I've been looking for about 2 hours to the answer to this problem, so don't yell at me.........

I have been using EMC 9 videowave with no problems (well sort of). Yesterday after doing a save in videowave, my computer crashed for no reason. When it came back up, and I went back into videowave I got an error message. "Cannot find required files". When I tried to locate the files none were found and I got a bunch of question marks where the pictures used to be.

I went to my documents and was able to locate the dmsm files and YES, they are still on my hard drive. I copied them and that didn't work either. For some reason Roxio is not reading them anymore........

any ideas? I'm a newbie.......

HP Windows XP

I am going to yell!!!

You posted in the Creator 2009 area and you have EMC9. Thus it gets moved.

Your Project file (dmsm) was trashed when your PC crashed. It is the file that 'knows' where everything is but it is only a set of notes.

You will have to recreate you Project. – Since it crashed, do a small part, Save it, reboot and make sure it loads OK. (program could be damaged too)

In addition to what Jim said, save your project under two different names. That way, if one of them has a problem, like yours, you can open the other one.

sorry.....i thought i was in emc9 help section......you yelled at me

ok....sigh....i'll recreate the project(s)............

But I didn't yell too loud…

I am bit unclear about what is really happening.
Can you start Videowave?
If yes do you get the question marks in the panel when you open the dmsm file?

Exactly what files did you move? The dmsm files, the picture and/or video files you are using in your project/

The question marks usually mean that Videowave cannot find the source files for your project and you have to locate the files and reconnect them.

If your computer crashed after you saved your project (dmsm) file, that dmsm file should still be allright and you should not have to recreate your project.

I was away rebuilding productions, but the problem continues to exist.....

Yes I can open videowave. Yes I get the question marks when I open a dmsm file. I rebuilt a few productions, and saved new productions. I also saved backups of those productions. However, they are still coming up with question marks even after recreating them.

I know the productions are there, but videowave just isnt finding the source files. ....and it USED to locate them. I don't know what has changed. And I don't know how to reconnect them.

I did an uninstall, and then a reinstall, and that still didn't solve the problem. The question marks are still there.....

I'm taking my computer in for a check up tomorrow, so I'll be offline for a few days.........

From your original post "I went to my documents and was able to locate the dmsm files and YES, they are still on my hard drive. I copied them and that didn't work either. For some reason Roxio is not reading them anymore........"

Where did you copy them and why?

If Videowave opens and you see the "?" in the panel then VW has found the dmsm file correctly and opened it. The "?" indicate that the picture files are missing. Did you move or delete these picture files from their locations as used in Videowave originally? Are those picture files still on your computer?

Please answer these questions and then we will continue from there.

Well OK! Now this makes sense......I have been making back ups, and moved some of the photos to an external memory drive. THAT'S probably what happened.....I'll play around with that, I'm sure this will fix the problem, because I was able to open the productions before I moved those files to the external memory......DUH! I just didn't realize the DMSM conintued to use the photos as memory, until you burn it of course. DUHHHHHHHHHh and THANK YOU! offline for awhile, computer is still crashing, and that's not good..........

The software does not embed the photos to the production, for obvious reasons. The .dmsm file size would be huge, so the software "links" to whatever you use in your production. Therefore, you have to keep all of your files, in the place that they were, when you created your production, or VideoWave loses the "link" to those files.

Take a look through this. It will explain an approach to handling projects.