dofminster Posted January 14, 2008 Report Share Posted January 14, 2008 With version 5.1 I am trying to make a series of AVI s from pte projects. One or two have worked well, some cause a system crash during the process, and some finish the process but the sound is displaced, broken up, or not there at all. I have found that using the pte video codec I get no video at all, only sound; the codec that works best is PICvideo mjpeg. If I break the projects up from about 150 slides each to a series of 10 then this is better; there are animations on most slides. I have removed and reinstalled pte, even downloaded a fresh copy, all to no avail. Any ideas as to what is going wrong. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mhwarner Posted January 14, 2008 Report Share Posted January 14, 2008 Not sure what your problem might be, but I will give you my experience from the other day. I created an .avi to upload to YouTube. Following some instructions I had found here on this forum, I set the format to 320x240 15fps DivX 6 codec. It was a small show of about only 20 slides, but I had no problems. Experiment with various codecs to see if that makes a difference. With regard to the PTE codec, I may be wrong here and if so, I'm sure somebody will jump in and correct me, but I believe that is only useful for creating an .avi that will be used more or less immediately in another program. There is a temporary .avi of sorts created, but it is only valid/available for as long as you keep that session of PTE open. You can pull that temporary .avi into another program (ULead or Roxio or Nero) and do something with it, but you must then save it from the other program or convert it to another format or whatever. That's the way it worked in version 4x anyway. You should read these forum threads and I believe you may find at least some of your answers:http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....76&hl=codechttp://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....96&hl=codechttp://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....65&hl=codec Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alrobin Posted January 14, 2008 Report Share Posted January 14, 2008 Mary is correct according to my understanding of the process, too. I jumped in here just to add to what Mary has said and mention that the process of creating a custom AVI has been streamlined in version 5 such that at the completion of the rendering process there is an option for previewing the completed file. If this option is selected, the AVI pops up in the default video player (WMP, in my case). Everything works so much more smoothly than in the good old version 4.x days! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Dick Le Bleu Posted January 15, 2008 Report Share Posted January 15, 2008 I jumped in here just to add to what Mary has said and mention that the process of creating a custom AVI has been streamlined in version 5 such that at the completion of the rendering process there is an option for previewing the completed file. If this option is selected, the AVI pops up in the default video player (WMP, in my case). Everything works so much more smoothly than in the good old version 4.x daysYeah. Piece of cake.Just for fun, and to address another question on this forum, I installed xvid from Videohelp.Then made a 4.5 minute 32 slide 1280X720 (16X9) image size slide show avi using the xvid codec.Slick. Made a 60mb avi file and as you pointed out, it played right after completion. Much clearer too, compared to the default 720X480 format used for DVD mpg2's.Can't use the PTE codec though (no video), and I think that may be by design. Not sure if my information is dated, but mpg2 encoding used to be proprietary. But I used xvid and MJPEG and both worked fine.Dick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goddi Posted January 16, 2008 Report Share Posted January 16, 2008 Greetings, Piece of cake??? Not for me. I have the latest version of PTE. I have made many DVDs from PTE. But when it comes to making an AVI...next to impossible. I have tried before and the frustration of doing it has kept me away from further attempts. However, having read this thread, I tried it again. No luck. I tried the Xvid and DivX6.8 codes mentioned here. Sometimes I get only sound, no images. With another codec, as the music played, I got "Image Load error:" as it cycled showing each image's path, but not the image. When I do get what looks like is going to be a good AVI, it plays about 4 slides then the images freeze (while the music plays) and then skips some images and is very rough and bounces around to different images. Why is it so difficult to just make a simple AVI? Some can do it...but some (me) can not. Can anyone just give the steps to do to make it work? I love PTE when it comes to making a slide show...but when it comes to making an AVI, it is totally frustrating. I have tried many different codecs but just get a mess. What am I missing??????????????? Thanks... Gary Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
