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Al, Check your email at this board. I had no problems producing both 720p, 1080i and 1080p WMV files from PTE's AVI output with WME. I never tried processing those AVIs through Windows Movie Maker though. Then again, all my source images were in 16:9 aspect ratio to begin with. I won't be reading or logging on to the PTE forums much after this post... good luck to everyone and thanks, Igor, for all your help in the past. Signing off... Ray

Guido, Check your email for details about my web site. Ray

Since you're in KS, you probably want an NTSC (instead of PAL) DVD? The standard resolution is 720x480. That's why Tsunami is complaining. If you want to preserve your non-standard aspect ratio, process your video using software that supports non-square pixels (e.g., Windows Media Encoder) before you convert it to MPEG-2 for the burn to DVD.

Al, Check your email for the 1080p link (I decided not to bother with 1080i - at least for now). I don't think it'd be fair to Igor to post about competitive products on the board, so I'll send you that information privately. If the 720p version is jerky on your PC, the 1080p version will be even more jerky! Go to miscrosoft.com and make sure your PC meets the minumum system requirements for WMV HD playback. Also, close all other programs that can eat CPU and memory. Remember that wide-screen and HD (which is anamorphic widescreen, 16:9) have different aspect ratios. If your source images are 1280x768 you should set PTE's video output size to exactly 1280x768 also. That should give you a vertical pan using the push effect without a gap between the images. Ray

Al and Ralph, I have now uploaded the slideshow/documentary trailer at 720p (1280x720). I'd better warn you that it's a 97MB download! I also have it at 1080p if you want to see it at that resolution (125MB). Check your email on this board. Ray

You're welcome! Good luck with your projects.

Glad to be of help. And glad soome have been able to produce "widescreen" shows to their satisfaction. A few observations... 16:9 is _not_ widescreen! Rather, it is known as "anamorphic widescreen." If you play a widescreen DVD on an HDTV or HD computer monitor, expect to see 2 thin borders top and bottom, as the widescreen aspect ratio is slightly different (more elongated) than anamorphic widescreen (but they're pretty close). "HD format" can mean different things depending on the context... There are 3 main formats in use: 1) 720p - the frames are 1280x720 pixels, and the frames are "progressive scan," which means the full frame is shown at once. 2) 1080i - the frames are 1920x1080 pixels (but some codecs, e.g., Microsoft WMV 9, can scale these to 1440x1080 and use non-square pixels), and the frames are "interace scan," which means, just like good old-fashion TV sets, half of each frame is shown at once, then the other half. (Most people's eyes are too slow to notice the interlace effect.) All HD cable and satellite TV signals (at least in N. America) are currently one of the above. 3) 1080p - the best currently possible. The best combination of 1 and 2 above. The only way (currently) to get this is to make your own or buy commercial WMV HD DVDs (e.g., at Amazon.com). Note that the above applies to the source material, not the hardware it will be viewed on. I've seen consumer electronics stores advertising TVs with 1024x1024 pixels as "HDTVs." This is nonesense! What they mean is "it can play an HDTV signal." Well, with the right converter, so can the very first consumer black-and-white TVs made in the 1940s! If it doesn't have _at least_ 1280x720 pixels you will lose quality. Period! So..... From Al: "I have since put together a wide-screen (1280x768) show using 720x480 format. I used Nero 6.0 to render it to HDTV format." I assume you mean the source AVI was 1280x768? I typed my earlier comment in a hurry, I should have said 1280x720, which _is_ the 16:9 (HD) aspect ratio, not 1280x768. Sorry. But note that unless your original images are at least 1280x720, PTE (and any other program) can only interpolate the missing pixels, which will reduce quality. If your destination is going to be a DVD, your software (e.g., Nero) will then downscale that back to 720x405. So, if you want your show to be anamorphic widescreen (16:9), on DVD, why not just skip an unnecessary step and tell PTE to output to 720x405 (also a 16:9, HD aspect ratio), then burn this with Nero? From Hawk: "I created a Custom AVI at Width 1920 and Height 1080...I opened Nero Express and burned files to DVD-R..." First, note that neither 2272 x 1704 nor 1024 x 768 is a 16:9 ratio. So when PTE output the AVI it must have distorted the images slightly? Second, because your output format is DVD, you could just as easily let PTE produce a 720x405 (16:9) AVI and burned that onto your DVD-R. The results should be the same. Third, what DVD player did you use? Some of the newer ones will "upscale" DVDs to higher resolution. Did you use one of these? Last, if you _really_ want to impress your audience, put your 1920x1080 AVI through Windows Media Encoder (free from Microsoft), and play it from your computer (it has to be pretty powerful to do this) with its video card output connected to your daughter's plasma HDTV. To get an idea of the quality you'll see, download one of the "showcase" HD trailers from microsoft.com. Soon I'll put a show I've made (however, not using PTE because I needed pan and zoom) on my web site in both 720p and 1080i. Email me if you want the link when I've uploaded it. I know some of this is not straightforward, but remember that the size and aspect ratio of the original material is very important here. Good luck Ray

