Max output file size from PTE

[mandarinfish]

I'm trying to debug a problem I'm seeing with PicturesToExe, and thought I'd ask here in hopes of narrowing down the issue.

I'm running PicturesToExe on XP within VMWare Fusion, using a bootcamp disk formatted to NTFS. The host is a Mac Pro.

I'm asking PTE to output an AVI file with raw, uncompressed video (so that I can create compressed video on Max OSX). This is a fairly short slideshow, about 4.5 minutes long, at 1000x750. In watching the progress bar as PTE chunks along slowly, creating this file, it looks like it is about halfway done when suddenly it proclaims that it is 100% done. The file that it has created is exactly 4GB in size. It doesn't play properly in Media Player.

Is there a limit to the size of the output file in PTE?

To determine if this is a VMWare problem, I'm also planning to boot from bootcamp and try again, to take VMWare out of the scenario. But thought I would ask if anyone has successfully created output files larger than 4GB from PTE on an NTFS disk (FAT32 has its own 4GB limitation).

thanks for any input...

Linda

[Lin Evans]

Hi Linda,

It's not a PTE limitation - shows as large as 20 gigabytes have been created in MP4 so must possibly be VMWare issue.

I am confused, however, about why you are approaching it this way. Why not just make a high definition MP4 directly from video builder which will play on your Mac directly? You don't need to make an uncompressed AVI at all, just make an MP4 and you can do it for a 4.5 minute slideshow in just a few minutes and the quality should be superb?

Best regards,

Lin

[mandarinfish]

Hmmm, it turns out it's not VMware, and it's not a problem with the size of the file. It's actually a few bytes larger than 4GB, as I noticed later.

PTE is completing the output of this file, but there are problems with the output (again, this is uncompressed video and PCM audio in an AVI). My conversion software (Premiere Pro or Adobe Media Encoder) won't accept the file as input. Windows Media Player will try to play it, but the video is all wonky. It starts out showing 4 copies of a slide overlaid (and the slide is actually supposed to be about halfway through the show).

I think this may be related to another problem I am seeing with Adobe Media Encoder and an AVI file using the PTE video codec. I'll post about that in a separate post.

Linda