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Creating a Looped DVD (repeating)

S

sotied

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 12, 2003
116
0
Boston
*Before you tell me this has been discussed, it was. Back in 2003 and there was no solution given. I'm just trying to do a similar thing and hope you can help.

My brother has a convenience store and wants me to create a DVD for him with ads of products that are on sale interspersed with video and/or slide shows. I THINK I have the ability to do the video either using iMovie or iDVD or even iPhoto and making a QT movie.

What I don't know is how to make the DVD repeat itself.

1 - he wants good quality video or photos so I have to keep the DVD length to about 2-4 hours.

2 - he wants to keep the DVD player locked in the store office.

3 - Shifts are 8 hours apiece so a looping/repeating DVD is necessary.

**On a side note, would I be better burning this on a CD because many CD players repeat and I suspect a DVD player that can read CDs will also have a repeat function......but it might only be for audio.

Thanks for your time.

Mac ON!

Jeff
 
sotied said:
*Before you tell me this has been discussed, it was. Back in 2003 and there was no solution given. I'm just trying to do a similar thing and hope you can help.

My brother has a convenience store and wants me to create a DVD for him with ads of products that are on sale interspersed with video and/or slide shows. I THINK I have the ability to do the video either using iMovie or iDVD or even iPhoto and making a QT movie.

What I don't know is how to make the DVD repeat itself.

1 - he wants good quality video or photos so I have to keep the DVD length to about 2-4 hours.

2 - he wants to keep the DVD player locked in the store office.

3 - Shifts are 8 hours apiece so a looping/repeating DVD is necessary.

**On a side note, would I be better burning this on a CD because many CD players repeat and I suspect a DVD player that can read CDs will also have a repeat function......but it might only be for audio.

Thanks for your time.

Mac ON!

Jeff
Click to expand...

This is easy enough in DVD studio Pro, you simply set the "first run" tag of the DVD to jump to the video and the "end jump" tag of the video to jump back to the same video track. This gives you a DVD that autoruns and loops indefinitely.

You'll need to drop the datarate of the video to get more than 3 hours, but this can be done in the QT MPEG2 encoder settings in DVDSP.

You can do the same thing with still pics using a slideshow.

iMovie will handle all the editing well enough, but 2-4 hours of video in one shot is waaaaay too much.

Split it into small chunks and re-sequence them in DVDSP.

In response to the below post, in iDVD you could place the video in the "First Run" slot in the map and then get the DVD player to repeat the disc, again, it's a no-menu auto-run DVD. This does depend on the player being able to repeat though.
 
iDVD will do the trick

I just did something similar to this using iPhoto and iDVD 05. I forget exactly where the option is, but basically in iDVD you set it to play the movie and then repeat. It was really easy to do. So easy that I can't remember the process right now because it just wasn't a process at all.

So yes, iDVD can do it. But you might want to make it only 2 hours or so, as 3-4 hours just sounds really long.
 
I do this every month for a Yoga company.

They have a plasma screen behind their counter in their "studio" and it displays an animated "whats new and upcoming events list"

Basically I animate posters they have at their other studios in other cities.

In any event, its usually a 5 min looping video, containing about 3-5 "ads"

Your idea for specials and sales etc is a good one, but a 2-4 hour looping video is friggen ridiculous.

Take into account how long a typical person looks at one thing of information, just long enough to read it. So having stuff shown for long drawn out periods of time is overkill.

What I think you want is like a 5-10 minute looping DVD that way customers can see the whole thing while in the store. Pushing to 30 minutes would be kinda hard, where would you find all the stuff to fill the time?
 
Dumb question. Why not rely on the repeat function of the DVD player? I don't think I've ever seen one without it.

B
 
balamw said:
Dumb question. Why not rely on the repeat function of the DVD player? I don't think I've ever seen one without it.

B
Click to expand...

That's certainly what I'd do. DVD Studio Pro will make it easy to make a DVD that loops on it's own, but I'm not sure it's possible with iDVD. Just make a regular DVD with one track and then use the DVD player's repeat feature. Even buying a new DVD player with repeat will be cheaper than buying DVD SP.
 
trouble making DVD with DVD studio pro

I'm making a looping DVD with DVD studio pro, from Final Cut Pro. I'm exporting a quicktime movie to DVD studio pro, but when I play the DVD, the sound skips like crazy. I tried resetting the audio to 44.1 as one website advised, still skips.

DOesn't skip when I play the quicktime movie on my desktop, or when I play the final cut pro file.

Please advise, thanks!!
 
trouble making DVD with DVD studio pro

oh, and when I import the quicktime movie to Studio Pro, the dots next to it are not green, they are yellow. help!

I previously wrote:
I'm making a looping DVD with DVD studio pro, from Final Cut Pro. I'm exporting a quicktime movie to DVD studio pro, but when I play the DVD, the sound skips like crazy. I tried resetting the audio to 44.1 as one website advised, still skips.

DOesn't skip when I play the quicktime movie on my desktop, or when I play the final cut pro file.

Please advise, thanks!!
 
If you are using a repeat function (ably described by wintermute), you are likely to get a crackle in the audio/freeze at the repeat point because of the way the DVD player repeats.
Is this the skipping you are referring to?

If not, can you be clearer when you talk about skipping? What exactly are you referring to?
 
stayfunny said:
I'm making a looping DVD with DVD studio pro, from Final Cut Pro. I'm exporting a quicktime movie to DVD studio pro, but when I play the DVD, the sound skips like crazy. I tried resetting the audio to 44.1 as one website advised, still skips.

DOesn't skip when I play the quicktime movie on my desktop, or when I play the final cut pro file.

Please advise, thanks!!
Click to expand...

stayfunny said:
oh, and when I import the quicktime movie to Studio Pro, the dots next to it are not green, they are yellow. help!

I previously wrote:
I'm making a looping DVD with DVD studio pro, from Final Cut Pro. I'm exporting a quicktime movie to DVD studio pro, but when I play the DVD, the sound skips like crazy. I tried resetting the audio to 44.1 as one website advised, still skips.

DOesn't skip when I play the quicktime movie on my desktop, or when I play the final cut pro file.

Please advise, thanks!!
Click to expand...

How do you import footage into DVD Studio Pro?
What settings do you use in DVDSP?

Have you used Compressor to create the MPEG-2 video and the AC3 audio file(s)?

And where does the sound skip exactly and how long is the video?

And how do you loop the video?
 
I don't know what yellow exactly means, but I believe that it's not fully supported.

The workflow to create a DVD for me is to selecht the seqeuncrle(s) and send them to Compressor. In compressor you select the DVD presets. Import the created files into DVD Studio Pro and you're done. DVD SP doesnt need to convert them, they are already the proper format andcompressor is also al lot faster than DVD SP.

If you want to import music, e.g for a slideshiw, I always convert the song to AIFF. DVD Studio Pro handles this also.
 
Loop a movie with iDVD

That's really pretty easy.

1. Open iDVD.
2. Select a theme that gives you the opportunity to insert an intro movie to your project.
3. Click of the Show DVD Map Button.
4. Drag the movie you want to repeat to the intro movie block.
5. Click the Intro Movie block.
6. Fron the Advanced menu, select Loop movie
7. Burn.
7 1/2. Older versions of DVD let users delete the non-reachable Menu. New versions do not allow for that deletion. In which case, ignore the warning about errors.
8. Done.
 
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