Tony -
I will try to be as clear as I can. I often run into this problem because when I try to be completely clear my messages tend to be too long to read and when I try to be short my emails are not clear. Here goes, and my apologies for the length of this post:
My wife and I recently went to one of t he local festivals and, using our digital cameras, we took a lot of photos and videos. Both of our cameras take HD type videos although they take different types. My camera takes .MOV video files and my wife's takes MP4 video files. And, of course, we alto took a lot of jpg files.
I spent some time with PowerDirector8 arranging these into a slide show with both the jpgs and videos. When that was done I moved to the
PRODUCE section and selected
AVCHD. Since the size of the slide show was > 6 GB I also selected 8.5 GB as the disk size and used one of my dual-layer disks. I also selected Widescreen (16:9) and 1920 x 1080 as the resolution size. I had never tried to make a slide show with PD8 before using dual-layers, but since there was an 8.5 gb option I did not assume there would be an issue. I then moved to the
CREATE DISK tab, selected write to disk, did not select write to folder and then tried to burn the disk.
The process took in excess of 4 hours, but when writing to the disk, the software gave me an "unsuccessful" message indicating that there was some problem that might have involved writing to a stream.
I then tried again, this time setting write to folder instead of disk, and this worked successfully. I had expected that the program would either create an iso file or a VOB folder structure and that I could then burn that to a disk using some other burn software, but the folder structure it created did not look like anything I had seen before and was larger (> 9 GB) than I could expect to write to a disk without some kind of compression.
I then bought some new (Memorex) dual-layer disks and tried again to create a disk, but this attempt also failed and did so with the same message as before.
Now to try to answer your questions.
1) I want to play the disk on my normal DVD players. One of these is a Blu-Ray player and the other is a normal DVD player, but with an UPSCALE function that presumably creates something like an HD picture. Both TVs attached to the players are HD TVs.
2) I am not sure that I know what you are asking me in this question. If you are referring to the PRODUCE tab in the software the answer was yes and that I used the AVCHD and 8.5 gb settings. And, as I wrote above, selected Widescreen and 1920 x 1080. I thought about using lower settings, but the size of the output did not change my much so I left it where it was.
When I first used the trial version (I have the normal version now) I tried several different settings, but found that AVCHD produced the best photo and video results from our cameras, so that is what I use now.
3) N/A (I think).
4) Before I purchased the software I made several DVDs, using single layer disks, from our pictures and videos. In fact this software was pretty much the only software I could find that understood and successfully processed both of our video files. Most ofters understood one or the other, but not both. So I was able to successfully create several small slide shows using AVCHD, but those were using the trial version and single layer disks. I have never before needed to use dual-layer so I have never successfully created disks on dual-layer disks.
All of this is running on a laptop (dual-processor) with 2 gb of memory, Vista Home Premium (up to date with Microsoft updates) and using the built-in disk burner. I have successfully written dual-layer disks with this machine, but not with PowerDirector. I had played around with the idea of downloading and trying CL's Media Suite Ultra to see if that works, but have not yet done so.
I hope this is enough information and that you were able to get through it all.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Feb 28. 2010 14:35
MikeFromMesa