PTE video to disks for TV

[LumenLux]

Maybe this new topic can focus one aspect of the many threads now going on PTE to dvd players.

Igor has indeed recommended Ulead as a high quality necessary link. It may be what many of us end up using - especially if it does produce a noticably better quality. But as Rick stated, many of us would like to try the possibilities we already own or find freeware or shareware. Maybe one is even better than Ulead. I suggest as each of us try various back-ends for the PTE produced .avi we can help each other by posting both successful and non-successful experiences.

My own experience so far has been with Pinnacle's Studio 8 to produce SVCD disk. I think someone has been successful with other Pinnacle products, but has anyone produced a PTE-SVCD using Studio 8? If you have, please share how. I admittedly don't know Studio 8 very well, but it appears I should be able to use Studio to take the PTE .avi file to MPEG for the SVCD. The way I have tried, Studio gives me a message The selected clip has non-standard Video Frame Rate thus cannot be encoded to MPEG. I think I might be able to try the alternate codecs but will not Igor's proprietary combination likely be better if I can make it work?

[Tom K]

I just learned of rev 4.20 this afternoon. After several false starts and "coasters" I have successfully created a DVD slideshow (with two shows on it.) I wound up downloading ULead DVD Moviefactory2 to do it but I hope there's something better - it's sloooow. At least it seems that way to me, it took an hour and a half to write a DVD that runs about seven minutes total.

The file sizes of the two .avi files was about 46M and 27M and the total of the files written onto the DVD itself was about 280M - a mere drop in the DVD bucket.

I first tried creating a SVCD with Nero Vision Express but it would not play on my Sanyo DVD/VCR machine. Then I tried a VCD, similar result. It seemed to want to try to and they might work on some other machine, but I'd prefer not to have to buy another DVD player just for this. When trying to use Sonic MyDVD I could navigate to the folder that contained the .avi file and click on it, but the program would lock up and I'd have to Ctrl+Alt+Dlt out of it.

As far as the DVD result finally achieved with ULead goes, it looks very good although there were some problems of a surprising nature. The first slideshow (of a friend's wedding) used all fairly rapid fades of 200ms for the transitions and the slides were onscreen for 1-2 seconds - 161 slides in 4:26 (I do not like slow-moving slideshows!) The fades all looked great, just like on the PC and the audio sync was also perfect.

The second slideshow (of this year's Reno Air Races) used all quick cuts - no transition - and the slides were onscreen for something less than a second - 206 slides in 2:36 or about 3/4 of a second per slide. Surpisingly, the quick cuts is where I saw problems. Maybe every tenth slide or so there would be horizontal bars seen as if one slide were caught halfway transitioning to the next, kind of a comb tooth effect. I don't know if it had anything to do with the rapid pace of the slides or if it is an artifact of the quick transition. I'm kind of thinking the latter as at one point I had about 7 slides in two seconds and didn't see any problems there. Requires more investigation I guess.

That's my $.02 so far.

And thanks a ton Igor and crew!!

[LumenLux]

Thank you Tom for your experience. I now have some more experience myself, but it's a bad sign when I am the only one responding to myself.

Tired of fiddling (for now), I too dl'd Ulead Video Factory 2 (30 day trial). First try, easy interface, ran like a pro. Using my original posted PTE show, It's Not About the Fish, PTE 420B2 created the avi file from the existing project file. Video Factory knew exactly what to do with it when I checked the box for SVCD. The conversion/burn took about 30 minutes and the show plays just under five minutes I think.

I am totally impressed with the quality Igor has brought to this SVCD medium. Prior to seeing this, I had always convinced myself to simply wait for true DVD burning. But seriously, I think this SVCD is good enough for many, probably most, uses. As for the actual number of DVD players that will play the SVCD, hope we will also hear some number of experiences.