VideoBuilder is killing me -- why won't it successfully work at th

[rungabic]

I never have had any problems at all generating .exe's, and now for the very first time, I need to make an HD .mp4 out of my slideshow. Without fail, I can successfully generate an .mp4 at the standard preset "HD (1920 x 1080) High Quality" setting. It works, and the resulting file plays fine.

However, if I customize the output to do single pass at 24000 bit rate, it completes the process, but the resulting file quits playing (in all 3 software players I've tried) just about halfway through the file. The file size, however, looks to be just as big as it should be.

And if I customize the output to do two passes at 24000 bit rate (or even 17000 bit rate I think I tried once), the process goes to completion, but I either end up with a video that quits halfway, or occasionally a 0 byte file.

What the heck is going on? I'm about to tear my hair out, I've done this so many times. And I've tried a couple different slideshows as well.

At first, I thought using the 7.0 beta was the problem, but I reverted to 6.5 and have the same issues.

One time, I deleted most of my 200+ slides and tried two passes at 24000, with only 3 or 4 slides in the show, and I think that did actually work.

There's just got to be a bug here. The only other logical thing for me to try is installing on a different machine (not that I know why that would matter), but I don't have the ability to do that at the moment.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[fh1805]

... It works, and the resulting file plays fine...

If it isn't broke, why do you want to try and fix it?

Peter

[rungabic]

If it isn't broke, why do you want to try and fix it?

Peter

Hi Peter,

Simply because, as I certainly have the horsepower and then some to play back an h264 file at a 24000 bit rate, and my final destination is projection on a 92-inch screen, I'd like to go for absolute maximum quality, even if it's only a matter of a few extra percent.

So am I the only one with this problem?

Coincidentally, I've also tried to output to AVI, using a multitude of different codecs, and those have all failed miserably as well.

Frankly, my "gut" impression is that PicturesToExe is solid and reliable, but VideoBuilder and AVI creation both seem to be somewhat half-baked to me. But I'm hopeful that someone can prove me wrong!

Thanks,

Brent

[davegee]

Are you using the players recommended by Igor?

DG

[rungabic]

Are you using the players recommended by Igor?

DG

I'm not sure where those recommendations are -- maybe you can point me to them -- I'd be happy to take a look.

Regardless, if VideoBuilder is producing a good h264 mp4, it really shouldn't matter what one uses for playback -- I mean, we all know that certain players play certain filetypes and codecs better than others, but when 3 different players end playback halfway through, there's something wrong with that file. And of course, when the file is 0 bytes, after VideoBuilder reports a successful completion, no player's going to play that! ;-)

Anyway, I tried playback with VLC, WMP 12, and ArcSoft TMT 5...all with identical behavior. That's enough to convince me that the files VideoBuilder is producing (when it manages to produce them) are well and truly borked.

Brent

[davegee]

The recommended players are listed on the creation page.

I just tried your settings on a short H.264 MPEG4 and it played Media Player Homecinema with no problems whatsoever.

DG

[rungabic]

The recommended players are listed on the creation page.

I just tried your settings on a short H.264 MPEG4 and it played Media Player Homecinema with no problems whatsoever.

DG

Not sure what page you're referring to, but I'll try to look.

Anyway, I appreciate you're doing that test, but as I said, I did that too: when I deleted all but a tiny handful of slides, I was able to produce a two-pass 24000 bitrate file, which played fine in all of my players.

But when I use those same settings with a 225-slide show, then resultant video file stops playback approximately halfway through...

[Lin Evans]

The issue "may" be with one of your images or with an audio file. Does it always fail in playback after the same image? If so, try removing the image where it fails and recompile. The fact that it fails "about half way" through and that the file size "seems correct" would lead me to suspect that one of the images is problematic for some reason. Even though an executable is produced and runs normally, there "may" be an issue either with an image, or with the background audio at that particular point. Another test would be to try compiling without the audio and see what the result is.

Best regards,

Lin

Not sure what page you're referring to, but I'll try to look.

Anyway, I appreciate you're doing that test, but as I said, I did that too: when I deleted all but a tiny handful of slides, I was able to produce a two-pass 24000 bitrate file, which played fine in all of my players.

But when I use those same settings with a 225-slide show, then resultant video file stops playback approximately halfway through...

