Digital Workshop

A couple of questions:

(1) Are there details anywhere of what the limitations are of the new DVD publication type? There isn't much information in the help file and lots of surprising actions seem still to be available if one chooses a DVD publication.

For example, storage actions (like write to disk file)... key press... registry... variables (like SYSTEM_TIME_DATE)...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but surely these can't function on a standalone DVD player, so why are they options in the editor when Opus has been told that this is a DVD publication?

Can we have a list, rather like that produced for Flex, which says what is and is not possible?

(2) Is it possible to create a DVD publication that plays for longer than the standard 120 minute length of a DVD by using pauses and timelines? What I have in mind is an instructional, mainly audio, publication where the narration stops periodically to permit activities to be undertaken and then resumes. How could I accomplish this? Are there any pitfalls?

Thanks,

Andrew

The issue for us with the Opus DVD publishing option is that DVD menu pages can do very little but "Normal" pages can still do whatever you want because they ultimately get converted to video. Obviously only those things which produce an event on the video will work but you may want to set up pages you proceed through using the keyboard and mouse recorder.

Limiting the functionality on these pages might not be what customers wanted. But that's not to say we haven't missed some things which don't make sense at all

I don't thnk your plan to increase the run time of the DVD would work. If you pause the visual in Opus and let the audio run the publishing function will generate still frames to sit in front of the audio and so you'll gain nothing. I don't think the audio track is separate from the video and I don't know if its possible for it to be.

You're right the Help file only really covers the technical aspects of the DVD publishing. I'll try to get a tutorial or some design advice put up online as soon as we get time. But as always - we release these things into the wild and your imaginations run wild and come up with all sorts of "what-ifs" we never thought of

There are three key things to remember with DVD...
1: Your menu page doesn't have mouseovers - the hotspot marker doesn't have to be the object you would click on in Opus - you could, for example, draw the hotspot as an underline to a piece of text.

2: If you want to program actions on a menu page use a timeline or create an Opus page and then change the Type.

3: You can create animated "hotspots" from Opus functions for the menu page by creating each element as a small video from Opus and then using them as video on the menu page. That way you can reproduce any of the effects in Opus which otherwise aren't possible on DVD menu pages.

Hope this helps.

Paul Harris

Thanks, Paul. Being able to publish for domestic DVD players will be very useful for me. I was just trying to save time by not playing with options that definitely won't work in the final publication.

Regards,

Andrew

Actually these things do work, sort of. The video export stage of the publish basically runs the publication as the player would run it, but records the results as video. So you can use variables, writing to registry, writing to disk files in the same way you would in a normal publication, but it affects how the video is produced, not what happens when the end user puts the DVD in their DVD player. So if you used SYSTEM_TIME_DATE, it would show the time and date that you published, not the time and date of being viewed.

You can also use the recorder feature to record your mouse movements and key presses and affect how the video is produced at publish time. This is very useful if for example you wanted to produce a demonstration DVD of an interactive publication.



Just jump to a menu page. A menu page can have just one button that continues with the publication.