Uhhh....Anyone checked out MS Photostory 3??

DCV wrote on 10/28/2004, 8:05 AM
If you haven't, you probably should (if you're running a legit copy of Windows of course):

http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/offers/

Holy cow, it does a whole lot for being free. This program has come a long way since version 1. There are a number of limitations but it does 95% of what people need and pretty easily I might add. Ouch!

John

Comments

DCV wrote on 10/28/2004, 9:06 AM
I just discovered something cool. If you browse down into the profiles folder there is a set of encoding profiles that PhotoStory uses to allow you to select different encoding schemes.

C:\Program Files\Photo Story 3 for Windows\Profiles\1033

Double click on one of the profiles and it'll bring up a profile editor that'll allow you to tweak away until you've got 720x480 DVD 29.97fps NTSC compliant video, which by default isn't one of the output schemes.

Now if Vegas had faster support for WMV this would be really slick. Right now it's just slick :)

John
Mandk wrote on 10/28/2004, 9:23 AM
After your first post I read the description. It says you can burn to DVD and I was wondering what format it out puts. Looks like you have identified the way to do that.
DCV wrote on 10/28/2004, 1:00 PM

I did some more checking and realized that the Window Media Profile Editor is part of the WIndows Media Encoder so you'll have to have it installed to be able to edit the PhotoStory profiles.

PhotoStory only ouputs Windows Media Files (.WMV), so you have to get them into a more friendly format to convert them to MPEG2.

Just as I remembered from way back when a few years ago in Vegas 4, converting WMV to AVI using Vegas 5 is a wash. The performance is bad (3.2Ghz P4 HT 1.5GB RAM - 5 min WMV -> AVI took 45 minutes) and my machine crashed.

So I found a nice little freeware utility called STOIK Video Converter that does a great job going from WMV to AVI using the Huffyuv Codec:

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/svideoconverter.html

The problem I'm running into now is some noticable artifacting that occurs when I go from the Huffyuv encoded AVI to NTSC DVD MPEG2 using either Vegas or CCE. Is this normal when transcoding Huffyuv ?

John