Eric Athroll

For Ken I don't need to do that because I have access to two modern Flat Screen TVs/DVD Players to check out my efforts, one belonging to a Camera Club colleague and the other to my son. My mate is due back on Monday, so will try out my various sample SVCDs on him and if they look OK - I'll also send them to my son to check out on his set-up. I am currently testing a sequence of a dozen slides with a Mp3 sound track to try and find the best jpg image size that will fill the screen without clipping the images or distoring the edges but testing them on my TV is not a good test. I'll certainly post my results in due course. Eric

For Ken I have given TMPGEnc a whirl today and it cut my encoding time considerably - a 6 min show from nearly three hours with Nero 6 to 45 minutes with TMPGEnc - still not anything like as fast as others are getting but a vast improvement. I burned the trial in Nero with a title page and it took a while longer to do - when I did it all in Nero, that included the title and the show. I did find that the quality of the Nero encoding very good and certainly the equal of TMPGEng. I shall play around with TMPGEnc some more, before I decide on a purchase. I have also contacted Ahead to ask them why their encoding takes so much longer than other software packages! My new Panasonic DVD S35 (£79) was quite inexpensive and plays almost everything although my elderly Panasonic TV with the old 4:3 format distorts the edges of the picture when I use the 16:9 format unless I zoom in a bit to clip them. I am looking to buy a new TV with a 16:9 Flat Screen shortly so I shall see what that gives me in the way of picture quality. I am also considering a new PC to replace my now pedpestrian set-up. All of this is very new to me so I mustn't expect instant perfection but evrything so far looks most promising. Eric Eric

For Ken Nothing there actually answers my question but reading between the lines it would seem you are suggesting my PC is adequate for the task so it must be Nero 6. I had hoped it would be up to the job as I hate using lots of bits of software to do one task and there is so much in Nero that I find to be excellent. I notice you refer to using other bits of software to do the actual conversion - if I have to, I will get something appropriate but will wait until the final version of PTE is published. Thanks for the advice.

Hi I previously posted a message indicating my success in producing a SVCD using Nero 6. Since then, I have followed the various posts on this subject and now realise that the time it is taking to convert from the PTE AVI file to a saved (not burned) MPEG2 file with my setup is unacceptably long. I have a Pentium III 800 MHz PC running Windows XP (Home). 768 MB RAM, 60 GB HDD (7200) and 40 GB HDD (4500), Rage Fury Pro/Xpert 2000 Pro Graphics (32 MB RAM), and Creative Audio PCI Sound. I have tried various tests using PTE Beta 5 and slide resolutions from 640x480 to 1280x720 (all at 72dpi) and an MP3 Sound Track. Using Nero Vision Express 2 to convert seems to take around 2 to 3 hours for the 6 minute show, depending upon whether I use single pass/normal quality or 2-pass/high quality. The resulting SVCDs play well on my Panasonic DVD Player and Panasonic TV. Using 640x480 slides and the 4:3 format the sequence fills the screen. With the 1280x720 slides and 16:9 format I get an fairly accurate TV image in it's 16:9 setting with very slight cutoff at the edges. I have no desire to get into the technicalities of producing SVCDs/DVDs - I just want to be able to do it as speedily as possible with presentations that match the PTE quality. Can anyone tell me whether it is the limitations of my current PC that is the likely cause of the slow conversion or the Nero 6 software. Eric

For Harry I just upgraded to Nero 6 from 5.5 as I use it for many other tasks and it seemed the least expensive option to get all the Video CD facilities (and DVD in due course) that I want. I was so impressed by my first effort that I have just purchased the same DVD player for myself. I now notice that on my TV (6 years old) the picture is slightly distorted at the edges and some minute flickering that wasn't apparent on my colleagues brand new Flat and Wide Screen TV, but still very acceptable. I shall play around with both P2E Beta 4 and Nero 6 as I am sure that with more investigation and familiarity with them both I can improve things. Eric

Sorry - that should read Panasonic S35 DVD Player

Hi It may be of interest to members that I have successfully made a VideoCD that plays well on a colleague's Panasonic DVD535 Player using P2E Beta 4. I converted my slide show (6 mins of 45 images sized at 750x500 pxls at 72 dpi and a sound track of music in mp3 format) to an AVI file checking the "interlaced for TV" box. Leaving P2E open I dropped the AVI file into Nero Vision Express and created a Nero Project which took around 50 mins to convert and then burned a Video CD at the fastest setting (single pass). The picture quality and sound was very good, the transitions (all fades) smooth, and with perfect synchronisation of sound and picture. I did all this with absolutely no technical knowledge whatsoever and no experience with either P2E or Nero. I've had P2E about 5 weeks and Nero 6 two days (I didn't even read the manual of either before doing all this). This says a lot for the user friendliness of P2E (and Nero). I hope the final version of P2E doesn't change it's apparent compatability with Nero 6.

