden by the + sign on Test Compile option on Compile dialog. By clicking on it we have the option to specify which movies will be replaced by dummy and which will be included. By default all movies will be set to be replaced by dummy movie. We use this option to compile two DVDs that each have half episodes included and the other half replaced by dummy so they will fit to two DVD-R while still keeping the whole structure of the original DVD-9.

Simply click on the icon left of the movie to switch it from Dummy to normal Movie .

First test DVD:

Second Test DVD:

This concludes the Draft authoring section of creating the first DVD-9. The next DVD-5 with just 4 remaining episodes will be obviously very simillar.

Watch this space for next part..