potwnc Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 I got "Image Load error:" as it cycled showing each image's path, but not the image.I'll also step in here because I've been using PTE for a long time and never had a problem before except for problems that were real bugs in PTE beta versions that Igor then fixed.I've also just recently been getting this "Image Load error" message for the first time (PTE 5.1). I recently bought a new scanner - the very high-end EPSON V750 PRO which scans at 6,400 dots-per-inch, optical. What that means in practice is that now each of my jpg files is around 25MB. I'm working on a slideshow now that has only 7 of these very large images - with PZR effects. I have one of the most modern and powerful PCs you can build/buy today (I custom built it to be extremely powerful just for HD video production) and my slideshow should be a piece of cake for this PC. But I get the "Image Load error" on both .exe output and .avi output from PTE.At this point I speculate that PTE 5.x is unable to use the PC's resources in some scenarios where the size of the source files is large relative to the configuration (powerfullness) of the PC and it uses this error message as some kind of "catch-all" error scenario within the program.I hope Igor will research this and let us all know what's going on.Ray Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goddi Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 Ray... After reading our post, I thought that the large files I had might be causing the problem with creating an AVI file. I was using my original images' size that is approximately 3.6MB each. PTE has no problem with this size for slide shows but maybe the AVI creator was. So I reduced the images down to about 100 kb each. Recreated the AVIs but it did not help. For any codec I have tried, the AVI stops at the 4th slide (but the music continues to play). Then it skips some images and shows another, but freezes and skips and freezes some more. With the smaller file size, I did not get the "image load error" message. What a disappointment. I wonder why the AVI creation works fine for some people but I can not seem to find any way to make it work. Gary Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Dick Le Bleu Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 Hi Goddi,Ah... Perhaps we are running into hardware limitations here? I have just upgraded to an Intel duo quad with a Geforce 8600gt. Performance has leaped since I did that, and my enthusiam should be curbed.I used to have similar problems when creating the exe's. i.e. My computer/video card just could not keep up with slideshow. Skipping images, sound cuts etc.Can you identify the equipment you are using - ie CPU, memory, video?I suggest we try a simple test. Perhaps 20 slides. Resize the images to say 640X480. I think most display controllers should be able to handle that.Now when you select Create AVI, select "Create Custom AVI file" and set the image width to 640 and the height to 480 and the frames per sec FPS to 29.97.Now select an audio codec - choose MP3 if you have it. It will compress the audio file significantly and reduce the file size, otherwise select no compression. Now select the video encoder - set it to xvid if you have it. It does a decent job compressing the video to a small file also. I am trying to reduce the amount of data that has to be read from your hard drive.Now click "Create AVI"That should create a decent size AVI for you to test.What are you using to view the avi? Windows Media player can sometimes burp. My reference is Virtualdub. It is free from videohelp.com. There are many players to choose from but let's keep this simple at this stage.Now if this works, try increasing the image sizes bigger to say 1024X768 and repeat. Hopefully we can find out where your bottleneck is.Dick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lin Evans Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 Hi Gary,There is yet another possibility which we have not ruled out and that is that perhaps there is no problem with the created AVI at all, but a problem with the media player being used.If you have one or more of these created AVI files which play only four slides and quit or where the music is a problem, could you possibly post a link to one or two so that we could try playing them on several different players? Best regards,LinRay... After reading our post, I thought that the large files I had might be causing the problem with creating an AVI file. I was using my original images' size that is approximately 3.6MB each. PTE has no problem with this size for slide shows but maybe the AVI creator was. So I reduced the images down to about 100 kb each. Recreated the AVIs but it did not help. For any codec I have tried, the AVI stops at the 4th slide (but the music continues to play). Then it skips some images and shows another, but freezes and skips and freezes some more. With the smaller file size, I did not get the "image load error" message. What a disappointment. I wonder why the AVI creation works fine for some people but I can not seem to find any way to make it work. Gary Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goddi Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 Thanks, Dick and Lin...Here are two links to 2 test files:Test 1: http://www.sendspace.com/file/l8xae2Test 2: http://www.sendspace.com/file/n3hyiaHere is my Hardware setup:Operating System: Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (build 2600)Processor Main Circuit Board:3.00 gigahertz Intel Pentium 48 kilobyte primary memory cache512 kilobyte secondary memory cache Board:ASUSTeK Computer Inc. P4P800 Rev 1.xxBus Clock: 200 megahertzBIOS: American Megatrends Inc. 1021.006 08/15/2005Memory Modules:2048 Megabytes Installed MemoryDisplay:NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600256 mb video memory52 GB free on drive.My slideshow is only 30 slides and