For bbdigital Now there's lateral thinking for you! Why didn't I think of that? Eric

Hi Jim Thanks for that. In that case, does it make any difference which sound file type I use in terms of the smooth running of the "show"? It occurs to me that maybe despite being a larger file (not a problem) the uncompressed file might put less "load" on a slower PC/Laptop with less RAM. I assume mp3 is the best of the three I mentioned in terms of size and quality of sound. Using my Nero Wave Editor to edit/assemble/convert the background music takes little additoinal time to do any or all of them. I apologise for wandering off the original topic but it is CD related and I hope it is of some interest to the originator of this post.

Hi Jim Thanks for that piece of info. The reason I made three shows using the three different music formats was to ensure that a user of the CD would have at least one of the music formats on their PC/Laptop. My aim in writing these shows to CD is twofold. a. To send copies to my relatives to view and keep. b. To show them to Digital Imaging Group/Camera Club Members via a Laptop/Video Projector - fast replacing the Projected Slides with Taped Sound AV Shows.

Hi Al Yes, my mistake. The wav file is the large one - don't know much about music files so am mystified as to why the other two seem so small and the wav one so large. I agree that defragging the HDD partition before writing to CD is probably not necessary, but it does make sure that no files are split into parts and (I assume) are written to the CD unfragmented. It takes only a few seconds to do this anyway, so it's no hardship. Eric

Hi Richard I have just made my first slide show with background music (150 images - 27 mins duration) and it runs very well from CD both on my PC (Pentium III 800 Mhz, 768 Mb RAM, Rage Fury Pro Xpert 2000 Video Card, Windows XP Home, LG CD Rom Drive 52X Max) and my wife's Laptop (Athlon XP, 384 Mb RAM, Integrated Video Card, Windows XP Home, Integrated DVD/CD Rom RW Drive). I have some slight flickering between fades from horizontal images to vertical images on my PC that does not occur on the Laptop (I put this down to the faster processor and graphics) but other wise it's fine. I made three identical shows using three different sound files - mp3, wav and wma. The first show (mp3) totals 287 Mb, the second (wav) 41.8 Mb and the last (wma) 41.8 Mb. When each is run they look and sound no different to me although my speakers are very inexpensive units. Images were sized at 768 X 528 pxls in jpeg at 50% compression and are shown with a black border. The sound was edited for volume and duration etc using Nero Wave Editor and the show fine tuned by varying the image duration down to milliseconds. Things I did do though when making the CD were - a. Copy all the image files and the sound file to a small partition on my second HDD that I keep free for writing to CD. b. Defragment all the data on this HDD once everything was finalised then recreate the show from this data, saving the final show to that same HDD. c. Switch off the Anti Virus software and burn the CD from that HDD. I don't know whether all the above makes a difference, but to my mind it should help to keep the data on the CD in an unfragmented state and an optimum playing condition. I hope you find the above of some help. Eric

CTX PRF1117 CRT Flat Screen Trinitron set at 1024x768 32-bit (highest quality colour) - refresh rate 85 Hz. Video accelerator to maximum.

For AI Thanks for the tip - I'll watch that when I assemble my images.

Hi again I've just copies my test project to a CD and played it on my wife's Laptop and it runs fine so it has to be my slow processor. The laptop is a Compaq and has Windows XP (Home Edition), an Athlon XP2200+ Processor, 320Mb RAM and Radion IGP 320M Display Adaptor. I aim to produce slide shows to show at my local camera club using a laptop and video projector (not mine) so hopefully this would project well, without all the flickering. One of my colleagues reckons he doesn't have this problem and uses the club's laptop/projector to show his creations (up to 350 images on 2 CDs). As my own PC copes more than adequately with my imaging and other needs I do not intend to upgrade the processor as to do this I would need to upgrade everything else.

Hi everyone Windows XP (Home Edition), Pentium III 800 MHz, 756 Mb RAM, Rage Fury Pro Xpert/2000 pro. I have tried all the obvious things like varying the length of the fade and the time between fades and played around with different image sizes starting at 640x480 pxls. The strange thing is it only happens with some images, usually with the opening one and subsequent one or two. Seems it may be my three years old PC. If this is the case will the next version improve on that? Also will a CD of the Project run properly on a faster PC? Any thoughts?

Hi I have been evaluating Pictures2Exe and have experienced problems during the fading out/in from one image to the next. All my test images are jpegs and have been sized to 1024 x 768 pixels at 72 dpi in Photoshop and compressed to 50% using File>Save for Web. When I run the test sequence with a music background using the fade in/out option some of the images suffer from pronounced flickering. As they are all sized and compressed to the same degree I cannot understand why. Any suggestions would be helpful.