Carol Steele

That's a problem with IE Lin - it somehow manages to mangle Flash installations - if you go the that page that keeps on giving you that message, click on it to go to the installer page - but this time look on the left hand side where it lists solutions for problems, download the Flash uninstaller, run this and then go back and let the Flash 9 installer run. This time it will install properly and you should be fine from then on in. You would have had this problem with any Flash site running Flash 9 components running in the page.

I have Adobe Flash and couldn't for the life of me convert any of the P2Exe avi files to FLV files - then after a little hunting round at the end of last week I found Slideshow Pro which is a very easy to use swf slideshow generator and is just $29 (around £15). Makes super shows, is very easy to use, but you do need to sit down and study the manual - and you do need either of the following versions of Flash - Flash MX 2004, Flash 8 or Flash CS3. Here's an audio free sample which is embedded in an ordinary web page - Audio free SWF slideshow ..... and here's a sample of an embedded page with audio SWF slideshow with audio

Hi Peter Well 12 chapters might be a bit tight - but it could be done fairly easily if you wish to forgo seeing a viewable representative image as the chapter as you can make the 'icons' to be whatever size you wish as you can see below:- Simply change the text descriptors of the chapters to something very simple such as 01 or 1, 02 or 2 etc. You could even create a startup slide with just a number on it and place that as the first slide in every chapter - and you could delete the text descriptor which goes under each icon for that chapter. The possibilities are endless - but it does become very fiddly as you have to edit each one separately - which is why I have put in a feature request (see here) which would allow you to do this more easily with a group of 'icons' and 'text descriptors'.

Personally I prefer not to have multiple pages for the menus. I edit the options.ini file and change the Count number to however many chapters I want (normally five or six). The line which needs changing is around 8 lines down and is: Count=n (where n=number of chapters I want). I then change the size of the 'chapter images' and their text descriptors - and arrange them to fit within the safe area of the intro screen. Here is an example of a 'Wedding Sampler' which I send out to potential clients:-

I find the handling of building the menu in VideoBuilder a lot of hassle as each one has to be done individually. What I would like to see are:- 1. The ability to select all or any of the menu 'images' and edit just one and have that edit applied to all the selected 'images' 2. The ability to select all text descriptors of the respective 'image' items and edit just one item and have that edit applied to all the selected text descriptors. 3. The ability to select menu items and have automatic alignment features - i.e. select some of the items and have them align left edges, right edges, top edges, bottom edges and also an automatic distribution of items based around their centres.

Thanks nobeefstu - I've been racking my brains trying to figure out a way to do it. Guess I should just have saved myself depleting the last few remaining few brain cells

Is there any way to get a DVD slideshow to automatically start with a short intro chapter and then when it has finished to go to a static main selection screen where you can choose any of the chapters on that screen to play.

Only if they have Windows emulation software on their Mac.

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.67mHtz/nVidia GeForce 6700GT with 256Mb RAM/Windows XP x64 Pro [sP2]/8Gb RAM Time to complete 43 secs

Thanks Ray, Mid November to Xmas is always a busy time for me. I shall now download the tutorial and studio it more. Happy Xmas and New Year

Thanks Ray, I'll wait til you update and see if I need more information after that.

I think I've found the answer. In the project options of Video Builder I changed the audio format from MPEG Audio to LPCM, it then plays properly. Just thought I'd add this just in case anybody else was experiencing this problem.

Thanks Ken - I see I will need to get my head round all of this

I am contemplating creating High Definition DVD slideshows. Is P2Exe VideoBuilder capable of doing this - and if so do I build the slideshow for a screen size of 1930 x 1080 ppi ...... and yes, I am aware I will need both a BluRay and HD DVD writer for me to do this. However, would it be possible to write small (say 20 mins) of HD content to an ordinary DVD and have it play back as HD ???

I have a new TV (High Definition) and HD DVD player and surround sound system via Sony amp/receiver. When I connect the DVD player directly to TV via HDMI cable I can hear the music tracks to the slideshow - yet when I connect the HD DVD player via HDMI to the TV and have an optical cable take the sound to the Sony amp/receiver and onto the surround sound speakers I get no sound out from the speakers. Ordinary DVD's and HD DVD's play as per expected (i.e. sound via optical out to the Sony amp/receiver and video to the TV via HTMI). Just doesn't happen with a P2E slideshow (or, to be fair, from a ProShow Gold slideshow). Is there any way to get the sound to be split off to the amp/receiver???

Have you hardware calibrated your monitor??? If this calibration is out this could account for the blown highlights. Also make sure you convert any images to sRGB colourspace before using them in a DVD slideshow.

I can confirm that. I have XP x64 on my main system and both PTE5 and Video Builder work without a problem. Some older software and some games won't work - and make sure that there are 64-bit drivers available for all your peripheral hardware (for instance Epson still do not have 64-bit drivers for my Photo Perfection scanner and the XP x64 drivers for my Epson C1100 colour laser printer were pretty rudimentary compared to the 32-bit XP driver). Some vendors have leapt straight to 64-bit Vista drivers and by-passed XP x64 completely. Other than that, this system has 8Gb of RAM and is pretty fast.

Alternatively, have you tried checking the button marked 'when show ends keep last slide in show on screen' in the 'Main' tab of the Project Options.

The DVD shows that I have been doing generally contain 4 or 5 chapters and a total of around 400 to 600 images. Soundtrack is 4 to 6 .wma files (around one soundtrack per chapter). File size is generally 1 to 2 Gb. Once I have saved each pte file (one for each chapter) I simply hit the DVD button and proceed from there. Once I have the Title Page made up (about 5 mins) it takes around 40 mins to create an ISO file and burn the DVD - and I simply go away and do something else whilst that happens. If I need copies, I simply use the ISO file which I created - in which case it takes around 15 mins to burn, compare and verify (I burn at 16x). There is no need to produce separate AVI files like you did in 4.x. Just make sure you set up the temp files on a partition/drive with plenty of free space as the temp files can get quite large.

Go to the Advanced tab in Project Options and check the box marked 'run application after last slide'. If you had, say four slide shows called Fred.exe, Jim.exe, Paul.exe and Hazel.exe, you would put Jim.exe here and this would run Jim's slide show. Once you got to the last show, you would put Fred.exe to create the loop. Obviously you would need access to the .pte files in order to do this.

So for around 600 images that would be around 10 days - I would have to charge a fortune for that then Not if she wants to start out married life in the correct way

I'm talking about the time to produce the show Ken - not the run time of the show.

Ah, I very rarely zoom in and out - when you're putting together a 500 shot wedding slideshow, all the bride wants to see is the full image, nothing too fancy - and I wouldn't really care for the amount of time to individualise every single shot for a DVD.

I have found that I have to way oversharpen the images - they look terrible when viewed on a high quality computer monitor - but look fine when viewed on a television monitor. Try downloading my actions from the 'Optimise File Size for DVD' thread in this forum. Even if you don't use the actions, you can get some sense of the sharpening needed. Another reason for lack of clarity could be if you are using images which are much too large. You need to be using images which are very close to the desired output size initially to avoid over resampling.

The script part of the action is an instruction to run the 'Fit Image' script (which is under File->Automate). It might be specific for Photoshop CS3 - if you have an older version of Photoshop, you can delete this part of the action by dragging it to the waste bin icon at the bootom of the Actions palette and replace it with the standard 'Fit Image' and insert the parameters of Height=560 pixels and width=1000 pixels.