I use 320 x ??.I hope you can see what is going one here. I tried Winamp and Windows Media Player. Same problem. Thanks... Gary===============================Hi Gary,There is yet another possibility which we have not ruled out and that is that perhaps there is no problem with the created AVI at all, but a problem with the media player being used.If you have one or more of these created AVI files which play only four slides and quit or where the music is a problem, could you possibly post a link to one or two so that we could try playing them on several different players? Best regards,Lin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mhwarner Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 Just an observation which may or may not have anything to do with the problem ...In the first show which has the "cannot load images" file, it says that the images are on your "E:" drive. Is that an external drive or a CD drive? If so, perhaps there is an issue of PTE not being able to load the images quickly enough. If not, then nevermind, but it was just a thought. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nobeefstu Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 Gary,I downloaded and played the Xmas-2007_vid-xvid4.avi in WMP and all seemed to play fine with no jumps, lockups, etc ... as you described.I counted 13 slide changes/transitions at varying slide time durations. Was the varying slide time durations intentional or were all suppose to be the same ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lin Evans Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 I got exactly the same results as you. I think perhaps Mary may be on to the solution for the issue in that perhaps the images are not being loaded quickly enough for creation of the AVI from the source.LinGary,I downloaded and played the Xmas-2007_vid-xvid4.avi in WMP and all seemed to play fine with no jumps, lockups, etc ... as you described.I counted 13 slide changes/transitions at varying slide time durations. Was the varying slide time durations intentional or were all suppose to be the same ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lin Evans Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 Hi Gary,Mary may be correct. Could you try using the Zip feature to zip up the content of your show including the PTE file then place them all in a new folder on the C: drive, open the PTE file from that location and try making the AVI again.I think also that there may be an issue with the images not being available when the program needs them if they are possibly being loaded from an external device too slow to present the images in a timely fashion. If this doesn't work, post the zipped file and others can try to make an AVI and rule out any issues with a particular image, etc., causing the difficulty. It would seem that you have adequate resources to easily make an AVI file. I'm not certain about the video card but certainly you have sufficent RAM and storage space on your C: drive, but the attempt to read from E: is perhaps a clue. By doing the zip and moving the whole thing to the C: drive it should eliminate any possibility of not having the images available quckly enough for the creation of the AVI.Best regards,LinGreetings, Piece of cake??? Not for me. I have the latest version of PTE. I have made many DVDs from PTE. But when it comes to making an AVI...next to impossible. I have tried before and the frustration of doing it has kept me away from further attempts. However, having read this thread, I tried it again. No luck. I tried the Xvid and DivX6.8 codes mentioned here. Sometimes I get only sound, no images. With another codec, as the music played, I got "Image Load error:" as it cycled showing each image's path, but not the image. When I do get what looks like is going to be a good AVI, it plays about 4 slides then the images freeze (while the music plays) and then skips some images and is very rough and bounces around to different images. Why is it so difficult to just make a simple AVI? Some can do it...but some (me) can not. Can anyone just give the steps to do to make it work? I love PTE when it comes to making a slide show...but when it comes to making an AVI, it is totally frustrating. I have tried many different codecs but just get a mess. What am I missing??????????????? Thanks... Gary Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Dick Le Bleu Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 Hi Gary,I agree with Lin. I got the same results as you did. Plenty enough power in your equipment lineup to handle a 320X240! At that size, I had no trouble with my XP Pro AMD 2k+ with only 512mb memory.Does it play ok when you preview the slide show? As already mentioned, it looks like your images are on a different and possibly slower drive? If it previews ok with images from the same location, it should make an avi ok!I always felt that AVI's would turn out all right because the encoder just goes as fast as it needs to go in processing files. Particularly if there was a lot of Pan/Zoom/Rotate taking place. There was no critical timing like there is playing an avi or running an exe slideshow. Sometimes my preview and exe's would stutter because my display controller could not keep up with the image size/frames per second demanded. But when creating an AVI those constraints should not be there it seems to me. Before PTE5.x I would encode the avi's to mpg2 with tmpgenc, author with DVDAuthorGUI and burn with imgtool. Now PTE5/Video