potwnc

I replied - via PM.

In my case I did not have empty text objects.

I did try this once - years ago - with no success. Now I have different, professional level software and a lot more knowledge. If you want to contact me privately via the forum I'm willing to see if I can make it work now - with your project if you're willing to e-mail it to me. Ray

I'll join the chorus... I'm impressed by this and can see lots of potential.

I've had the same error messages and similar problems - although not from doing the same thing, I was switching between slide and timeline view as the miniplayer played the show. My files were very large and WnSoft support said to use smaller files.

A long time ago - over a year anyway - I made a suggestion that PTE itself reduce the image size as it creates the .exe. For example, many of my images are 1920x1080 (for full HD), but I might want to put out an example .exe at a smaller size so people don't have to download such a large file. Rather than me individually re-sizing all the images for each different size .exe I want, PTE would do it for me. The original images would keep their size but be smaller in the .exe. Igor said he'd put this on his TODO list, but I guess that's a very long list by now :-)

Ron, I visited most of the pages (Firefox 2.0.0.16) and downloaded Tigers & Leopards at Marwell and 4WaySplit_Demo (which extracts to 4WaySplit Dermo - so you may want to rename the contained .exe file). Everything worked fine. Ray

Actually, the Wikipedia statement captures the essence of the problem "... anamorphic 16:9 aspect ratio ... stored at a resolution of .. (3:2)" Here, 16:9 describes the displayed aspect ration, but that is never the stored aspect ratio on the disc itself. When authoring the DVD you need to be able to instruct it that the pixel aspect ratio is anamorphic 16:9. Then your HDTV should display it at 16:9 if that is also the display aspect ratio of your source images. This is covered in my HD Appendix of the unofficial user guide. I don't use Video Builder so I can't tell you how you achieve this using it. "Even if I had a HD DVD or Blu-Ray burner, could DVD-Video Builder create a 720p or 1080i HD DVD?" The current version cannot. "Also, is it the "anamorphic" process that causes the size discrepancy on the HDTV screen?" See my explanation above.

I've been following this for a few days now and I didn't plan to post a response because I only produce 16:9 video with PTE anymore and I don't see that changing and I don't think Igor's proposed change will affect me... obviously I'll have to wait until the 5.6 betas to confirm that. But, to try to bring this thread back on topic, I'd like to see the first beta of 5.6 released and then those with enough time and experience can, hopefully, start posting about how it actually impacts us - positively or negatively - with examples and explanations. I, for one, would be willing to sign up for this kind of "power testing." Ray

If you want to contact me via PM on this forum or using http://www.peoplesoftheworld.org/contact.jsp I can arrange for you to email me your PTE project and sample files and then help you diagnose/fix the problem. Ray

Good question... remember that RAID is a technology that addresses data integrity, so it's not directly relevant to the slideshow production issues. I chose not to include RAID on my latest PC configuration but only because (i) I back up all my critical data regularly and (ii) all my photos are on slide film anyway so I can't back them up or rescue a loss with RAID. I would think for most people here RAID 0 is adequate.

To confirm Lin's reply, I have an 8800 GTS and have found that it plays back every PTE slideshow I've ever made or downloaded without a single pause or stutter. Playback of .exe and video files is super smooth, including very large, full HD (1920x1080 pixels) projects with extremely large original images and full HD videos with a very high (15MB/s and more) bit rate, and reasonably complex P/Z/R effects. Not that this is due only to the graphics card - I happen to have a very powerful PC in terms of the other components as well. If you think you will need PTE projects at this scale consider the MOBO, CPU, RAM and hard drive components otherwise your new PC will likely experience a speed bottleneck somewhere. Ray

With the memory demands of HD production, are there plans for a 64-bit version of PTE?

If you use Windows XP Pro x64 or Vista 64-bit, and you render video with a codec other than the built-in PTE codec, you may want to look at http://members.optusnet.com.au/squid_80/. Ray

There's been a lot of discussion here about putting PTE shows on web sites. As of the time of this posting, "Wondershare Video to Flash Encoder" is available as a free (full version, not a trial) download for the next 6 hours only at http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/. Ray

Laura, Please use the contact form at http://www.peoplesoftheworld.org/contact.jsp to send me a message with your e-mail address. I'll then respond with instructions/help. Ray

Then I'm not sure what to say other than it doesn't sound like a resource problem. I don't use VideoBuilder myself. Have you tried creating a .AVI file with the PTE codec and, with PTE still running, letting a different application (e.g., Nero Burner) produce the MPEG-2 file or the actual DVD?

My PC also reported no trojan, virus etc.

Claude, What do you mean by this? What happens when you just hit "Preview" from within PTE? What happens if you create a .exe file, exit PTE and then run that .exe file?