[rungabic]

The issue "may" be with one of your images or with an audio file. Does it always fail in playback after the same image? If so, try removing the image where it fails and recompile. The fact that it fails "about half way" through and that the file size "seems correct" would lead me to suspect that one of the images is problematic for some reason. Even though an executable is produced and runs normally, there "may" be an issue either with an image, or with the background audio at that particular point. Another test would be to try compiling without the audio and see what the result is.

Best regards,

Lin

Lin -- I'm pretty sure I had the same issues with a completely different (yet approximately equally as long) slideshow, but I'll certainly check into your idea. However, would a "bad" image or sound file cause it to fail a single-pass 24000 bitrate run, yet work in a single-pass 10000 bitrate run? I can't really figure out how that could be...

Brent

[Lin Evans]

Hi Brent,

Logic says no; but I gave up logic long ago where creation of video files were concerned. I've seen slideshows fail because of audio when the same audio played fine in most players. Go figure! Sometimes these things just require trial and error to sort out.

At first I thought it might be a resource issue and that still could be at the root of the problem. Something as simple as a memory glitch could cause a problem during the creation of the file. Without knowing exactly what the internal procedural differences are between the creation of a 10,000 bitrate and an 24,000 bitrate file, it's difficult to guess at where the problem might lie. The fact that you can create a small video with only a couple images at 24,000 bitrate means things are probably working correctly in the software. The larger the file, the more resources are taxed in most cases. This may be a bit extreme, but if you could zip up the images and post a link to the zip file, perhaps I or someone else might try creating a 24,000 bitrate file using your parameters. If successful, then we can eliminate the software and look at resources. If not, then perhaps Igor could look into the problem? I would suggest first trying the removal of a file or making without the audio to eliminate those possibilities.

Best regards,

Lin

Lin -- I'm pretty sure I had the same issues with a completely different (yet approximately equally as long) slideshow, but I'll certainly check into your idea. However, would a "bad" image or sound file cause it to fail a single-pass 24000 bitrate run, yet work in a single-pass 10000 bitrate run? I can't really figure out how that could be...

Brent

[rungabic]

Hi Brent,

Understood.... I wish there were an easy solution, but right now perhaps the easiest and quickest way would be to zip up the PTE file and post it and several of us could try to create the two-pass 24,000 bitrate run. If you don't find an answer, then we can always do that to sort it out.

Best regards,

Lin

Thanks for your help, Lin. I agree with everything you said. And if it's a resource issue, then trying this on another system would be a good idea (an one I just can't do at the moment, as my other system is temporarily down). I appreciate your offer to test it. Let me poke around a little more and see what I can do first in terms of ruling things out. The killer is that on my current system, which is a few years old, it takes over 2.5 hours to do the two-pas 24000 run...so the process of trying different variables is excruciatingly time-consuming, painful, and frustrating...

Brent

[brutus]

Hi Brent.

Wrong Bitrate. Should be in Megabits / second, [21Mbps = 21000000]. Enter the new value and try again.

Cheers,

John

[rungabic]

Hi Brent.

Wrong Bitrate. Should be in Megabits / second, [21Mbps = 21000000]. Enter the new value and try again.

Cheers,

John

John -- you're right, but I think that's either a bug or a feature of the interface. When I first saw the bitrate selection field, it looked really weird to me -- because it defaults to 10,000 and maxes out at 24,000. I thought "where are the rest of the zeroes," and so I just assumed the max corresponds to "24Mbps." I wish it were that simple.

Brent

[rungabic]

Hi Lin & others...

Just wanted to report back that I had at least some success with this. Thinking about the idea of a resource issue, it occurred to me that all my photos were 12 MP, and here I was trying to generate a 1920x1080 video. Since I had zoomed in 118% on most of my slides in order to fill a 16:9 frame, I batch resized my photos to be 2265x1504. Lo and behold -- the resulting 2-pass, max bitrate video worked! Clearly, there was no particular photo or audio file that was borking the video, but simply reducing the overall data size of the entire project did the trick. Interestingly, the max "24000" bitrate file was reported by my various players as peaking far higher than that, and I wish I knew what the setting really meant.

Now, the other part of my goal was to be using the 7.0 beta to append a brief HD video clip to the end of my show. Unfortunately, while I can build an h264 video file of just that video file alone, when I append it to the show, then my resulting video again quits halfway or 2/3 of the way through. Once again, there appears to be a "resource issue" and/or the software simply isn't doing a good job of managing too much data, particularly since it seems to be able to handle one-pass, 10000 bitrate, but craps out on 2-pass, max bitrate. However, until I'm able replicate these issues on a different computer, I suppose I shouldn't point the finger...