Al, Any particular reason you chose 720x540? Anyway, for an NTSC DVD (North America, Japan and a few other, obscure places) always choose 720x480. As I said before, don't worry if that's not the aspect ratio of your source material... programs like Nero etc. will automatically set the pixel ratio so that the aspect ratio of your source is preserved. Which version of Pinnacle Studio do you use? 10 is very flakey when it comes to doing what you told it in terms of these type of parameters. I wouldn't recommend producing an uncompressed AVI file. As you said, they are huge. Stick with a codec that produces a manageable file. Good luck!

I'd really like a future version to support HD (24-bit) audio.

Al, Yes, 720x480 is not 16:9, but 720x480 is the standard resolution for NTSC DVDs. It doesn't matter what aspect ratio your source material is. So, for example, Pinnacle Studio (and the others) will produce DVDs in 4:3, 16:9, letterbox etc. but the actual DVD will always be 720x480 (unless you want PAL, which I guess you don't if you are in Canada). This is no different than commercial DVDs that come with 2 discs - Standard format (4:3) and Widescreen format (usually 16:9). Both dics are 720x480 (if they are NTSC). If you play any NTSC DVD (commercial or one that you made) on an HDTV (all of which are 16:9, but note that a lot of sales people don't know this, or will lie about it to get you to buy their product), you will see the aspect ratio of your source material. If that source material is 16:9 (e.g., 1280x768), it will fill the whole screen. If you want to show the material in true HD (1280x786 or 1920x1080 or 1440x1080 non-square pixels) you have to use Windows Media Encoder (or Sony Vegas, or Pinnacle Studio 10, which is very unstable, or some other software that supports HD rendering) and play it back through your computer. HD players are not currently available outside Japan. Hope this helps! Ray

Al, yes I've done this successfully. After rendering from PTE to AVI at 1920x1080 (NTSC, non-interlaced, 29.97 fps) (I believe I used the standard PTE codec, but I'm not too sure about that). I used TMPGenc DVD Source Creator to reduce it to 720x480 (16:9) MPEG-2 format and then used TSUNAMI-MPEG DVD Author to author and burn it to a DVD+R (my burner uses bitsetting to produce a final DVD-ROM). I used Windows Media Encoder to produce 1440x1080p (Non-Square pixels) WMV HD. The only problem I had was when I first tried AVI -> WMV. Windows Media Encoder crashed consistently and I thought it was a PTE error. I posted about that in the forum, but later tested it on a clean Windows install and it ran fine. Hope this helps! Ray

I've posted before in here about scanning images at HD resolution (which I've been doing for the past year). Well, in case anyone missed the announcements yesterday (Wednesday), both Blu-Ray and HD DVD players will soon be available (at least in North America). I didn't bookmark the locations where I read this but, for example, Best Buy today announced pre-ordering on their web site for a Toshiba HD DVD player (to ship in March/April), retailing at US$ 500. As we know, software to support HD rendering as been available at consumer prices for some time now. With these latest announcements, it's only a matter of time before burners will be available and we can distribute our work in HD format. The future is looking bright :-)

I have to agree with Fred on this. Please let us - the creators - control what the user can and can't do with the shows we create. Also, in keeping with UI standards, you wouldn't want to write a program that said: "Save changes? Yes/No" and ALWAYS save the changes, would you?

I too would be willing to help test. In case anyone is not following the news about Studio 10, take a peek over on that discussion forum to see what lack of beta testing can achieve... I suspect that right after Christmas, a lot of people will be looking to switch to a different product. I've given up on it and will be switching back to PTE. Hopefully a usable 5/5 beta will be available in time for a present I've promised someone. Igor, you have a real opportunity here to get new market share!

