I was recently given an overnight authoring job for an organization's marketing group, which needed to go out the next afternoon. It was a pretty simple project, consisting of nine video clips, and a single menu from which the presenter could select any of the clips or a 'play all'.
The video elements were not ready for encoding until late in the day, so I started them transcoding and left the video for the next morning. I had received the menu background and button text information earlier in the day, and I decided to build the disc using DVDStudioPro4, then write the DLT with DVDAfterEdit's Mastering Edition. In DVDStudioPro I made a couple of scripts to keep track of which button the user left from, and whether the disc was in 'play all' mode.
After importing the video elements the next morning I ran everything through DVDStudioPro's simulator and everything checked out alright. However, when I built the disc and checked the navigation again, any button selected continued to navigate only to my 'play all' video clip. Puzzled, I rechecked the navigation with DVDSP; it continued to work as expected in the simulator. I did a fresh build and got the same results. Opening up the project in DVDAfterEdit's Tracer, I ran the navigation and realized that my script which pointed the proper button to the proper video element was getting skipped over.
Since it was getting later in the morning, I decided that instead of trying to get DVDStudioPro's navigation to work properly I would just use DVDAfterEdit for the disc's navigation. After making a duplicate of the video_ts folder I used DVDAfterEdit to zap the abstraction layer's commands. Then plugging in new commands with DVDAfterEdit, I created basically the same navigation structure, except with far fewer lines of script. I was also able to improve upon a couple of navigation things as I went along.
After about an hour, I had a new disc that worked exactly as expected and was very streamlined in it's structure. DVDAfterEdit made the DLT, I made another copy for the client and delivered everything on time.
-Phil Peters