A couple of VS9 questions

[russellw]

Hi all

I'm new to the ULead range of tools having migrated from the unpleasantly bug ridden Pinnacle Studio 10 and unfriendly Liquid Edition 6.

So far I am enjoying both VS9 and MSP8 / DVDWS2 for their nice interfaces and user friendly features.

Mostly I will use VS9 as a replacement for Pinnacle Studio to do the lightweight tasks that don't require the additional features of and functionality of MSP8.

I do, however, have a couple of questions.

1. The Movie Maker in VS9 only appears to have a single (Christmas) theme available to it - does this require the purchase of additional packs or should there be more. The tutorials seem to indicate the former although it might be because the 1st and 2nd parts of the Content Pack failed to even run although Parts 3-5 worked fine.

2. The VS9 MPEG4 batch conversion (the plug-in is installed) doesn't seem to create a THM file to go with the output although the MovieMaker template does. Am I doing something wrong?

Cheers
Russ

[michaeltee]

Hi Russ,

I'm new to the ULead range of tools having migrated from the unpleasantly bug ridden Pinnacle Studio 10 and unfriendly Liquid Edition

Yeah, my (still sealed) copy of Studio Plus 10 is sitting in my closet while the folks at AVID/Pinnacle try to sort things out... Meanwhile VS9 and Studio Plus 9 are serving me well. Welcome to the VS9 board!

1. The Movie Maker in VS9 only appears to have a single (Christmas) theme available to it...

Sounds like you're missing some Movie Wizard content. I'm assuming I have the complete "standard" set (although I couldn't swear to it) which consists of 13 themes for video projects and 8 for slide shows. To check your installation:

Program Files > Ulead Systems > Ulead VideoStudio 9.0 > Editing Style > Style...

In the Style folder you should see 2 directories, "General" and "SShow" plus a file named AVEStyle.ini

In the "General" directory (Movie Wizard project themes for video clip projects) you should see 13 BMP files and 13 INI files along with an NTSC and PAL folder, each of which should contain 13 WVS files.

In the "SShow" directory (Movie Wizard themes for still images) you should see exactly the same structure as "General" except there are 8 of each file extension instead of 13.

Are you seeing all of the above in your installation?

2. The VS9 MPEG4 batch conversion (the plug-in is installed) doesn't seem to create a THM file...

I've been using Canopus ProCoder for that but I'm not sure why you'd need a THM file for your MPEG4 conversions prior to adding them to a project. Maybe I didn't quite understand the question or more likely the fact that I'm not familiar with VS9's batch conversion utility.

-Mike

[russellw]

Hi Michael
Thanks for the detailed reply.

I had tracked down that directory and identified that there is only one file in there (naturalluy enough the Christmas one) and am therefore assuming that the problem was caused by the missing content pack parts. Tech support have kindly provided new links so I can download them again tonight.

The latter issue is only because I am using MPEG4-SP for the Sony PSP but as the Movie Maker applet seems to do the same job just as well I'll use that as it does create the THM file.

Having both MS8 and VS9 has led me to having two separate installations of Smart Sound (in 2 different directories), the AFT plug-in (whatever that is), the DVD burning plug in and a whole heap of other bits but they don't seem to be getting in each others way so apart from chewing a bit of hard disk space I can't see any issue with that. I might try and consolidate them into the \Common Files\ULead directory or in the root folder and see what happens given that the files are identical and it is 100 Mb of space.

Having had a good play with all the various bitys I am pleased with the intuitiveness of the interfaces and the commonality between the individual bits. I managed to knock over a couple of projects in an hour or so to multiple output formats so productivity looks good.

I now have to resolve why my Fusion HDTV+ capture card is displaying jerky HD images and breaking up occasionally. Presumably this install has overwritten a used DLL but that shouldn't take long to suss out.

Thanks again
Russ

[michaeltee]

Hi Russ,

Good to hear the missing themes issue will soon be resolved

I'm fairly sure I've seen postings from other users who have VS9 and MediaStudio installed on the same computer without conflict though I don't know if they've had the issue of dual SmartSound installations.

It does seem unusual. As you already know, a single SmartSound installation should support any and all SS enabled apps on your computer. Normally the SS installer looks for an existing instance of the program when a new SS enabled app is installed. As far as I know, the same version of SS applies to MSP8 and VS9. As for the QuickTracks content, a common directory can be manually specified through the VS9 or MSP8 audio UI. Just recently I installed a set of Quicktracks content CD-ROMS's purchased directly through SmartSound. The additional content as well as Full Spectrum 22K all reside in my Library directory which (in my case) is shared by VS9 and Studio 9. Well, if all else fails, SmartSound offers very good free tech-support by phone at 818-920-9122.

-Mike