I too am waiting with baited breath... I released my trailer using other software, but it may not be too late to change back to PTE if 5.0 does all I need.

I don't know what was on my PC to prevent WME from working before, so I built a new PC with XP Pro, SP2 and PTE 4.41 and then it worked fine. The reason I want WMV format is so I can release a documentary I'm producing in High Definition. BluRay and HD-DVD are a long way off - probably years before either is available at consumer prices. WMV HD is here today and the quality is excellent.

My apologies to everyone - I spoke too soon. PTE's .avi files can be encoded just fine with WME. WME, it seems, does not play well with others. So if anyone plans to use it, plan on having a PC with little or no other software on it. Ray

Igor, I've waited a few days now and I see no e-mail from you. Anyway the problem is that WME just keeps on consuming virtual memory, no matter how high I set my virtual memory in Windows XP SP2. Then it eventually just crashes with an error message that it couldn't read a memory location. E-mail me if you need more detail. Ray

I'm surprised nobody in this thread seems to be thinking forward to HD formats. Yes higher resolution projectors are getting less expensive all the time, but so are HDTVs. I only scan now at 1920x1080 (and higher for images that will be zoomed/panned). I can say from first-hand experience that 1920x1080 images look superb on good-quality HDTVs. As for video, well I've posted before that current PC technology is just too slow to render from .exe files at that size, but encoding to 1920x1080 .avi (which PTE can already do) does not have to be done in real-time - only playback has to be done in real-time, which is possible with today's medium-quality PCs. If anyone has downloaded any of the 1080p (or even 720p) content from microsoft.com, they will already know how stunning the quality is. The only missing part of the link is that PTE - as far as I can tell - produces .avi files that cannot be encoded to HD! (I posted about this a few days ago in the video topic - Windows Media Encoder 9 crashes with every codec I've tried and this appears to be a bug in PTE). This is by no means a plug, but Pinnacle Studio 10 will be out in October and will support HD video from slideshows, with pan and zoom, and will render .avi files that WME9 will encode. PTE is falling behind and I think Pinnacle 10 will be a real threat unless it catches up!

Has anyone tried using a PTE .avi output file as input to WME 9? When I try this WME 9 crashes (the error message is that it is trying to write memory at location 0). Igor, is this a bug with the way PTE writes .avi files?

I, for one, was hoping to use some of Guido's royalty-free music in the future (and make a donation if/when I did). I can probably help some with web hosting of files also if the file sizes and bandwidth requirements are too high for the free file-sharing web sites that are out there. Guido, please PM me if interested. Ray

It's a documentary about indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia. If there's interest, I'll announce on here when the trailer is released (2-3 weeks from now). Ray

I think it was my post about image size that started this thread. I guess we'll all know more once Igor releases the first beta... and I don't want to seem like I'm speaking for him (I'm not!). My concern that prompted my original question was that I'm working on a lengthy (90 minutes) production that I eventually want to render to HDV format. So my own concern in posting that question was not with the performance of a .exe show on "average" PCs. I scan to 48-bit TIFF at 3840x2160 pixels, which is way too large (48MB files, uncompressed) for current PC technology to render in real time with current graphics cards. In fact, I don't plan to produce a .exe of this in the foreseeable future, only a video version (DVD then, later, HDV). I've started working with other software, but not because I fear PTE won't handle my image sizes (Igor assured me in the other thread that it will), but only because my deadline is too close to risk PTE with pan/zoom won't be ready in time for me. Unless you have a deadline like I do, wait for the first beta and then, as always, experiment before drawing conclusions. Ray

Igor, I know I shouldn't be asking this yet but.... I'm going to ask it anyway! Knowing that my final output will be 1920x1080 pixels (I'm anticipating HD-DVD burners and connecting directly from a PC through DVI to current HDTV technology) am I safe in my assumption that scanning my images at 3840x2160 pixels will produce good results once pan and zoom is released? I'm asking this because I'm currently scanning thousands of images at 3840x2160 and if I had to re-scan them, the project would be delayed by months! Ray

Igor, How confident are you in that 4-6 week estimate? The reason I ask is because that's around the time I want to release a trailer of a full-length documentary. It would be SO MUCH better if the trailer could include pan and zoom! I'd be more than happy to use a pre-beta if possible! Ray