Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Discuss which third party applications you use to help create your slide shows using ProShow Producer. This is not a forum to promote other slide show software programs.
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Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby mauiman » Wed Feb 16, 2011 4:43 pm

I just bought CaptionsAlivePro after hearing and seeing such wonderful uses of this avi creator. Unfortunatly after installing it on my xp sp4 machine and following all the basic instructions and pressing the Build AVI File button the results were disappointing. No avi file was created. A bmp of the last frame was created but no avi. In talking with Dave we seem to be getting stuck as to a solution. Brainstorming, has anyone had a similar problem? Everything works as advertized except no avi. ?????????????? :(

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Re: Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby gpsmikey » Wed Feb 16, 2011 5:04 pm

XP SP4???? Last I heard XP was SP3.

Couple of things come to mind - just saw a strange one in the Sony Vegas forums recently - turned out the guy had a disk partition named with a special character in it and while most software was able to handle it, QuickTime refused to load the files. You don't have something funny (it's always funnier when it is someone elses problem :twisted: ) about the destination path you are trying to save to or anything ? Have you tried using a different partition and a short clean path to see if that could be an issue ? I'm surprised Dave has not been able to solve it - usually if I find a problem, he has it fixed in short order. Another option could be you are trying to save to a directory you don't have write priv. to ? Just tossing out a couple of things I have run into in the past.

One other thought - are you sure it is not putting the .avi file somewhere else ??

mikey
You can't have too many gadgets or too much disk space !!
mikey (PSP6, Photoshop CS6, Vegas Pro 14, Acid 7, BluffTitler, Nikon D300s, D810)
Lots of PIC and Arduino microprocessor stuff too !!

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Re: Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby becky_calif » Wed Feb 16, 2011 6:43 pm

While on the subject of CAP, are there settings that would help decrease the size of the finished avi? Even with short timed avi's the file sizes are too big. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Becky

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Re: Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby SWoolford » Sun Feb 20, 2011 7:32 am

I continue to have the same issue with Dave's other product Highlighter Pro. It is very Strange. We have not come up with a solution. I would be very interested if you find the answer.

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Re: Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby Dave Fitzpatrick » Sun Feb 20, 2011 9:17 am

Mikey brought this thread to my attention, so I thought I'd get in on this. mauiman brought this to my attention and we have tried a number of tests to figure out what is going on. As of right now, none have produced an answer. It is very puzzling to be, since a failed AVI build should produce an error, but none is being raised. I made a quick mod to the program and sent it to mauiman and, sure enough, there is no AVI file in the directory where it should be located. As Mikey noted, a simply path and file name might be a worthwhile thing to try, although I think we already did this. As for write privleges, the program is writing the XXX_LastFrame.bmp file to the directory, so that doesn't seem to be a problem. The only other things I can suggest is:

(1) Make a very simple show in Producer (just a couple of slides) and output an uncompressed AVI targeted at the same directory CAP is trying to write to. If Producer can write the file into that directory...well ???? If Producer can't, then we can continue to explore mauiman's system configuration to see what is restricting these file writes.

(2) Check to see if AVI files are somehow "hidden" in the target directory

(3) Do a full system Find to see if Windows can locate the file anywhere on the HD.
Dave

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Re: Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby SWoolford » Sun Feb 20, 2011 10:35 am

Just as an FYI, Dave. I have the same problem using Highlighter Pro. I have created a slide show to AVI and it worked fine. In fact, as a work around, I use the BMP's from Highlighter Pro and they seem to work. I am at a loss as well. I love Highlighter and so I continue building my output with Producer. Please keep me in mind with whatever fix is found. Thanks Steve W.

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Re: Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby SWoolford » Sun Feb 20, 2011 10:41 am

One other note, I have the demonstrator version CaptionsAlive Pro and it works just fine on my PC. I have to wonder what kind settings could be out-of-whack?

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Re: Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby mauiman » Thu Feb 24, 2011 1:49 pm

I just wanted to say that Dave Fitzpatrick has gone way out of his way to help me solve this problem, even to the point of responding to my email while at the grocery store. Thank you Dave. We have been trying anything we can to find the culpret but with little success. It is obviously something with my computer software somewhere because it works in so many other places. We are just trying our best.
Mauiman

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Re: Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby kabeeo » Fri Feb 25, 2011 6:42 am

Dave was always great with me when I had some download problems at the beginning. I love the program. I would love more fonts too.
--Kevin
Proshow Producer
Canon 50D
Elements 10

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Re: Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby mauiman » Tue Mar 01, 2011 4:28 pm

I continue to try anything that may give me some success with CAP.

