donw

Hi Ron, I have carried out a lot of experiments and have established a workflow for producing HD DVDs of P2X slideshows which will play on my Panasonic Blu-Ray player: 1. Produce a set of images sized to 1920 by 1080 pixels. 2. Make a slideshow in P2Exe. 3. Create a “HD Video for PC & Mac”: Select HD (1920X1080), high quality. This produces an “.mp4” file. 4. Open multiAVCHD. Click the “add video files” tab and select the mp4 file. 5. Click “start”. Click on the “AVCHD Strict” button in the “AVCHD for optical Media” section. 6. The program produces a set of subfolders in a folder with a label such as “AVCHD-date-number”. The key one is the BDMV folder which contains the “Backup, Clipinf, Playlist, and Stream” subfolders and a couple of bdmv files. The video is located in the “Stream” folder as a “0000.MTS” or “0000.m2ts” file. 7. Open ImgBurn. Set Mode to “build”, and the output to “Image file”. Click on the “Browse for folder” icon, navigate to the required “AVCHD-date-number” folder, and click on the BDMV folder. The information pane will show the number of files included for burning, and the % of the DVD which they will occupy. Click on the “Label” tab and type the file name into the “UDF” box. 8. Click on the “Folder-to-disc” icon to create an ISO file. A summary box pops up. Click OK and the ISO file will be created. I close the program, then re- open it. 9. Click on the “Write image file to disc” icon. In the box which appears, click on the “Browse for file” icon in the Source area. 10. Select the ISO file. Insert a DVD into the DVD burner. Click on the “Write to disc” icon. If you are using a RW DVD, the program will go into erase mode, even if you have already erased the contents with Nero etc. 11. Play the DVD! This will also work with Proshow mp4s, but I get "pixilation" on the transitions unless I set the transition time to zero. Regards, Don

Thanks, Dave. I'll try and borrow a laptop with a HDMI port and try it out. I found that my burning software (Ashampoo Burning Studio 9) will burn P2X .mp4 files as video files onto a DVD, but the results were not really sharp and the pixels "shimmered" in the transitions. There was nowhere to set the parameters such as mode and bitrate with this software. Regards, Don

Thanks, Dave. I'm using a Dell laptop with a Nvidia graphics card. I tried setting the TV to be the main monitor but still couldn't get past a resolution of 1280 by 800. Maybe that's due to the VGA cable. I got into the Nvidia setup on the laptop but couldn't find any evidence that it could output 1920 by 1080. Regards, Don

Hi Dave, My TV is a 42 inch Panasonic Viera (not sure why the TV industry still uses inches!). Its resolution is 1920 by 1080 pixels. Its manual states that when connected to a computer by a VGA cable, its maximum input resolution is WXGA, or 1366 by 768 pixels. I rang the Panasonic technical people who confirmed this. They also confirmed that if I connected via a HDMI cable, the maximum input resolution would be 1920 by 1080 pixels. I then did a Google search on the maximum resolution of VGA cables and came out with a lot of interesting information. The consensus was that these cables are limited in the signals they can transmit. There is an interesting diagram in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vector_Video_Standards2.svg There is also a lot of information about getting the maximum resolution from a laptop’s graphics card. I played around a lot with the settings, nominating the second monitor to be a HDTV etc, but still could not get more than 1280 by 800 out of the Dell laptop I was using. Regards, Don

Hi Ron, My aim is to display HD (1920 by 1080 pixels) slideshows on my plasma TV (Panasonic Viera). I first tried making exe files with 1920X1080 px images, and sending them to the TV from a laptop. However the TV display is limited by the size of the laptop maximum resolution (1366 by 768 px for my laptop), also, I think by the VGA connection which I used. I suspect that if I used a HDMI connection that the image quality on the TV would be better, but my laptop does not have a HDMI port. I read that some people have had success using a Media Player to send input to their TVs, but I haven’t got one. I do not have a BluRay burner so I can’t produce a BluRay DVD, although I have tried without success to burn a normal DVD with the output files from the multiAVCHD program. However I have been successful in using the multiAVCHD program to produce a set of files which I copied to a SDHC card. When I put the card into the SD slot on my Panasonic BluRay player, I got a fantastic, HD slideshow. My TV also has a SD slot but the card wouldn’t produce the slideshow from this slot. It does show jpeg images copied to the card (if they have been saved with the “baseline” option, not the “progressive” one). My workflow to produce the files on the SD card is: 1. Produce a set of images sized to 1920 by 1080 pixels. 2. Make a slideshow in P2Exe. 3. Create a “HD Video for PC & Mac”: Select HD (1920X1080), high quality. This produces a “.mp4” file. 4. Open multiAVCHD. Click the “add video files” tab and select the mp4 file. 5. Click “start”. I click on the “Panasonic Blu-ray players” button. I haven’t explored the other options very much. 6. The program produces a set of files in a folder with a label such as “AVCHD-20100512-162620” 7. To prepare the SD card for the files, I reformatted it using the sdfv2003.exe utility suggested by multiAVCHD’s author Dean Kasabow. I then set up the following folder structure on the card: F:\PRIVATE\AVCHD\ 8 I copied all the files from the “AVCHD-20100512-162620” folder into the AVCHD folder on the card. I have now converted some of my ProShow gold slideshows to P2X ones. I added white borders to the images using a Photoshop action, and added the “.ogg” files from the Proshow voiceovers to the corresponding images in the P2X show using the “add sound” button. I think I'll get a Blu-ray burner soon. They have come down a lot in price (helped by the strong Oz $?). All the best, Don Weston.

I have used Proshow for several years but have recently moved to P2Exe to allow me to show HD shows on my TV via P to Exe's video file outputs and Dean Kasabow's MultiAVCHD program. I would like to add borders to all slides in a show simultaneously, but if I select multiple slides, and click "objects and animation", the screen is "greyed out". Is there any way to edit slides simultaneously? Don W