Scenarist Buddy

Scenarist Buddy screenshot 

Background

I am a Scenarist DVD Author by day, using the industry standard Sonic Scenarist which gives control over almost every aspect of the disc within the DVD spec. Any author serious about producing truly bespoke work will tell you its the package to use, but this degree of control also comes at a price – speed of use – it needs everything spelled out to it. With a normal DVD this isn’t a problem; it’s good in a way, since it forces you to think about every aspect of the discs navigation. However there are certain types of disc you may want to author where this low-level, verbose form of interaction with Scenarist becomes a stumbling block to working… namely interactive games discs.

Often, authoring houses turn to another 3rd party solution to author these types of DVDs such as DVD Extra from Zoo Interactive. Its a respectable system but does require you to learn its proprietary, in-depth process which, for the sake of completing a handful of interactive titles may not be desirable to you.

Aims

It is this situation that leads me to the creation of ‘Scenarist Buddy’, my ongoing attempt at a tool to enable a higher-level working with Scenarist, via its Script Import/Export feature. It remains, at the moment, in humble beginnings, merely replicating certain features of text editors (e.g. Editplus) that we already use to assist in editing code for the same reason.

A huge chunk of work in making this truly useful is the Scenarist Java API which is also a work in progress. This involves creating a Java datatype equivalent of every Scenarist Object that is visible in Scenarists proprietary project script. Crucially, a Class must also be created to read such scripts to and from a Serialized Java data object form, for automated manipulation by code. Once this is done, the sky’s the limit with interactive authoring, since Scenarist Objects could be procedurally created by code.

ScenaristBuddy is a Java Application.

Current Features

  • Text Search and Replace
  • Timecode Operations (Offset, Scale, Rebase)
  • Token search with file-based replace
  • Select text in containing block braces ‘{text}’
  • Tabbed panes for ease of working with multiple documents

Features in progress

  • Scenarist object interface through “JScenario”, a Scenarist Java API

Downloads