Hi DH Pence -

Here, PD12 imports the individual slides from a .pptx file without issue.

From what you've said it sounds like you should be able to import, so I'm not surprised it's giving you the "fits".

I've attached the sample PP presentation I just tested. See if it works for you. That might lead us to narrowing the problem.

Cheers - Tony

P.S. Attaching the .pptx sent the forum page into a spin, so I've zipped it.
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DH Pence,

What version of Power Point do you have installed on your computer?

I have an older Power Point (Office 2000), it does not know the .pptx file.
Thank you Tony for the file.


Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

That's possibly the issue, Carl.

.pptx is only compatible with later versions of PP... from 2010 (I think), so if your version of PP isn't "current" that may be causing the same thing Carl found. Mine's part of Office 2013.

Attached is the .ppt version of the same thing (for PowerPoint 97 - 2003) for testing.

This may help too - http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=3

Cheers - Tony
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Tony, your .PPT version does work on my old PowerPoint 2000.

PD12 is a bit finicky about opening the .ppt.

One time importing the .ppt causes PD 12 to stop working.
Open PD12 a second time then Importing the .ppt works.

Interesting that the duration of the images is the Default as set in Preferences.

Lets hope it works for DH Pence.

Your converter did not work in PD 12 for opening the .pptx file. It does allow the .pptx to open in PowerPoint 2000 as a read only.
Which may mean I could then save the .pptx as a .ppt file. I did not try that.

I just used your provided file.

Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

Thank you for the response guys. I am running PowerPoint 2007 which does .pptx and will open presentations made with 2010 and 2013. I did try a few different .pptx files (including the widescren one Ynotfish attached) with both PowerPoint and PD12 and received the same result: PowerPoint has no problem with them however PD12 still chokes. Carl that first screenshot you attached helps me however as I believe that is what the error message in the blank window should probably state.

For laughs I did try an install the compatibility pack which isn't supposed to be required for Office 2007 or later and received a message while attempting the installation which indicated that it wasn't needed.

I have submitted a trouble ticket to C/S and am curious to see what they come up with.
Win 7 64 Home Premium on an AMD 1090Tx6 @ 3.2ghz, 16gb of ram, dual 500gb drives, AMD Radeon 770 w/ 1gb.

Well it appears I am still struggling with Tech support to get any support (my copy came form Newegg which is an authorized reseller however they need further proof up to an including my first born's birth certificate).

I did have my son (a software engineer) come over and we went through the fun of uninstalling and reinstalling both MS Office and PD multiple times. He noted that Powerdirector does an absolutely horrible job of writing registry keys, as he described it "hit or miss". A prime example is how it writes it's exception into windows firewall in which it creates an entry for PD10.exe in the x86 program files directory which is a non-existent file on 64 bit systems. He did go through the registry thoroughly and in his opinion there is an issue with the x64 version making system calls.

I'd like to ask if anyone else is running Windows 7 64 and PD 12 along with what version of office you are running if you have the 64 bit version of the OS. Win 7 64 Home Premium on an AMD 1090Tx6 @ 3.2ghz, 16gb of ram, dual 500gb drives, AMD Radeon 770 w/ 1gb.

I have PowerDirector 12 Ultra (64 bit).
Microsoft Office 2000 Premium (32 Bit)
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit. I have 8 GB RAM installed.

No Problems.

I did test ynotfish (Tony's) .PPT file, it works. The slides are imported into Powerdirector.

There are many forum members that have PowerDirector 12 and Windows 7 64 bit. Very few have any problems.
The 64 bit versions of PowerDirector 12 are Ultra and Ultimate.
PowerDirector 12 Deluxe is 32 bit.


Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

Thanks for your reply Carl. I'm running PD12 Ultimate (x64), Office 2007 (32 bit) on Win7 home premium x64. For the life of me given the different manners in which we installed (changing the install order, etc..) I can't figure out why this is doing this. PD offers the option to import, shows the files in the import window, and attempts to lad them after giving the blank error window before telling me PowerPoint isn't installed.

I was thinking it might be a problem with Office being 32 bit but if yours works then I have to cast that speculation aside. I've become determined to fix this. Win 7 64 Home Premium on an AMD 1090Tx6 @ 3.2ghz, 16gb of ram, dual 500gb drives, AMD Radeon 770 w/ 1gb.

... and my PC is Win7 (64 bit)

I'm using PD12 Ultimate & Microsoft Office 2013.

You seem to have tried everything, including bringing in a pro, but I can't see any reason it's not working for you.

I wouldn't expect the tech support team to be necessarily well-versed in PowerPoint!

Carl - PD imports the slides (as you said) just as slides (images). It ignores all animations, timing and effects applied in PP. That's why it drops them in the timeline at your selected image duration.

Cheers - Tony
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Well gents it gets worse. On the advice of my son (the software engineer) I loaded up a process monitor (Sysutils Procmon)and tried to do the import into PD12. Tons of path not found, buffer too small, name collisions, buffer overflows, illegal calls, name not found, etc. in the system calls. It's ugly to say the least.

At this point I'm just going to pop the $50 and buy the Moyea PPT converter and bring them over as either MP4s or AVIs. That will keep all of the animations and timings intact.

