DVD Studio Pro - Creating the Track and Adding Chapter Markers to It

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Creating the Track and Adding Chapter Markers to It

How you create the track depends on your movies:

If you have a single movie that contains all of the sections edited together: This is the ideal

situation because, assuming you edited them together in Final Cut Pro, you could also
have added the chapter markers needed to set up the stories. You can manually add
the chapter markers in DVD Studio Pro; however, most often you will not be able to
place them on the exact frame you would like to use because the markers must be on
an I-frame or a key frame.

If you have multiple movies, with each containing one or more sections: In this situation,

you place all of the movies in the same track (in the order they should play for the “play
all” button). This situation also requires you to manually add the chapter markers.

Note: Having multiple movies makes it tempting to skip using stories and just create
a separate track for each section. You could then create buttons to play each of the
tracks. The difficulty in this is creating the “play all” button, because each track’s End
Jump would need to be set to go back to the menu. Even if you managed to use scripts
to get each track to jump to the next track, you would almost always have a short pause
during the jump while the DVD player located the next track. Using stories makes it
possible to have seamless playback between the sections for the “play all” button while
retaining the ability to play each section individually—all without using scripts.

To create and configure the track

1

Click the Add Track tool in the DVD Studio Pro toolbar to add a new track.

You can also use the track that is automatically added to new projects.

2

Import the movie or movies into the project.

3

Do one of the following:

• If you have a single movie, drag it to the track in the Track Editor.

• If you have multiple movies, drag each to the Track Editor, in the order that you want

them to play.

4

Add the chapter markers to the track by positioning the Track Editor’s playhead on the
first frame of each section and pressing M.

The markers are placed on the nearest I-frame or key frame. You can move the marker
forward or backward to try to locate a better frame if needed.

Note: If you used a single movie that had the chapter markers added in Final Cut Pro, the
chapter markers should already be present and you can skip this step.

You can also name the chapter markers to help identify them later when creating your
stories. See

Importing Assets

and

Working with Markers

for additional information.

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Chapter 3

How Do You Do That?