Carol Steele

My VideoBuilder licence has expired so I need to purchase a new one - but when I click on the button to purchase a new key for version 6, I get sent to the 'Regnow' web site which fails to load (using Firefox). Anybody else having this problem??

No problems here Isabel - I watched it in HD and it loaded fast with no lags, all transitions worked with no lags either (connected via 10Mbit cable)

That is probably due to the fact the original images are probably 3:2 ratio and not 16:9. To get to 1920 x1080 you are going to have to crop a portion from the top and bottom as well. To do this simply create a new action and use the crop tool set at 1920 x1080 px and 72 ppi. Run this action over the folder of images once you have created it.

Yes , I guess so I build a new system every 2½ to 3 years - although I was a bit annoyed this time round as just after a week of purchasing all the bits, Intel released their DO version of the i7 920 chip, which is far easier to overclock and runs much cooler than the S0/S1 variant. I can get a reasonable and stable overclock to around 3.36GHz with this chip, but the D0's are easily overclocked on just air to around 3.8 to 4GHz. Guess I'll wait a year and then do an upgrade as prices should have dropped a lot by then. I do a lot of Photoshop work and I create a lot of HD slideshows in both HD DVD and Blu-ray formats and I have found that with this system I can render an HD show in one quarter of the time it used to take on my old Intel Core Duo E6667(?) chipped system which I built 2½ years ago. Things have definitely got cheaper though - I paid over £300 for 4Gb of RAM back then and this time round I paid around £100 for 12Gb of much faster RAM. Trouble is that the price of motherboards (at least 1366 mobos) has gone through the roof for reasonably high end ones and the cpu's aren't exactly bargain basement prices yet

FWIW, I have had no problems running PTE on my Windows 7 x64 system (except for the problem I mentioned in the other thread). No need to invoke compatibility mode whatsoever. System details: CPU: Intel i7 920 S0/S1 Mobo: Gigabyte GA-X58-UD5 RAM: 12Gb OCZ 2000MHz Video: nVidia GeForce GTS 250 with 1024Mb RAM Op Sys: Windows 7 x64 Ultimate (Build 7201) - it also ran without problems in the RC (version 7100) PTE: version 5.6.4

I prefer to have the resident shield active so that anything which comes into the system is automatically scanned before you touch it. It was the Resident Shield which was causing the problems. I'm testing Avira at the moment (and this doesn't introduce the long delay before the slide appears) and I will try Avast soon and see which one I prefer.

OK, thanks to everybody - it does appear to be a problem caused by running with the AVG anti-virus program. Temporarily turning it off resulted in start times as fast as with my Vista machine. Hopefully AVG will introduce an update to solve this, in the meantime I will look at alternative AV packages.

Hi Igor, Thanks for coming back to me on this. I am using AVG Free (version 8.5) on both machines (a Win7 x64 machine and a Vista x32 machine) - the Win 7 system should be much faster as it is a newly built Intel i7 system. I will disable the AV software and see if this is the cause and will report back.

I am using Windows 7 (x64) and PTE and for some reason there is a very slow (read excruciatingly slow) start up when clicking an exe file produced with PTE. Double clicking on the same file on a Vista machine results in virtual instant start up, indicating that it is something in Windows 7 which is causing this. Timings are:- From double clicking on the file 10 seconds for the screen to turn black and a further 15 seconds for the 1st image to appear. In Vista double clicking on the file results in the first image showing immediately (less than 1 sec) The exe file is an intro image which contains links to the other slideshows and is a mere 963Kb in size. I have tried running in Win XP and Vista compatibility modes and also running in administrator mode - all to no avail. Just a forewarning to Igor as when Windows 7 is released (in October) this will become a serious issue.

My thoughts and prayers are with the both of you Lin. I hope your wife comes through this illness and you are able to smile once again. Love and best wishes Carol

The difference in quality (even playing an SD version of the wedding sampler on an upscaling DVD player) is quite astounding Ron, it seems even more marked than an ordinary SD film disk being played on an upscaling player. When you are sending out samplers to prospective clients you want to hit them with the best quality possible - it's all very well saying that the finished product will be better, but in an overcrowded market and when I don't have direct access to the prospective client, I want my samplers to stand out head and shoulders above the opposition. I should point out that I am a photographer, not a videographer and my finished product are prints and not a video of their wedding - although they can buy a DVD slideshow of all the images and now I will be able to add the option of purchasing an HD version of the slideshow either in HD DVD or Blu-ray varieties.

Hi Ray, I have a Blu-ray burner coming on Monday/Tuesday, so I will be able to burn genuine BR disks after that - but at around £4.00 a pop vs around £0.15 a pop for ordinary DVD's, it makes more sense to burn to DVD if I can

Hi Ray, Thank you so much for this valuable information. As I am using Pinnacle Studio 12 to render the shows to disk (an ordinary DVD disk) in either HD DVD or AVCHD format (the latter is accepted by Blu-ray players as a Blu-ray disk) I am at the over limit for an HD DVD (around 23 mins of video on the DVD if burned at 100% quality) and just on the limit for a Blu-ray AVCHD disk at 100% quality. However, I have burned the shows (with menus etc) onto HD DVD at around 67% quality and there is not a huge drop in visual quality. Unfortunately this is not a quantitative comparison - I must first run half the show which was burned at 100% quality, then change to the full show burned at 67% quality and see If I can remember what the first one looked like. Unfortunately I cannot run a side by side comparison. Thanks again, Carol

