jezzaf99

Almost likewise, Fonz - I'm a pro photographer wanting to make put slidesows onto a DVD to offer to my clients, and I'm finding this software just not user friendly at this stage. Great for making slideshows to play on the PC, and burn to a CD and play on other machines, but when it comes to the DVD side of things, I think I'm going to just give up. I really haven't got the time or energy to be checking codecs and so on - I just want to burn a slideshow to a DVD quickly, easily and efficiently! I know you guys like Ken, who seem to all about codecs and such like have no trouble doing this, but it seems to me from the posts that an awful lot of people are failing to achieve this. It makes great slideshows, but that last stage of burning to DVD is such a nightmare. My dream for 5.0 would be for DVD authoring to be fully integrated! I would just add that I am running a good up to date well resourced PC, so it's not like I'm struggling on an out dated piece of kit. All the best jez

Cheers Dan Thanks for your ideas and sharing your experiences. It's strange isn't it, how discs will run on one machine and not another!! The important thing is not to run DVD's on my laptop - I can always just copy the slideshows over. What I need to do, efficiently and reliably is to produce shows on a DVD for my clients to use, and hopefully pay me some decent money!!! I'll have some goes next week - gonna take abreak for the weekend! Cheers Jez

Hi Ken Thanks for your reply Taking your last point first, it was really a lack of time - this time last year I was holding down a full time job while running a part time photography business, and quite a number of things got done to a good enough level while wishing I had more time. Now the day job has gone, hooray, and I really want to do things to a much higher level - the area of disatisfaction with that DVD was the "shimmer" which I've now seen several references to in the forum, but is not evident in the slideshow I've just produced, though I've only been able to view on my PC and laptop, transferred to the laptop by burning the files to a CD and copying. In terms of what am I doing differently from last year, as far as I can tell, nothing! The only change in my hardwear set up is that the DVD writer has been replaced; the old one failed and was replaced by Dell as part of the three year warranty I have on the system; however all DVD's which I use to back up files onto can be read by both my PC and my laptop. Video tracks I can assemble using Roxio, burn to DVD and view on my TV through my Philips DVD player. I can't check whether last year's show still works, as I no longer have a copy of it. Despite what I said in my post, I've actually had a rest from the DVD aspect today - I felt I needed a break from it and have got on with some other tasks instead. Tested out slideshow features such as the limited usage and disable printing/copying facilities instead, checking that I can happily give clients their wedding previews in this way and not lose my reprint sales! The procedure I've been following is to assemble a slideshow in pte, with a sound track, using "Create slideshow as" and saving it. Then clicking "Video"; leaving pte open and without clicking "Finish", I open Roxio DVD Builder in Easy Creator 7, import the pte avi, and burn the DVD - it will playback on my PC but not on my laptop, and not on my DVD player. And I really can't work out what I'm doing wrong!! But I'm sure that suddenly it will work, and I'll never be sure what I've done differntly. Jerry

I'm going to reply to my own post .... since posting this message I've also tried burning a DVD of a slideshow made in Roxio (as opposed to burning a show made in p2e then burned in Roxio - same result ... tomorrow I'll try doing it on the laptop - same software (well Roxio anyway - I'll try to load to p2e onto it too).

Hi everyone I have tried searching the forum in an attempt to find out what I'm doing wrong but with no success. About a year ago, I invested in Roxio, for archiving and slide show purposes, then discovered PicToExe, which seemed to a pretty good job at slide show creation. I created a slideshow on DVD for a wedding client, and while I wasn't 100% happy with it, it worked. I'm now gearing up for this year's wedding season, and have created a slideshow to use on my laptop for presentation purposes ... but when I try to burn it to a DVD to play back through a DVD player connected to a television, it just doesn't work; I also tried burning a SVCD, which did work but the quality was pretty awul; nowhere near a quality that I could sell; picture quality was the problem, yet when viewing the .exe file on my PC, they look fantastic. Any ideas - I'm getting pretty fed up after three days graft on this, hours spent going through the forum, and many DVD's thrown away! Jez

How did I miss it! Thanks Roger Jez

"The norm seems to be settling down to 1024 x 768 pixels (jpeg of course) . It does depend on how you intend to show the finished .exe though. Always make your slide shows at the same resolotion of the intended monitor on which they will be shown." Can I ask at what ppi, eg is this at 72ppi, the usual for output to screen, or 300ppi? Thanks jez

At a seminar I attended yesterday, the speaker said that PictoExe slideshows can have time limited functionality added ... but there wasn't time for him to go into how to do this! How can I access this feature? Thanks jerry