Scenarist, seamless branching and interleaved VOB IDs

I've been searching the net for more info about seamless branching and Scenarist and it would appear that Scenarist cannot do seamless branching and infact there is probably only two authoring packages that can. One from Toshiba and the other from Panasonic (LQ-VD2000S ) which is what Warners use to author there DVDs. If anybody knows another package that can do this please let me know. Cheers Paul

actually, there's a solution when you're reauthoring:

As I said in my first post, following that guide almost works but when cell transitions jump over a VOB ID the join cannot be made seamless as the DVD drive head has to reposition to pickup the next ID leading to a small glitch in the movie. e.g. Title 1 plays VOB IDs 1,2,3,4,6,7..... Title 2 plays VOB IDs 1,2,3,4,5,7..... When Title 1 moves from 4 to 6 the transition is NSM (non seamless) and when Title 2 moves from 5 to 7 the transition is NSM. To enable a seamless transition VOB IDs 5 & 6 have to be interleaved (ILVU) so that the drive head does not need to be repositioned. Thanks for the reply anyway.

I'd like to tell my experience with the backup of one of my dvds that has a theatrical and an extended version. I'm more or less satisfied with the result but I still have some doubts. One thing is clear, as you said, Scenarist can't cope with seamless branching, Well, the film I've backuped using Scenarist is the Otto Preminger's classic "Laura". Both, the theatrical and the extended version have 21 chapters, but a different cell in chapter 6. I dragged the theatrical version twice into the Scenario Editor and replace in one of the pgcs that cell of chapter 6 with the cell from the extended version. The transition are not seamless, but once compiled I used ifoedit to change the cell type in order to create a seamless playback. That doesn't work in one of my standalone players (a Samsung) that still makes one pause of a second in the transition, as if it were a layer break, but curiosly in other player (a Kiss) goes smoothly, without pause, the same as in the original dvd. So that means that if you change the cell type with ifoedit there are some players that can play seamless. I know that doesn't sound very "professional" because it depends on the player, but for me is an advance. Maybe someone can comment something about it. Anyway I'm confused about this: mpucoder said: "When there are 2 or more possible paths, all of equal time, as is the case being discussed, the material is interleaved. This is multi-angle, not seamless branching, and Scenarist can do this." Well, I understand that, but if I open this original dvd with ifoedit and look at the two cells that are different I see that in the theatrical version cell 8, that is marked as IlVu, has a time of 00:00:35.05 and the cell 8 in extended version marked also as IlVu has a time of 00:01:37.29. So both are interleaved (if Ilvu means that) but have no equal time. Which method did they use to make that dvd? Or is it that if they made a seamless branching (with TFDVDEdit or whatever) the cells that are replaced appear also with that IlVu mark. May be not all the Ilvu cells have to have the same duration. I don't know. Thanks in advance.

When I wrote that I did not mean to imply that seamless multi-story is not interleaved - it is. There are three types of interleave: 1) seamless multi-angle in which all paths (angles) have the same time, structure, audio, and subs 2) non-seamless multi-angle in which all paths have the same time, but do not need to have the same structure (a requirement to switch angles seamlessly) , audio, or subs 3) seamless multi-story. The paths are of different lengths, and everything is independant. You cannot switch paths during play, as the path is in the PGC. Within each multi-story path there can be multi-angles, either seamless or non-seamless. Changing the cell type can work if the player can make the jump before its buffer runs out. All players are required to make certain minimum jumps, and this is the trick to seamless branching (multi-story) - to keep the jumps over the other paths within the distances all players should handle.

Thanks a lot. If I understood well, the film I backuped has a seamless multi-story type of interleave. I would only like to know one more question : is there other way to recreate the film with Scenarist different as the one I used it? I mean, both versions have 29 cells and only cell 8 is different. What I did is quite simple. I dragged twice the shorter version and replace the shorter cell 8 with the larger cell 8 of extended version. I did that in the scenario editor. I didn't touch the track editor nor create new angles nor anything more.

Although I use Scenarist I'm far from a guru with it. But from what I understand you have gotten as close to the original as possible with Scenarist. There is probably a way to avoid the tweak with IfoEdit, and I think the entire process was discussed in a thread in this forum some time in the past.

@talayero thats usually the best way to go.. or drag the longer one twice of you want that version to play seamlessly. the other version (pgc) will have a noticeble pause but its the best scenarist can do.