1. Started up in Safe Mode - Ran CAP, same problem no avi

2. Logged on as network administrator - Ran CAP, same problem no avi

3. Attempted to write to C: ... no avi

4. Created avi in ProShow Producer 4.5, ran CAP tried to overwrite PSP avi, Acknowledged overwrite request, .. no avi

5. Loaded CAP on old 450 Mhz Win 2000 machine. CAP WORKS ... but of course, really really slow.

What in the world would delete the avi after it is made but before it is verfied?

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Re: Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby gpsmikey » Tue Mar 01, 2011 5:20 pm

Well, this is a painful solution, but it may find out just what is going on. Check out Sysinternals (now hosted on Microsoft)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... s/bb545027
They used to have a utility called filemon if I remember correctly, but I think it is now part of diskmon. In any case, you can run that utility and then whatever else you want and it will tell you what files are opened, closed, being written to etc. Generates lots of data, but I have used it before to track down some things that nobody else could figure out what they were doing.

mikey
You can't have too many gadgets or too much disk space !!
mikey (PSP6, Photoshop CS6, Vegas Pro 14, Acid 7, BluffTitler, Nikon D300s, D810)
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Re: Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby myrthachang » Tue May 10, 2011 5:13 am

Dear Swoolford or whoever willing to clarify for me:
When Swoolford said: "I love Highlighter and so I continue building my output with Producer." What does "Continue building my output with Produce" mean? Are there 2 ways to build the AVI, one within HLP itself, and another way through Producer? How do you integrate HLP into producer so you can "build the output with Producer"?

Thanks kindly. --myrtha

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Re: Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby SWoolford » Thu May 12, 2011 11:08 am

Dear Myrthachang;

In Highlighter Pro program folder you will find the Bitmaps folder. This is where HP places its Bitmaps. Before I proceed, this works best when using a black background becuase you will need to use the Chroma option to remove it in your show. I simply copy the bitmaps in order into an empty producer slide show. I then set the time on each slide to '.1' and the transition time to 0 and the transition to 'Cut'. Then play it to see the results. It should look like your Highlighter effect with a black backgound. Then I just produce the slide show as an AVI file. Once done inport the file into your slide where you want it and chroma it out. This not the best solution but it gets me by. I am having the same issues with HP and CapAlive as the above poster.

Steve W.

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Re: Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby VidQueen » Fri May 13, 2011 5:49 am

becky_calif wrote:While on the subject of CAP, are there settings that would help decrease the size of the finished avi? Even with short timed avi's the file sizes are too big. Any suggestions would be appreciated.


Hi Becky,

I never use the AVIs as is. The file size is ridiculously large. I always convert mine to WMVs right in Producer. Just bring the full AVI into Producer, make sure you have no transitions on either side and make the slide the same length as the video file (under the Layers>Video Settings Tab, hit the "Sync Slide Time" button). Then Create>Video file and choose Custom >Windows Media. Make sure you look at all the settings there. I had to uncheck "include Audio" and change my resolution to 720 x 480. The resulting file was 700kb...and it was beautiful :D

Jennifer

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Re: Problems with CaptionsAlivePro

Postby Dave Fitzpatrick » Fri May 13, 2011 7:42 am

Jennifer, you can do that, of course, and it will result in a much smaller file size. You can also dramatically reduce the size of the AVI by converting it to a WMV file in Windows Movie Maker. You can also use DivX, xVid or any number of video compression codecs. I leave the videos at full, native, uncompressed resolution to give people that option, but there is also one other thing to consider. None of these video compression schemes are lossless. There is always some loss of image quality, no matter how small. And whatever the input source, Photodex uses a compression codec of their own in Producer to build a pxc file, or mpg2/mpg4 compression if building a DVD or ISO. These outputs from Producer will be the same size, independent of the input size of the AVI. If you input an uncompressed file, you get a compressed output that has experienced one application of image quality compression loss. If you first compress it to a WMV and then use it to build a show in Producer, the ouput image quality of you show will be that resulting from 2 generations of compression losses, but no difference in final file size. It's sort of like the reason you shouldn't resize your pictures to a smaller format before loading them into Producer.

Dave
Dave

The camera sees things the way they are. Photoshop makes them the way we'd like them to be.

http://www.mediadigitronics.com

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