Thanks for all of the help guys. Win 7 64 Home Premium on an AMD 1090Tx6 @ 3.2ghz, 16gb of ram, dual 500gb drives, AMD Radeon 770 w/ 1gb.

You issue is as much a mystery to me as all the process monitoring

I'd check the trial version of that conversion software to see how well it replicates the animations (particularly). I've used quite a few "dud" converters in the past.

You may be able to save yourself some $$$ by using screen capture software (many are free) while running the presentation. I just tried it here, with very acceptable results.

Cheers - Tony
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I'm a little late to the party, but I was intrigued by your son's idea to use ProcMon (Process Monitor). I'm using Win8.1 so it's not going to be identical, but I found all kinds of apparently worrisome results when running my copy of PD12. However I think this is a case of having too much information and not enough context.

When I opened up PD12 with an existing project, ProcMon generated 695,296 events in just 30 seconds! That really is TMI!

Most of the events that I scrolled through were marked SUCCESS, but there were plenty of others like BUFFER OVERFLOW, INVALID PARAMETER and NAME NOT FOUND. For that last one, it certainly looks bad that Windows and PD were looking for hundreds (or even 1000's) of specific registry keys and couldn't find them, but what that really means is that those registry keys have probably intentionally NOT been set.

PD still has to check because it will do things differently if the keys are ever set, but it's an expected occurrence to see NAME NOT FOUND. Since PD continually looks for some of the registry keys, ProcMon has to record (again) that the key wasn't found, which just adds to the impression that there are LOTS of problems when that isn't quite the case.

I guess my point here is that seeing even a large number of unsuccessful events in ProcMon does not necessarily mean that something is terribly wrong with your installation, but something clearly isn't right if you don't even get a complete error message for why it can't import the .pptx file.

FWIW, I can successfully import either variety of PowerPoint slides, and the fact that you've uninstalled and reinstalled PD and Office without resolving the problem is worrying.

The best thing I can offer is to have you run "sfc /scannow" (without the quotes) from an elevated (Administrator level) command prompt. That's the best way for Windows to quickly check and repair any damage that might be lurking in the protected system files. We had one forum member who discovered that his Win7 install was badly damaged even though everything, except PD, seemed to be working properly. With any luck, System File Scan may find and fix whatever's going on with your setup.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes

YouTube/optodata

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Opto, ProcMon is a neat tool to see what is going on behind the scenes. The most critical of the events mine generated were buffer overflows which is a bad thing in any case - it indicates a program that has erratic memory handling routines. I might understand if if my system didn't have beefy memory.

SFC is a neat program (I ran it earlier and fouind no issues) however there is another solution which I've found beats MS's utilities hands down. Auslogics Boost Speed will allow you to clean and fix the registry and defrag it, defrag and optimize the hard drives, and a lot of other functions that I can't remember right now.

I am inclined to think I may have a hardware combination that PD just doesn't like. I'm running a machine built for gaming and it will run most of the newer stuff at max settings but doing something as simple as going from PD to waveditor and back with a small mp3 file (less than 1 mb) causes PD to stutter even when I shut down my other unnecessary software like Symantec, printer monitors, etc.

It does render at a very acceptable speed with no issues however so I'm inclined to believe that it's the way PD addresses the memory on my system when making calls to other programs that causes issues. When it's working within itself I have absolutely no issues. I have offered a copy of the dumpfile showing the system calls to tech support, let's see if they want it or not. Win 7 64 Home Premium on an AMD 1090Tx6 @ 3.2ghz, 16gb of ram, dual 500gb drives, AMD Radeon 770 w/ 1gb.

DH, I'm glad you ran SFC and it didn't find any problems. It's not a registry cleaner and Boost Speed doesn't restore protected system files, so as far as I know they are complimentary programs.

I agree that having buffer overflows is an unwanted situation, and on my system they seemed to occur when reading various .png files during PD's initialization. In my case, they didn't have any obviously bad side effects - but if yours occurred when trying to import the .ppt(x) slides then that might be a helpful clue for tech support.

Just to be clear, buffers are created in memory by PD (and every other program) and are designed to hold objects of a specific size. If a buffer overflow occurs, it's because the object exceeds the allotted size and it's data spills into the next set of memory locations, which can sometimes do very bad things. Buffer overflows are unrelated to how much memory (RAM) you have installed, and they're caused by a deficiency within PD - usually because it didn't verify the size of the object before loading it or because there is nothing in place to deal with an overflow.

Your high end AMD gaming system might have a role here, though. Those of us with top-end Haswell + nVidia GTX 7xx + Win8.1 systems were dogged by terrible delays in waiting for various PD windows to open (I'm talking about 15+ seconds!) Meanwhile, people with 1 generation lower/older hardware (or with AMD chips) had full speed experiences. This was finally addressed in the 2923 patch after months of forum posts and video screen captures to show how bad it was.

I know AMD machines weren't affected by that particular issue, but it's possible that something like that is affecting PD on your rig. Exchanging a tiny sound file between Wave Editor and PD shouldn't be a test of your patience. Although this sounds counter-intuitive, do you have access to a midrange video card?

If you swapped GPUs and ran through a couple of quick steps (like trying to import .ppt and doing the MP3 exchange), you'd at least be able to rule out some bizarre (but not-unprecedented) interaction between PD and your big/fast GPU. Otherwise, I'm stumped

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°