Mark Multiple Clips with "Chapter Marker"?

Hey friends,

Forgive me if you have already addressed this one... I looked but could not find it anywhere on the site...

This falls under the "digital daily" scenario...
I have 50 or so clips captured, in a timeline, and I now want to put "Chapter" markers at the head of each clip in order to output an MPEG 2 stream via compressor for DVD. The goal is to provide my producer with a DVD that can utilize the "track forward" button to skip around to each clip. As you can imagine, doing this manually would take a very long time...

Anyone know of a shortcut or built in feature that will do this quickly?

THANKS!!!

-Joshua


Joshua Martelli
Director of Multimedia
Office (760)721-3600
Cell (619)921-9196

Mad Media Design
2554 Pahvant
Oceanside, CA 92054
Fax(760)721-3626

www.madmediadesign.com



<Comfort the Disturbed, Disturb the Comfortable>

Hmmm... I can think of a couple of ways of speeding it up, but not automating it entirely.

The first way would be to add all of the clips to your timeline in DVDSP and then to use the down arrow key on the keyboard to jump to the first 'join'. You would then type 'M' on the keyboard to add a chapter with the default name 'Chapter xx', where xx is the next logical number in the sequence. You could tap out a few of your favourite rhythms whilst you're at it... ;-)

The only other way to speed it up would be to import a file of pre-determined chapter markers, but this would depend on you knowing the precise time codes for the length of each clip and creating a text file with them in. DVDSP can import this information and place markers at the time codes that you include. From the manual (p.355):

<i>Each marker must be on a new line that starts with a timecode value in the ?00:00:00:00? format. These values identify the marker positions.

? After the timecode value, you can include a name for the marker. You can use a comma, space, or tab character to separate the timecode value from the marker name.
? Any lines that do not begin with a timecode value are ignored. This makes it easy for you to add comments to the list.
? The timecode values do not have to be listed in chronological order.</i>

Hal's first suggestion is the one I would direct for you. It doesn't take very long if you're not looking to name each chapter marker, and if you are, then you can name the first, highlight the name, apple-c to copy, then in the next one you create, mm, apple-v (in the name), then update the name.

- Steve