Various Suggestions

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Various Suggestions

Postby flhsteve » Sat Aug 07, 2010 3:28 am

Having just spent three months of my life on a large and complex show I have some suggestions for improvements to PSP which is excellent, but let down for me by the following;

- Cuts should automatically default to 0 secs.
- Exe playback performance issues where transitions and motion is jerky need better solutions. I would assume that this is a limitation of PC technology but programs such as PicturesToExe seem to have solved them.
- Rendering of video clips seems to be causing a lot of people problems. Assistance from PSP to, say, compress unnecessarily large video files would be helpful.
- Output menus have to be recalled each time and should be saved with project.
- Audio clicks are generated by PSP when music and sound effects begin and end, which sound unprofessional.
- There is no option to open a DVD at the menu. The first show starts playing automatically.
- The default internal rendering resolution is too low and gives people a bad initial impression of the program with apparently soft previews.

Is there any evidence that Photodex monitor this forum?

Cheers, Steve.

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Re: Various Suggestions

Postby TC Time » Sat Aug 07, 2010 6:16 am

flhsteve wrote:
Is there any evidence that Photodex monitor this forum?


Hi Steve,
I'm sure there is someone on this forum that could answer your question in regards to Photodex monitoring this forum. Or, they may have knowledge as to who to make your suggestions to so you feel they are getting to the right people.
If you are on Face Book, Photodex does have a page. I notice that someone from Photodex does respond to questions & suggestions. If they cannot answer the entry, they reply that such info is passed on to the proper departments or suggest a call into technical support.

GL,
TC
TCTime

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Re: Various Suggestions

Postby im42n8 » Sat Aug 07, 2010 10:10 am

Layer transitions default to 0s when set to cut. Slide transitions may not necessarily be 0s when selected as a cut transition.

There are numerous issues related to EXEs and Photodex is working on them. the same goes for making videos of various formats. Photodex is quite helpful in these areas tho not always successful in all circumstances.

Output menus typically must be manually saved. They can be recalled during a given session but that's not always a given. They could improve this area (saving projects and all stuff associated) and they've been called on it.

The audio clicks require work-arounds at this time. Photodex is aware of the problem but haven't come up with a fix yet. It must be low on their priority list since it's been complained about for years.

If your DVD show starts automatically then you haven't included a menu. Include one and your show is accessible by clicking on the menu. This is particularly important if you have multiple shows on your DVD. No menu and you end up with playing your shows from the first through to the last one after the other.

Tell photodex that their default internal resolution is too low compared with current state of technology and what people are using.... make it a feature request. Then, make sure you've changed the default options to something you think is more appropriate.

Photodex is more than aware of this forum and the people who are part of it. Several were asked to be contributing authors in the recent "Secrets of the ProShow Experts" book (I was one, Mona, Jennifer, Steve, and Mike were others).

Dale
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Re: Various Suggestions

Postby flhsteve » Sun Aug 08, 2010 4:22 am

Many thanks for the replies so far.

It is remarkable if smoothness is not top of the Photodex 'to do' list. I know many dedicated AV users who use PicturesToExe solely because of the perceived smoothness of the final result - despite the fact that they would benefit from the vast superiority of the PSG/PSP feature list.

Audio clicks would be next on my priority list. I wonder if the various means to move and edit the clips are more or less prone to clicks. I haven't put in the time to test this.

Regarding DVD menus, I do have a menu but, at least on my Sony PVR/player, it starts to play the first show automatically when I insert the disc and I have to tell the player to show me the menu. This doesn't happen with commercial DVDs.

Finally, I haven't found a consolidated bug list on this forum. It would be handy to know that specific bugs are already logged by Photodex. I am still finding bugs that I reported a year ago.

Cheers, Steve.

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Re: Various Suggestions

Postby BarbaraC » Sun Aug 08, 2010 4:45 am

Even if there's no sound file anywhere in a show, you'll still hear those clicks when running the show or when checking fly-ins/outs for captions because ProShow is accessing the sound card. Thus, it has nothing to do with our sound files and everything to do with how ProShow is functioning. The only workaround I've found is to add silence at the beginning and end of sound files and then overlap them so that ProShow isn't turning the sound card on-off-on-off.

Barbara
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Re: Various Suggestions

Postby flhsteve » Mon Aug 09, 2010 2:53 am

Ahh - that's a very interesting insight, Barbara, thanks.

As I have music playing throughout the show, the clicks are only audible between tracks and especially if a sound effect plays in the silence between tracks - so generating four clicks. As the show is finished and I am loath to re-edit my sound files, another work-around is to create a sound file with a few seconds of silence and add it as a slide sound 'patch' over the clicks. It can be attached to any nearby slide and dragged into place in the timeline view -even over the top of existing sound effects.

Now I understand the issue, I would have thought that addressing this problem would not be complex for Photodex, considering the number of complaints I see about it.

Now about the video jerkiness - any easy fixes there?

Cheers, Steve.

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Re: Various Suggestions

Postby gpsmikey » Mon Aug 09, 2010 6:42 am

You have some good points, let me toss out what I know about some of the issues.
They have been asked about posting a "bug list" and/or "feature request list", but they indicated they did not intend to do that since it does reveal things to the competition. While I understand their comment, I'm not sure I agree with them on it :? They are working on fixing bugs though (and their beta test people help to eliminate lots of bugs before you even see them ) Quite a few of us here are members of the beta test group and they do respond as things are found so the average user never sees them.

As far as the "clicks" go, it is partially hardware/system dependent - some people have far more problems than others with the issue. One trick many of us have used is to create a number of short "sounds of silence" as it were - 1,2 and 5 second sound clips of "silence" (easy to do in any audio editor) that we can insert as needed. Another trick is to always overlap adjacent sound tracks - even if only for 1/4 second or so - that tends to eliminate the "clicks".

As for the video issues, Photodex is not alone in this boat - take a look in the video editing forums for Sony Vegas or others and you will see everybody is having issues - there are so many different formats out there being created by the newer cameras that it is a real pain for lots of folks (and some of the compression formats require some serious processing power to "uncompress" - add that to a transition or fx and the processor can't keep up (but in the final rendered DVD, it should be ok). I do know they are working on fixing these issues.

mikey
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