Archive for General
A new tutorial has been added to the site which looks at how you can use just three scripts to cover any number of tracks and stories in your project and make sure you get a reliable ‘play all’ situation.
This is very different from the earlier scripted example, which uses a script for every track to sort out the end jump and allows you to use the exact track names in your project. This is excellent for when you want a simple system that is easy to follow and does what you expect. However, if you are ready to move on with your scripting, this tutorial introduces you to using item values from your project. The advantage is that you don’t need to worry about track names, you can add as many tracks as you like and it will still work with no additional lines of code needed. You *do* need to edit a line in each script, but that’s a very small job!
Have a look here:
http://www.dvdstudiopro.co.uk/play-all-3/
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A new tutorial exploring the use of advanced scripting techniques has been created, which uses bit based techniques to generate a random number and jump to a track or story. It checks to see if the track or story has been played before and if so generates a new random number.
The tutorial is theoretical, and doesn’t have a set of files to download yet, but looks at how to track up to 40 tracks/stories. This means that the tracking has to use 40 bit slots, or two and a half registers, leaving the remainder for calculations. This is more than enough, and in fact twice the number of clips could be tracked using this technique.
As it is only theoretical, there may be some flaws in the scripts, but it is offered as a starting point for experimentation and discussion. It uses fairly basic maths for the most part, but makes use of the ‘AND’ operator to compare two GPRMs. Previously, the ‘and’ has been used almost exclusively on this site to mask off different sets of bits.
The tutorial can be found here:
http://www.dvdstudiopro.co.uk/scripting-advanced-random-playback/
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One of the more frequent errors when using DVD Studio Pro seems to be that users are creating HD projects by not changing their preferences. In the main, these projects will work fine up until the point that you burn a disc and then try to play it back. Because HD projects have a very different structure, and most DVD Players can’t read them, the discs will appear to fail.
In a SD project you only get two folders at the root of the disc (unless you have added ROM content) and these are called ‘VIDEO_TS’ and ‘AUDIO_TS’. The audio folder will be empty, and that’s fine. The video folder will contain ‘.ifo’, ‘.bup’ and ‘.vob’ files only. If there is anything else in there you could have problems when playing back.
To avoid these issues, make sure that when you set up your project you set it to be SD. When HD players and HD authoring become more mainstream you’ll have less problems (although I guarantee there will be some…).
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Just a brief note to anyone who has been in contact with me over the last few months. My laptop was stolen yesterday and I lost a lot of data, including a fair number of email addresses and details. If you have been in touch with me for any reason (be it personal or work-related) please get back in touch… the chances are that I can’t send an email to you at the moment as I won’t have your address.
Additionally, a number of ongoing DVD projects were on that machine, which will now need to be recreated. Apologies if you are waiting for me to complete work for you, it will be completed as soon as possible once I have audited the status of the work I was involved in.
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New tutorials are being added to the site as fast as possible, but sometimes it isn’t fast enough! Just this week there was a challenge about creating subtitles - we think we found a way to solve the problem, and we would like to add a tutorial about how to set up a text based subtitle file so that it just works.
If you would like to request a tutorial, or if you would like to engage our services to work on your project, please just leave a message for us!
Tutorials are free, of course, but they may not get to exactly the problem that you have got. Using our consultancy and freelance services we will build custom solutions that we won’t then give away to anyone else.
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