Putting together a slide presentation

ADinelt wrote on 1/29/2004, 5:58 PM
I am working on a small project of putting all of my late parents pictures into a slide presentation on DVD. I have scanned in the pictures and have put together two small sections so far. Each project has anywhere between 10 and 30 pictures in them.

I seem to have a problem in Screenblast and was wondering if anyone else has encountered it as well. Screenblast every now and then will seem to hang or enter long wait periods although the program still shows as running in task manager. It is really noticeable if I go to another window then come back to Screenblast. The hour glass will appear anywhere from 30 seconds to a couple of minutes.

I think what is happening is Screenblast is polling or constantly refreshing the Medial Pool. The reason I think it is refreshing is when working on video projects, I have noticed each graphic in the Media Pool flickering, as though Screenblast was cycling through each one in the pool. Screenblast definitely takes longer to create the graphic in the Media Pool for a picture than a video clip. And if it is cycling through the images, then this would account for the long wait periods.

If this is what is happening, does anyone know of a way to stop it? I looked in the preferences (internal as well) and nothing seemed to jump out. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

My system is a PIII - 650 with 384 meg ram, Windows 98SE, dedicated 60 meg 7200 hard drive for video, Screenblast 3.0a.

Thanks...
Al

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 1/29/2004, 6:20 PM
Every time Movie Studio loses focus to another program, it closes all the files in the media pool. Then when it gets focus again it has to reopen them. If you go to Options / Preferences / General you can uncheck "Close media files when not the active application". This should help out a lot. The only downside is that you may have some problems if you decide to edit one of the pictures in another program while it's still open in Movie Studio.

Another thing that will help is to make sure that your pictures aren't any larger than they need to be. If you're using them pretty much as is without zooming in or cropping then you should probably resize them to the video frame size (654x480 for NTSC, 787x576 for PAL) before loading them into Movie Studio.
ADinelt wrote on 1/29/2004, 7:23 PM
Changing the setting in the preferences seems to have helped quite a bit.

I scanned all of my paren'ts pictures just after they passed away and am now doing something wth them. I don't want to get into resizing the pictures as there are around 500 in total that I will be working with, and I am doing some panning and zooming to add some interest to the presentation. Just wish my parents were still around to see it when it's done.

Thanks again. It always amazes me how much you guys/gals know!!
Al