Thanks Ray, as these shows are Wedding Samplers which I send out to potential clients, the recipients are exclusively UK based, so I guess it will be either 25fps or 50fps. I guess converting at 50fps would double the size of the mpg4 file, but would opting for either interlaced or progressive for the final disk have any bearing on whether you render at 25 or 50fps?? Thanks, Carol

By default if you just use the HD (1920 x1080) setting, the frame rate is set to 29.97 for the resultant MPEG4 file. However, as I am UK based, should I be going into the custom settings dialog box (see below):- and set the frame rate to either 25fps - or even 24fps for an intended target of a Blu-ray disk?? Thanks Carol

For anybody interested in Pinnacle Studio, the normal retail price from Pinnacle is around £65 +VAT for the Studio Plus version - but I found the Ultimate version on Amazon for around £38 - so it pays to shop around . Edit (2 weeks later): Just checked again and it's gone back up to £76. I think they must have put it up at the wrong price and subsequently changed it. Guess I was just very fortunate Carol

Hi Lin, Many thanks for the information about Pinnacle. I downloaded the trial version of Studio 12 Plus and it works fine. I took the mp4 file from P2Exe and loaded it into Pinnacle - chose to output onto a standard DVD disk in HD Format (because I have a Toshiba HD DVD player) and it works perfectly - possibly not quite up to purchased HD DVD movies, but certainly a lot better than upscaled SD format from a straightforward DVD disk. The beauty of this is that I can now offer my clients either Blu-Ray or HD DVD slideshows, so it is an ideal way of producing high definition disks. As my shows are generally 20 to 40 mins max, they easily fit onto a standard DVD disk, so I don't have the expense of the very expensive Blu-Ray disks. Many Thanks

I have been running 64-bit Windows for over 2½ years now, initially with XP x64 and for the past 18 months with Vista Ultimate x64. The most annoying aspect of Vista is the constant nag about "Do you want to do this" ..... "Are you really sure you want to do this" type of message and the knocking out of monitor profiles. However, if you use a modern virus scanner and anti-mal ware programs you can disable this by disabling the User Account Control (UAC) and by following the directions found on this website. I have one piece of software which I cannot install (an old accounts program) and one piece of hardware (an old modem which I used purely as a telephone answering machine) which I have not been able to locate drivers for, otherwise everything runs great. The latest version of Photoshop (x64) runs so smoothly in 8Gb of RAM - but one caveat with the 64-bit version of Photoshop is that any plugins you use need to be 64-bit versions too, it cannot use 32-bit plugins. Fortunately both the 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Photoshop are on the DVD and you can elect to install both versions if you want. Simply install your 32-bit plugins into the 32-bit version of Photoshop. A bit clunky, but until the plugin vendors rewrite their plugins as 64-bit versions, this is the only workaround. Photoshop also uses the RAM on the video card to enhance its operations via OpenGL, so a modern graphics card with plenty of on board memory is recommended (around 512 to 1024Mb should do nicely). Contrary to Conflow's experience, I store thousands of large files on my system - but these are on separate internal hard drives and these are backed up to external e-sata hard drives (I must have around 4 TB of disk space on this machine alone). No problems whatsoever. One last piece of advice before you decide which direction to take, make a list of all your devices (both internal and external) and go to each manufacturers website and check if they have Vista 64-bit drivers available for their device.

If I play back on the computer the sound is the same as the pte preview - it is only when I start playing back to my TV via my amp + DVD player that the volume effectively doubles (in comparison to 'normal' DVD's when played on the same system). Yes, I'm aware that I can convert all my music to lower volume versions in Adobe Audition - but wanted to avoid doing this if at all possible. A volume control with the P2Exe program itself would be the ideal answer.

After I have created DVD's in Video Builder, the volume at playback is roughly double what everything else plays back - so it would be nice to have a volume slider either built into P2Exe or Video Builder itself.

Thanks for the suggestion, but it turned out to be a mistake on my part - I had included a wav file instead of a wma file - and although it played OK when I previewed the pte slideshow, it wouldn't convert for some reason.

This problem has just surfaced. I have created the pte slideshow and it plays back all 4 of the audio files correctly. Unfortunately, after creating the DVD slideshow, only the first track plays and then no more audio. I have tried 1. Auto syncing the music along the timeline 2. Doing a manual sync No joy with either - just the first track plays and then silence. The sound files are wma soundtracks - but I have never had problems with this format anytime in the past, so I doubt it is that. In the DVD menu setup, the audio is set to MPEG audio with a bitrate of 224kbps. Any ideas???

With the unfortunate death of HD DVD, there are bound to be a number of HD DVD players at vastly reduced prices coming onto (or already on) the market. All of the Toshiba models do upscaled SD - possibly to a higher standard than simple upscaling models - plus there are hundreds of HD DVD titles which can be had at reduced prices. There are various firmware versions available which will convert these players to region free SD players (the HD disks were always region free) - so you can buy DVD's at much reduced prices from places such as Amazon.com (see AV Forums) for further information.

I've got a 42" Toshiba telly and a Toshiba E1 HD DVD player (yeah, I backed the wrong horse - but just as with the VHS/Betamax "war", the superior technology lost) - but the E1 does a terrific job with upscaling and DVD's written with Video Builder and image files sized specifically for normal SD viewing look extremely good on my system - much better than on my previous system. I must admit I was blown away when I first watched a DVD done this way. Unfortunately, I've gotten used to the better quality now (amazing how quickly that happens). Carol

I think she might have lesbian tendancies Colin (nothing wrong with that if you are that way inclined) as I received the same message. I notified one of the moderators about it. There was a program about the Nigerian Mafia using such tactics to extract money from people on BBC1 television a couple of weeks ago - so do please heed Colin's warning about not responding.