[vifferman]

Hi, All!

I've been using Creator 2010 for about a week now, and starting to get the hang of it. I had around 4,500 photos and movies from our first trip to Europe in August/September 2008, and my wife was getting pretty grumbly about how long it was taking me to get them onto disks. After initially using Nero and giving up, then trying a mixture of Picasa, Camtasia Studio, WinDVD and some other products, I tried Corel Digital Studio, just for the video mastering and creation of DVDs, but it was annoyingly inflexible and difficult to customise, so when the trial period expired, I didn't bother buying it.
Trying Creator 2010 was a gamble - the reviews were mostly OK, but there were some criticisms, so I was thinking I was taking a big gamble buying it straight off. However, the more I've used it, the happier I've become.

It hasn't all been plain sailing; for some reason I can't get sound on my videos if I choose "Best quality", but the "Better quality" (which doesn't use Roxio's encoding) works OK. It took me ages to get the hang of customising the menus so the buttons would actually highlight properly. Saved projects are sometimes invisible, and I'd ripped my 'final' DVD only to find there was no sound for the last video - somehow the soundtrack had become toggled off.

I've yet to wean myself off using Picasa to edit and sort the initial photos and videos, but it looks like it's safe to drop Camtasia for turning slideshows into videos. While Camtasia has a very simple interface, and is very intuitive, it's frightfully slow, doesn't like more'n about 100 pictures / 10 minutes of video, and EVERY transition has to be configured individually!

You'll no doubt be hearing more from me - hopefully just questions and comments - as I've still got photos to process from London, Los Angeles, San Francisco (2 visits), Adelaide and various parts of New Zealand. We're also off to Europe again in a few months, so there'll be lots more to do!

- Ian in EnZed.

This post has been edited by vifferman: 08 November 2009 - 06:04 PM

[myguggi]

Hi, All!

I've been using Creator 2010 for about a week now, and starting to get the hang of it. I had around 4,500 photos and movies from our first trip to Europe in August/September 2008, and my wife was getting pretty grumbly about how long it was taking me to get them onto disks. After initially using Nero and giving up, then trying a mixture of Picasa, Camtasia Studio, WinDVD and some other products, I tried Corel Digital Studio, just for the video mastering and creation of DVDs, but it was annoyingly inflexible and difficult to customise, so when the trial period expired, I didn't bother buying it.
Trying Creator 2010 was a gamble - the reviews were mostly OK, but there were some criticisms, so I was thinking I was taking a big gamble buying it straight off. However, the more I've used it, the happier I've become.

It hasn't all been plain sailing; for some reason I can't get sound on my videos if I choose "Best quality", but the "Better quality" (which doesn't use Roxio's encoding) works OK. It took me ages to get the hang of customising the menus so the buttons would actually highlight properly. Saved projects are sometimes invisible, and I'd ripped my 'final' DVD only to find there was no sound for the last video - somehow the soundtrack had become toggled off.

I've yet to wean myself off using Picasa to edit and sort the initial photos and videos, but it looks like it's safe to drop Camtasia for turning slideshows into videos. While Camtasia has a very simple interface, and is very intuitive, it's frightfully slow, doesn't like more'n about 100 pictures / 10 minutes of video, and EVERY transition has to be configured individually!

You'll no doubt be hearing more from me - hopefully just questions and comments - as I've still got photos to process from London, Los Angeles, San Francisco (2 visits), Adelaide and various parts of New Zealand. We're also off to Europe again in a few months, so there'll be lots more to do!

- Ian in EnZed.

A couple of things I don't understand in your post.

What does this mean: 'if I choose "Best quality", but the "Better quality" (which doesn't use Roxio's encoding)'? myDVD does not have an option for "best" or "better quality", that only occurs in Videowave if you Export your project to a video file.


What do you mean by "Saved projects are sometimes invisible"?

Do your DVDs play properly in your PC or DVD player?

This post has been edited by myguggi: 08 November 2009 - 09:05 PM

[vifferman]

What does this mean: 'if I choose "Best quality", but the "Better quality" (which doesn't use Roxio's encoding)'? myDVD does not have an option for "best" or "better quality", that only occurs in Videowave if you Export your project to a video file.

