The task: assemble a random slideshow.
Materials: photos sent to me from fellow travellers from a cruise last year. (I did a website
). A whole variety of sizes and resolutions, from a selection of digital cameras. A total of 137 photos.Method: Load all photos into the timeline, unedited and untrimmed. Whatever size they were, that's OK. Duration 5 seconds each, random transition. Just over 9 minutes duration.
Add a few musical tracks as background.
Then Rendered to an avi file - PAL DV.
I avoided my usual preference of exporting the file out to MyDVD and burning with this; this was a test of VS8 capability.
Loaded the avi file into the burning module. No menu; just burn to DVD. Anti-flicker filter OFF. I had initial problems (I suspect the burner didn't like the DVD+RW I had used many times before). Ended up burning to an iso image.
Then pulled up the DVD/VCD burning module, located the iso image and burned it to a DVD+R disc.
It burned at about 8000 bitrate; seems to surge during the more complex transitions to peak at 9100. I guess it's VBR. I was planning to use AC-3 audio but with the burning module that didn't happen, I got LPCM.
Result: just about perfect. I identified three photos which could have an issue - shots of beaches etc with palm trees in the distance. Where the green leaves stood out against the blue sky there was a bit of flickering in that spot (only). It was also present in the avi file – a couple of small areas in each photo; the rest of the photo was fine. Otherwise the project came out perfectly, the transitions were great, and even the album transitions worked perfectly.
So why does it work for me? I don't know. This is what I DO have:
Acer TravelMate laptop, Centrino 1.6 Gh processor, 512 RAM, 60 Gb Toshiba HDD, 64 Mb ATI 9000 Mobile Radeon video card.
All video work (working folder) is on an external HDD Western Digital 120 Gb USB2 connection.
Sony DRU-510A external DVD burner (USB2 connection)
Sony DVD+R discs.
Software environment:
Windows XP Professional, SP2 fully installed.
Direct X 9.0c
Norton Systemworks 2003
Zone Alarm Pro
MS Office
MYOB v 13
Video Studio 8.01
MyDVD 6.0
Windows Media Player v 10
Real Player v 10
Quick Time player
Sonic Cineplayer (now the default for playing DVDs)
Power DVD player
(And sundry other programs which probably don't matter)
What I DON'T have:
Moonlight-Elecard mpeg player ( I heard the codec can conflict with something so uninstalled it)
Other video editing packages
If that is some small help in this mystery I’m pleased.