Brent

[Conflow]

Hi Lin & others...

Just wanted to report back that I had at least some success with this. Thinking about the idea of a resource issue, it occurred to me that all my photos were 12 MP, and here I was trying to generate a 1920x1080 video. Since I had zoomed in 118% on most of my slides in order to fill a 16:9 frame, I batch resized my photos to be 2265x1504. Lo and behold -- the resulting 2-pass, max bitrate video worked! Clearly, there was no particular photo or audio file that was borking the video, but simply reducing the overall data size of the entire project did the trick. Interestingly, the max "24000" bitrate file was reported by my various players as peaking far higher than that, and I wish I knew what the setting really meant.

Now, the other part of my goal was to be using the 7.0 beta to append a brief HD video clip to the end of my show. Unfortunately, while I can build an h264 video file of just that video file alone, when I append it to the show, then my resulting video again quits halfway or 2/3 of the way through. Once again, there appears to be a "resource issue" and/or the software simply isn't doing a good job of managing too much data, particularly since it seems to be able to handle one-pass, 10000 bitrate, but craps out on 2-pass, max bitrate. However, until I'm able replicate these issues on a different computer, I suppose I shouldn't point the finger...

Brent

[Conflow]

Hi Rungabic,

I agree with Lin's comment.."Throw logic out the Window" because I also had terrible problems

with Video-production over the past few years and I learnt the hard way as follows:-

1)

When using any type of Video-production Software and World-class Converters there is absolutely

nothing to be gained with using 'Mega-sized' Images except absolute frustration and confusion.

2)

When I started to use my common sense I finally choose to settle on a suitable 'Image-size' size

between the 2 HD-Video Standards of 1920x1080 and 1080x607 ~ I choose 1280x720 pixels and

since then everything has worked out just fine for me with every Video-production and Conversion

including Mp4(H-2640. This Image-size renders quite happily with 2.Gb Memory and upwards for up

to 10.minutes of Video.

Note: By the way I also found that the Mp4(H264) Video-format does not like being Zipped-up its very

'tetchy' about it. Even with Win-ZipPro do not use any zip-Compression, just send as is.

3)

I asked myself why is it working so well?? and of course the answer was staring me in the face:-

The reproduction on a PC is 30.Fps (progressve) and on EU.TV it is 25.Fps and on US.TV its 30.Fps.

All TV is (interlaced) and any errors are smoothed with the EU.50-interlaces per Frame X 25 Fps

this being 1250 scans/second. In the US its 60-interlaces x 30.Fps being 1800 scans/sec.Thats one

'hell' of a lot of data/per/second multiplies by your Pixels/per/Image/per/second.

4)

From the above its plain to see if you use 'Mega-images' your RAM-Memory resources are going to

expire very quickly. Indeed if you had the time and 'retro-calculated' the amount of RAM/second/

usage there will come a point where the PC will be forced to create extra 'Virtual-Memory' on its

Hard-Drive and as this is (mechanical) and Non-synchronous the Video-rendering will fail.

The plain fact is that it seems to be you running out of RAM-Memory with these large Image-sizes and

they serve no purpose because Video-Standards are precise with very little image-resizing utilities

with the exception of "You-Tube" who do this as a Client-Image Standardisation.

Hope this helps ~ I attach a screen-shot of Computer and Video Image Standards to help you choose.

Brian (Conflow)

[davegee]

I doesn't matter if you are making an EXE or an MPEG4 (H.264) video - if your project is 1920x1080 you don't NEED images bigger than 1920x1080!

I've heard it said often here that "my system will handle images SOOC" - they might, but you are using resources needlessly.

The only time that images larger than project resolution size are needed is for zooming and then ONLY on images which ARE ACTUALLY zoomed.

DG

[RobertAlbright]

I doesn't matter if you are making an EXE or an MPEG4 (H.264) video - if your project is 1920x1080 you don't NEED images bigger than 1920x1080!

I've heard it said often here that "my system will handle images SOOC" - they might, but you are using resources needlessly.

The only time that images larger than project resolution size are needed is for zooming and then ONLY on images which ARE ACTUALLY zoomed.