Oh yes - you're right; it's in Videowave, not MyDVD (but I got there via MyDVD).

What do you mean by "Saved projects are sometimes invisible"?

The first few projects I saved didn't show up when I selected the "Open Project" option from the menu. This hasn't been a problem since - I've either found them, or gone the other way and double-clicked them from inside the folder to open them in the appropriate Roxio application.

Do your DVDs play properly in your PC or DVD player?

Yes, the ones without Roxio sound do, but on those where the sound didn't work, I didn't bother checking - just changed the option.
I suspect that those ones may work if I then write them to disk first. I should also check in Videowave that the background soundtrack option button isn't red (off) as I had that happen to one video, without me knowing. It wasn't until I played the disk that I found out, then had to rewrite the whole disk again after setting the option back to 'On'.
BTW - I tried switching the "Use hardware" to "Use software" and it made no difference to whether there was sound or not.


I finalised a video disk last night, and decided to try out some disk labels I bought yesterday. I was thrilled to see I didn't need the software that came with the labels, as not only did Roxio have a very good label printing utility, but it also had the correct template for the media I was using!

The only problem is the more I use Roxio, the more cool features I discover, and I'm tempted to go back and redo the first two video disks I produced using other software so I can incorporate some of the features and make the set look consistent.

This post has been edited by vifferman: 09 November 2009 - 04:26 PM

[Jim_Hardin]

Oh yes - you're right; it's in Videowave, not MyDVD (but I got there via MyDVD).


The first few projects I saved didn't show up when I selected the "Open Project" option from the menu. This hasn't been a problem since - I've either found them, or gone the other way and double-clicked them from inside the folder to open them in the appropriate Roxio application.


Yes, the ones without Roxio sound do, but on those where the sound didn't work, I didn't bother checking - just changed the option.
I suspect that those ones may work if I then write them to disk first. I should also check in Videowave that the background soundtrack option button isn't red (off) as I had that happen to one video, without me knowing. It wasn't until I played the disk that I found out, then had to rewrite the whole disk again after setting the option back to 'On'.


I finalised a video disk last night, and decided to try out some disk labels I bought yesterday. I was thrilled to see I didn't need the software that came with the labels, as not only did Roxio have a very good label printing utility, but it also had the correct template for the media I was using!

The only problem is the more I use Roxio, the more cool features I discover, and I'm tempted to go back and redo the first two video disks I produced using other software so I can incorporate some of the features and make the set look consistent.

Some of your statements are still troubling… Your method of editing and perhaps outputting is a pretty poor way to get things done. It will bite you.

You might want to browse through Here posting.

[vifferman]

Some of your statements are still troubling… Your method of editing and perhaps outputting is a pretty poor way to get things done. It will bite you.

You might want to browse through Here posting.

Don't worry - it just sounds like I'm doing things in a random and "troubling" way.
I think that apart from when I was just starting off, I've basically done what you suggested. It took me a while to find out which applications in Roxio to use, but the majority of my time I've been using VideoWave and MyDVD, as in your link.
The trouble was, by necessity I had to start with a mixture of sources for my DVDs: I had some videos of slideshows that were ready to burn, some slideshows that were almost complete, and some photos that had yet to be made into slideshows. These needed to all be bundled together on one disk. Add to that the fact that for me Roxio was new, somewhat confusing (and a little unintuitive in places), and untested, so I needed to make sure it was going to do what I wanted before relinquishing my dependence on my other tools.

Previously, my workflow was:

• Edit and sort photos and video clips in Picasa.
• Export Picasa folder to HTML
• Run a VB utility to resort the photos
• Import the sorted photos/videos into Camtasia, add a backing track and title frames and turn it all into a video
• Take the video and burn to disc (used Nero first, then IntervideoWinDVD, then Corel).

It looks like with Roxio I can finally set up some templates, and use Roxio to do the whole thing (although I've yet to verify that Roxio handles photo editing as well as Picasa does).

[Jim_Hardin]

I will sleep better for that