Builder does it all from one mouse click. Although the preview/exe would stutter because my video card could not keep up, the DVD would play fine in my DVD player.Oh... just had another thought. How big are your image files? I realize you have set your output AVI to 320X240, but if you are using full size source image files, perhaps PTE is spending so much time reducing image size to 320X240 it hasn't time to be ready for the next frame?Dick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goddi Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 Hi All, I put all the files on my C: and ran it through the Create AVI but it did not make a difference. I have 154 GB of free space on the C: drive. This time, I numbered al the slides so I could see what was going on. I have 31 slides and the first and last ones play twice. The only slide that play in the AVI are as follows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 13, 17, 21, 25, 29, and 30 (the 2nd 30 does not play).Here is the file with the slides numbered:http://www.sendspace.com/file/gn5mo3Here is a zipped file with all the images and the PTE file:http://www.sendspace.com/file/fimba8 I appreciate your help and how some one can figure this out.... Thanks... Gary================Hi Gary,Mary may be correct. Could you try using the Zip feature to zip up the content of your show including the PTE file then place them all in a new folder on the C: drive, open the PTE file from that location and try making the AVI again.I think also that there may be an issue with the images not being available when the program needs them if they are possibly being loaded from an external device too slow to present the images in a timely fashion. If this doesn't work, post the zipped file and others can try to make an AVI and rule out any issues with a particular image, etc., causing the difficulty. It would seem that you have adequate resources to easily make an AVI file. I'm not certain about the video card but certainly you have sufficent RAM and storage space on your C: drive, but the attempt to read from E: is perhaps a clue. By doing the zip and moving the whole thing to the C: drive it should eliminate any possibility of not having the images available quckly enough for the creation of the AVI.Best regards,Lin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goddi Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 Dick asked:Does it play ok when you preview the slide show? As already mentioned, it looks like your images are on a different and possibly slower drive? If it previews ok with images from the same location, it should make an avi ok!Yes, in Preview it plays perfectly. Yes, my E: drive is a separate hard drive but I don't think it is any slower.How big are your image files?I checked the actual image size in dimensions and they are about 2.5" x 3.5"(about 100 k each). Gary Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lin Evans Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 Hi Gary,Click the link below to retrieve an AVI and MPEG file of your slideshow. There is something about the files which the AVI generator doesn't like. My suggestion would be to email the link to the PTE zip to Igor and perhaps he can determine what the problem is.I had the same problem you have but the work-around was to create an mpeg file then convert that to an AVI.Probably you should tell Igor what software you used to reduce the size and how you saved the files as jpeg or jpeg progressive, etc.here's the link to the successful conversions:http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/Xmas-2007.zipBest regards,Lin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goddi Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 Lin... Thanks for the AVI and MPEG. So it looks like it can be done. I have tried doing this with the original images and after the images were reduced in size (used NetGraphics Optimizer2). I sent a message to Igor to see if he wants to see the files. Appreciate your help... Gary==================================Hi Gary,Click the link below to retrieve an AVI and MPEG file of your slideshow. There is something about the files which the AVI generator doesn't like. My suggestion would be to email the link to the PTE zip to Igor and perhaps he can determine what the problem is.I had the same problem you have but the work-around was to create an mpeg file then convert that to an AVI.Probably you should tell Igor what software you used to reduce the size and how you saved the files as jpeg or jpeg progressive, etc.here's the link to the successful conversions:http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/Xmas-2007.zipBest regards,Lin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lin Evans Posted January 17, 2008 Report Share Posted January 17, 2008 Hi Gary,The fact that you tried and failed with the original's from the camera is significant. I just tried your music with different slides to eliminate that as a variable and it worked fine.Just for testing, you may want to open each of these files in Irfanview and save them again to a different folder and try with the files after saving. There is something in one or more of these image files which is definitely throwing a curve to the AVI generation tool but not to the MPEG generation tool which works perfectly. Irfanview will often "correct" difficult images and uses a very conservative save method so sometimes if I have a difficult image which fails to open in Photoshop I simply open