Slide Show in VMS7

reneg wrote on 6/2/2008, 1:59 PM
I completed my first real project with VMS. I had good intentions over the last year to learn VMS, but I finally took the plunge when I had a real project with a real deadline. I went through the in-program "Show me Hows" as well as the tutorials linked off the knowledge base here and learned a lot of "what", but little "how". Surprisingly, YouTube provided better tutorials with lots of "how".

I hit a brick wall in rendering my project as it would never complete. Luckily, I read a post in this forum which suggested resizing images because VMS runs out of memory. Task manager confirmed this with my project. Rather than resize my images, I split my project up into two parts and then joined the MPGs together with another tool. I didn't use VMS because it wanted to re-render the parts that I had just put together using VMS.

I'm guessing the memory limitation isn't resolved in VMS8. Future versions of VMS should transparently support large picture images. In my opinion, it is not intuitive for users to resize images to accomdate program limitations.

Overall, I like VMS and am beginning to feel comfortable with the program since I feel that I've cleared the initial learning curve.

Comments

ritsmer wrote on 6/3/2008, 12:02 AM
Hi reneq

How big are the large images you work with - i mean when they come from the camera?

I often make projects having several hundred up to 5Mpix images ( jpg and 1 - 1,5 MB each) and I have never seen the slightest problem using them directly in VMS (without downsizing them)

Not downsizing them also makes the quality of Ken Burns-like pans and crops better.
reneg wrote on 6/3/2008, 5:44 AM
Most of my images were 3000 by 2000 in resolution (2-3MB) with a few in the 3500 by 2500 range (one as high as 7MB). Some were digital pictures, and some were scans of old pictures. I have around 200 images in my project and used the Ken Burns effect a lot. The choke point for VMS7 seemed to be when Virtual Memory in the task manager showed VMS7 consuming 1.6-1.7GB of ram. I have 4GB of ram in my system. VM Size is not displayed by default in Task Manager and needs to be enabled view View -> Select Columns. After breaking up my project into two 100 image projects, Virtual memory got as high as 1.4GB, and rendering to MPG was able to complete.
ritsmer wrote on 6/4/2008, 4:47 AM
The thread "Frozen render" in this forum might also give you some clue as to what (added) filesizes VMS can handle.
reneg wrote on 6/4/2008, 8:00 AM
Saw that thread. The workaround of manually resizing images is inefficient and not intuitive. Image size/resolution should not break rendering in a future version of VMS. That is my feedback to the Sony devs should they actually read these forums.