In creating long-form programs I prefer to set Chapter indexing markers on the FCP time line, it is easier to add and name them with a couple of key strokes. Of course they are not carried through the encode process using the WinXP Cinema Craft encoder - so none appear when importing the MPEG2 into DVDSP.
I examined the DVDSP manual hoping there must be some way of applying Chapter markers to MPEG2 encodes that I had done with Cinema Craft encoder.
The answer lies in some very useful export features of QuickTime Pro and a bit of formatting of a plain text file for import into DVDSP.
First make sure you have an initial Chapter at the very beginning of your sequence - if you don’t the timing points of your Chapters will be mucked up when imported into DVDSP.
Next export your sequence to a QT Final Cut movie and open this in QuickTime Pro.
You should see your named Chapter index pop-up to the right of the movie timeline display.
Open the Show Movie Properties window (CMD + J) and enable the Text Track so that it is visible at the top of the movie window. We want to export just this text track, so go to File Export and choose Export: Text to Text.
In options make sure “Show Text, Descriptors, and Time” is selected and Time Stamps is relative to Movie.
Now we have a bit of tidying up of this text file to meet the syntax for DVDSP. Delete all the description header information before the first 0:00 time code. Backspace the Chapter names so they appear after the time code but on the same line, separated by a comma, space or tab.
Do a find and replace on the “.” in the time code and change it to “:”, likewise find and replace the square brackets with nothing or delete them manually. Your text file should like something like this:
00:00:00:00 Start
00:16:22:12 Intro
etc
QT also adds a Chapter point at the end of the sequence, so you might name this END or delete it.
In DVDSP with your video track displayed in the Track Editor, Choose File > Import > Marker list or control click in the Track Editor’s marker area above the track and choose Import Marker List.
Of course you can still create Chapter Menus by dragging this track to the Menu editor. A helluva lot less tedious than reading your FCP chapter points and manually entering them back into the encoding software or DVDSP - yes I learnt the hard way!
FCP Chapter markers + 3rd party MPEG2 encoders can they co-exist?