it in Irfanview, save then it works fine in Photoshop. It wouldn't hurt to try this but preserve the originals for Igor to look at. You can work around the issue by converting to MPEG then using one of many conversion tools to convert to AVI but better to get to the bottom of what it is that's causing the problem.Best regards,LinLin... Thanks for the AVI and MPEG. So it looks like it can be done. I have tried doing this with the original images and after the images were reduced in size (used NetGraphics Optimizer2). I sent a message to Igor to see if he wants to see the files. Appreciate your help... Gary================================== Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goddi Posted January 18, 2008 Report Share Posted January 18, 2008 Lin...Thanks for going the extra miles with this problem. I'll try what you say about Irfanview and let you know. By the way, how can you create an MPEG with PTE? I don't want to open another can of worms but I don't see that option. Thanks... Gary==================================Hi Gary,The fact that you tried and failed with the original's from the camera is significant. I just tried your music with different slides to eliminate that as a variable and it worked fine.Just for testing, you may want to open each of these files in Irfanview and save them again to a different folder and try with the files after saving. There is something in one or more of these image files which is definitely throwing a curve to the AVI generation tool but not to the MPEG generation tool which works perfectly. Irfanview will often "correct" difficult images and uses a very conservative save method so sometimes if I have a difficult image which fails to open in Photoshop I simply open it in Irfanview, save then it works fine in Photoshop. It wouldn't hurt to try this but preserve the originals for Igor to look at. You can work around the issue by converting to MPEG then using one of many conversion tools to convert to AVI but better to get to the bottom of what it is that's causing the problem.Best regards,Lin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lin Evans Posted January 18, 2008 Report Share Posted January 18, 2008 Never mind Irfanview, I just tried it and still have the problem.....Lin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goddi Posted January 18, 2008 Report Share Posted January 18, 2008 Thanks for the heads up. I was just about to do it. Gary========================Never mind Irfanview, I just tried it and still have the problem.....Lin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
potwnc Posted January 18, 2008 Report Share Posted January 18, 2008 Hopefully this will help to get to the bottom of this.I generated both a .exe and 2 .avi's from Gary's project - a .avi using the PTE codec which I then put through Sony Vegas 8 Pro to render to .avi and a .avi using the XVID codec. The results are the same in all 3 cases. It skips slides 6, 7 and 8. These were not the same slides that it skipped for Gary on his PC. That suggests to me that the problem is not with any of the image files themselves, or I would have expected it to skip the same slides for both of us.I then produced a .avi using Gary's same image files (Gary, there are 33 in your .pte project zip file, not 31) but usingWindows Movie Maker. The output was perfect. No skipping and perfectly synched and smooth. If Movie Maker can process his images I would expect PTE to be able to also.I then took the same image files from the project I'm working on that has this same problem when I use PTE 5 or 5.1 and made a show using PTE 4.49 - as above I generated both a .exe and 2 .avi's from Gary's project - a .avi using the PTE codec which I then put through Sony Vegas 8 Pro to render to .avi and a .avi using the XVID codec. Again all 3 outputs are the same - no skipping, no image load error messages, perfectly smooth fades etc. The 4.49 of course doesn't have the PZR effects but nor does Gary's show. By the way, these images come from taking the .tif files from the scanner (scanning 35mm slides) output and using Photoshop CS3 to save them back out as JPGs. They open in and save from Photoshop without a problem.Gary, would you be willing to create the exact same show using the exact same files but using PTE 4.49 instead and let us know your results?I'm now convinced this is a new bug introduced with version 5. While my files are huge at 25MB the fact that I get (almost) the same problem as Gary with his files and we both have PCs that should easily be powerful enough tells me that PTE 5.x itself has to be the culprit in this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Dick Le Bleu Posted January 18, 2008 Report Share Posted January 18, 2008 Yup. I can confirm potwnc's results...Just for fun, I fired up 4.48. Gotta pick up 4.49 one of these days.At first, I created an avi with just the images without the music ...Perfect. Hmmm Then I went back to 5.1 and created the avi without the music also...Perfect.Then attached some other music to the program thinking Gary's mp3 was sick... Same problem! Skips slides etc.Went back to 4.48, attached Gary's music - Perfect!So it looks like something happened between 4.48 and 5.1 in merging audio and video in making the AVI.Funny I have not encountered this yet, but I can definitely confirm that Gary's images and music will not make an AVI correctly with 5.1. Dick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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