Creating Tracks in DVDSP

Beth Cataldo, March 29, 2007

Creating Tracks

Every DVD project starts with an empty Track. To add media to this Track, you can drag and drop your MPEG-2 file onto it. If DVDSP sees an audio file with the same name as your video file, it will drag the audio file along with your video video when you drag and drop.

There are several ways to create a new track in DVDSP. You can drag the video file anywhere in the Outline view. In fact, you can drag several video files at once onto the Outline view. This will automatically add new video tracks and add the video and audio tracks to them. You can then rename the video track by double-clicking in the text of the video track's name.

You can also Control-Click in the Track area and a drop-down menu will come up and you will choose Add>Track.

You can drag and drop the video onto a button in a menu, and DVDSP will automatically create a new track, assign the track to this button and jump back to that menu and button once it is done playing.

Editing in DVDSP:
The Timeline lets you perform very simple edits in DVDSP, like trimming clips, putting clips together in a longer clip, adding alternative video and audio tracks and adding subtitles to clips. The V1 Stream is the most important stream and must have a video clip in it. That video clip must butt to the beginning of the Timeline. Other clips in different Tracks can be offset in the Timeline if need be. You can't put spaces between clips in V1.

When DVDSP compiles the final DVD, it truncates the video where the video in the V1 timeline ends. So, if any of your clips (including audio or subtitles) is longer than the V1 clip, they will be truncated.

Playing Clips:
To play a clip from the Timeline, you can control-click on it and hit the Play option in the pop-up menu.

You can also double-click on a clip to open it in the Viewer. From here, you have a player that you can use to play and stop to see the footage.

You can always simulate to see what's going on with your footage.

Track Order:
DVDSP displays track numbers based on the order in which the files are shown in the Outline view. If you haven’t created them in the correct order, you can rearrange them by dragging and dropping them.

Linking Tracks:
Once you've created a track, you can then link to it from any button or other track. This is done through the Inspector or with Control Click.

DVDSP automatically links each newly created track to the one before it, with the final track linking back to the first.

You rarely will want your DVD to flow this way. To change the way the tracks link, you need to set the End Jump property:

1. Select a Track in the Outline View.

2. From the Inspector go to the End Jump drop-down and choose an item.
Tracks can jump to menus, chapter markers, scripts, slideshows or even chapters in other tracks.

3. Further down in this Inspector, you will see Playback Options info.

4. Set a number of seconds you want the DVD player to pause before playback (up to 4 minutes) or set to none if you want it to immediate go to the item you've chosen.

5. Once your track exists in your Outline, you can link to it from any button.
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