DG

This discussion strand is very helpful for those of us who are experienced digital slide producers but novices in combining stills with videos. I totally agree with Dave's last comment - even the latest HD projectors normally have a maximum resolution of 1920x1080 pixels (often used in combination with laptops at 1920x1200 pixels). At 1920x1080 px resolution, the image quality of PTE exe.files on large screens (we've gone up to 12 feet wide) is superb. What I'm getting round to is a question: is there a consensus about what HD video codec (and file ending) works best with PTE exe files? Tell me about one which is proven to work (including sound) and I'll try to produce it from my editing programme. I know there will be other options which may also work on some people's computers, but can we settle for one as a default standard?

[davegee]

Hi Robert,

Presumably, you have a singe source for any video which you want to insert into PTE such as your Canon 5D or perhaps your Nikon 5100?

Igor has requested samples from various cameras so that he can test and has promised that a converter will be built in at some stage.

I sent a short clip from a very basic Nikon L2 compact and he "fixed" that for me.

If we start from where you are, will your existing camera's video allow it to be inserted WITHOUT conversion?

If not, why not send a VERY short clip to Igor and ask for his comments?

I recently saw Andy Rouse at the Hay Book Festival and he showed some remarkably professional looking still/video combination shows (albeit from a MAC!) and the source video came from his D3's.

If you have a chance to see him anywhere I can THOROUGHLY recommend that you go from a photographic and entertainment point of view.

I know that he is booked for Abergavenny CC's annual lecture in November. Further details and other possible venues at his web site.

DG

[RobertAlbright]

Hi Robert,

Presumably, you have a singe source for any video which you want to insert into PTE such as your Canon 5D or perhaps your Nikon 5100?

Igor has requested samples from various cameras so that he can test and has promised that a converter will be built in at some stage.

I sent a short clip from a very basic Nikon L2 compact and he "fixed" that for me.

If we start from where you are, will your existing camera's video allow it to be inserted WITHOUT conversion?

If not, why not send a VERY short clip to Igor and ask for his comments?

I recently saw Andy Rouse at the Hay Book Festival and he showed some remarkably professional looking still/video combination shows (albeit from a MAC!) and the source video came from his D3's.

If you have a chance to see him anywhere I can THOROUGHLY recommend that you go from a photographic and entertainment point of view.

I know that he is booked for Abergavenny CC's annual lecture in November. Further details and other possible venues at his web site.

DG

Hi Dave

I'm using a Canon 5D Mark 2 shooting in the MOV format at 1920x1080px Full HD H.264, Audio is recorded as Linear PCM. I haven't tried inserting it without conversion - unedited it's a mess. So I edit in Sony Vegas and have already sent a sample to Igor. He is making changes to PTE Beta based on output problems arising from particular HD codecs used by Vegas. However in this enquiry I'm really wanting to know if there's a proven HD format which works well in PTE when combined with stills. My stuff is projected on big screens at UK and international festivals so HD is required - ie there is no drop off in image quality when the production switches between film and video.In video there are hundreds of codecs and file extensions, I just want to know about one that works in PTE and is widely in operation. I know it's early days but some members of the forum have considerable previous video experience, unlike me who has been a stills photographer for 35 years and an AV producer since 1982 with first film and then digital.

[Barry Beckham]

Hi Dave

I'm using a Canon 5D Mark 2 shooting in the MOV format at 1920x1080px Full HD H.264, Audio is recorded as Linear PCM. I haven't tried inserting it without conversion - unedited it's a mess. So I edit in Sony Vegas and have already sent a sample to Igor. He is making changes to PTE Beta based on output problems arising from particular HD codecs used by Vegas. However in this enquiry I'm really wanting to know if there's a proven HD format which works well in PTE when combined with stills. My stuff is projected on big screens at UK and international festivals so HD is required - ie there is no drop off in image quality when the production switches between film and video.In video there are hundreds of codecs and file extensions, I just want to know about one that works in PTE and is widely in operation. I know it's early days but some members of the forum have considerable previous video experience, unlike me who has been a stills photographer for 35 years and an AV producer since 1982 with first film and then digital.

This is exactly what I have been patiently waiting for. I am not interested in any video less than HD, but unless I have missed it, I havn't seen anything posted that is close to what I an looking for, apart from Igors short demo, that was better.

No offence intended to what has already been posted, but I am not at all interested in poor quality video playing as a backdrop to stills, or small videos clips playing over stills pictures. As soon as you do that, the eye is draw to the movement and you may as well not have the stills at all.