Making a 'play-then-pause' DVD in DVD Studio Pro

Here's a quick 'how-to' provided by Buzz Miller (who got it from Nick Fox-Gieg ) on how to design a DVD in Apple's DVD Studio Pro app that will play one clip then pause on black, then play the next clip and pause etc. If you're doing a VLOBLIVE event short-handed and need to know that there is NO WAY to play the wrong thing on the DVD, this is a good approach.
Thanks Buzz.

Back in this item I suggested making a custom menu specially designed for live play-in of DVD clips.
Buzz goes one better by doing away with the menu altogether and just chaining the clips together. His 'secret sauce' is to add a 'wait' in between each clip so you have to do something (press play) to get the DVD player to play the next clip.
The big advantage of this is that the DVD menu will NEVER appear by accident on the screens.
The only disadvantage is that you have to fix the sequence, and there's no real clue what's about to play other than the track no.

Here's how Buzz does it:

"In the Assets tab (upper left) I import the clips (including one that fades to black, and I usually include a short 3 sec black clip that I start each disk with).
Then drag your clips (in the order you wanna use 'em) from the Asset window to the Track timeline (bottom).
In the Outline tab (upper left), click on the UNTITLED_DISC icon to activate the Disc window (lower right)
In this Disc window:
- name the disc.
- change First Play from Menu 1 (I don't use menus) to Track 1 > Chapter 1 (the short 3 sec black clip).
Back in the Outline tab (upper left) click on Track 1 to activate the Track window (it was just the Disc window, lower right).
In this Track window:
- Create chapter markers in the Timeline window at the start of each new clip, by clicking in the space above the time "ruler." It can be tricky to navigate and be precise, so I use the keyboard shortcuts to zoom (Apple + & Apple -) and the up and down arrow keys to go to the breaks between clips.

- set End Jump to "Tracks and Stories" > Track 1 > Chapter 2

- back in the Track window, under Playback Options, the Wait setting is the key to letting your disc park on the last frame of the given Track or Chapter. Set it to Infinite and it will keep playing the last frame (often black if you made your clip fade to black in FCP). Or set it to x seconds if you want it to pause on the last frame for a specified amount of time.
When it comes out of Wait, it will do what you specified in the End Jump setting above."

There you go. I haven't tried this myself, but it is a good illustration of how to use the power of a tool like DVDSP to make your VLOBLIVE life much easier.

Posted: Sat - July 23, 2005 at 03:20 PM |

VLOBLIVE :: 1. Preparation

Making a 'play-then-pause' DVD in DVD Studio Pro