Well this is what I actually wrote: "My point was that the "Disc Format War" is over and Blu-ray won it." I think it goes without saying that everyone understands this to refer to the disc format war that has been going on between Blu-ray and HD-DVD for the last few years. How much more qualified do you need such a statement to be? I could qualify it further by pointing out that I currently know of nowhere I can go to rent a movie on HD-DVD disc; nor do I know where I can buy an HD-DVD player. Toshiba themselves have already announced dropping support for HD-DVD format discs and players. I don't know how anyone can look at this and not conclude that the war I'm referring to is over and who the winner is. But if anyone has any doubt they can google "Blu-ray wins" and get the opinion of industry experts. My statement says nothing about newer disc formats that may one day emerge and be a serious contender to Blu-ray. But right now there is none. Yes I did write that and you're correct about who are among the driving forces behind the Blu-ray disc format... but I don't see how one has anything to do with the other. You said it was a "problem" that "you will not be able to Copy the Blue-Ray Disc." What might be a problem for you might not be a problem for everyone else. Just as it's not a problem for me that my house has doors that lock so I can protect the contents inside it, I don't assume that it is a problem for other people in the world, who may not have the same kind of contents to protect, that their doors don't have locks. But I do assume it is a problem for those who don't have a key to my doors precisely because I want it to be a problem for them. Just as there is nothing about doors that says they have to have locks, I correctly pointed out that there is nothing about the Blu-ray disc format that has to have the content on the disc copy-protected. If I choose to lock my door that's my business. It's no surprise that the companies behind Blu-ray - the commercial studios - chose a technology that they believe - rightly or wrongly - has the better copy protection. It's also no surprise that the newest generation of Blu-ray discs they are producing are copy protected. I imagine this is because they want it to be a problem for people who want to copy the content on the disc. But the point is that they choose to put this copy protection on those discs. It is not forced on them by the technology itself. Perhaps you could qualify further why you believe this is a problem? You are aware of how old that article is, aren't you? Ray

Dave, I didn't mean to hijack your thread... I'm trying to post material that is relevant to it. There's always a trade-off between viewing what the author intended and filling the screen at native resolution. One advantage of video is that the player can easily tell you what the resolution of the content is; the author doesn't have to do anything special to let you know this. As for "living with it" I'd rather not have my audience see "Image load error" instead of the image I intended. But if I don't know the specs of their computer I don't know how to guarantee avoiding that. On the other hand, if I have a DVD or Blu-ray people already know whether they have something that can play it. Ray

Well I won't enter into any political or ethical discussion on this point (and I don't think the members of this forum want to either), but I see that as an advantage, not a problem. There's nothing about the Blu-ray disc format itself that requires data (video or any other content) to be copy protected. If some (e.g., commercial film studios) choose to copy protect their content that's their business. My point was that the "Disc Format War" is over and Blu-ray won it. As users of PTE if we want to distribute video on disc we should consider that - for the near future at least - most of our audience will most likely be able to watch it only on either DVD disc or Blu-ray disc. The choice of the media (data) format on that disc is (again for the near future) up to us. We can make it standard DVD/MPEG-2, AVCHD DVD/MPEG-2/MPEG-4 or Blu-ray/MPEG-2/MPEG-4. Almost everyone now buying set-top players are buying one capable of playing all of these media formats.

Actually, Toshiba were behind HD-DVD and it is that format, not Blu-ray, that they abandoned. Blu-ray is alive and well. My main point in my reply was about quality and the size of the original image for 16:9 output. The issue is much the same for .exe or video output. In fact, for long shows with large files it's even more relevant for video as there comes a point where .exe output is just not feasible. Even for the simple, 2-slide show I uploaded the .exe file is larger than the video output file that I uploaded!

Dave, Do you mean that all your source images are 1366x768 or only those images for which you have no PZR effects? For any image that is 1366x768 you will lose quality with any P, Z or R effects. As I've posted here before and tried to explain in the HD Appendix of the unofficial guide, output devices will scale the source up or down as necessary. Most "HD" output devices these days are - or are capable of displaying - 16:9 aspect ratio. But I think we all want to have our audience experience what we intended. For .exe output we can do that by specifying the window size in PTE. But for video output we can't force our audience to view it as we intended. Instead the best we can do is render to one of the HD video output dimension standards and hope our audience will have an output device (or set their output device to the resolution) that matches our intention. With that in mind download this example by choosing "Save As" from the download link. But before you download it make sure you have VLC Media Player or Media Player Classic installed because Windows Media Player will not play this file. Then set your output device to exactly 1280x720 resolution, and then set your player to view the downloaded video file at "Full Screen" mode - otherwise you won't experience the quality that PTE can deliver. It is a 1280x720 (16:9) short video with just 2 images. The first was taken on Fuji Provia 100F slide film, the second on Ektachrome 100VS slide film. Both were scanned at 6400 dpi optical, which is at the cutting edge of current "prosumer" technology. The original images are around 8500x5500 optical pixels. The output was 1280x720p with the PTE codec and rendered to AVC using Vegas Pro 8. If anyone downloads this file and follows the above instructions exactly I'd be interested to hear back on this thread about their perception of the quality. Ray

John, thanks for pointing that out. Somehow I'd just never noticed it in the new version. Anyway, here's a bug that will happen only using very large images and a large number of them. We concluded in a previous thread that this was a Windows limitation but now I'm not so sure. In my show slide 50 (of about 100) is 4993x3240 pixels. PTE 5.1 handles this just fine - the preview works, the .exe works and the output .avi works. The same .pte file in 5.5 beat 8 stops at this slide in the mini-player and continues to play but shows no more transitions. If I then switch to the timeline I get an access violation followed by a popup saying "can't draw on canvas" (or something like that, I forget the exact text). This popup comes up again and again and I have to kill apr.exe from the task manager. I can recreate this easily. If I try to just output a .avi from that same .pte file I get a very small .avi file that is the correct length (in minutes and seconds), but has just the image that is too big and no transitions.