I'm still using the trial version of AW4 - deciding whether to buy (I already own DVD Author 1.6 which does nearly all I need except the slideshow editor).

In the slideshow editor, using "Local transition and resize" on a picture, you can drag to select a red rectangle. I was execting it to zoom in to the selected area, but all it does is vaguely zoom in a little bit roughly towards where I selected. Am I expecting too much or is this broken?

AW4 seems to be a much more capable and better user interface than Instant show - which seems a bit strange (eg no proper subtitle feature and unable to control video encoding in Instant Show)

SUGGESTIONS TO MAKE AW4 THE BEST SLIDESHOW SOFTWARE AVAILABLE:
- More than one sound file per channel per slideshow track
- Read image EXIF data for subtitles
- Easier subtitle editing for slideshows - it's hard work manually selecting the start and end point for each picture's subtitle, and a nightmare if you re-order your images
- Increase the maximum image count per title (why only 200?)
- Get the zooming working properly for Ken Burns effects.

WHAT I LIKE ABOUT AW4
- True subtitles
- Able to control video encoding. When you don't use zoom or transitions you only need the minimum bitrate of 1520 - letting you add thousands of images (most slideshow software will only give you a two hour slideshow on a 4.7GB DVD).
- Dolby Digital
- Good user interface
- No useless gimmicks

I've now bought the full version of TAW4 and because I've been so impressed I'm going to update my earlier message.

Authoring Works 4 is the most capable slideshow software I've ever tried. Sure some others do "Ken Burns" effects or read EXIF data, but no others come close for ease of use, the subtitles and the ability to add many thousands of photos to one DVD. Subtitle editing - although a bit basic - does have enough functionality to do whatever you want. For example - to insert some slides you can shift the start time of all subsequent photos. You can also export you subtitles to a text file where if necessary you can cut and paste in entries from other subtitle stream if you need to combine to slideshows and subtitle streams. Say you want to combine slideshows A & B. Shift the start time of all the slideshow B subtitles to the time Slideshow A finishes. Export the subtitle files and cut and paste the entries into the slideshow A subtitle files. Works fine.

The 200 limit for maximum number of images I commented on earlier is no problem either. AW4 will split a large slideshow into a number of 200 photo chapters that can be played as if they were all one slideshow. In fact it's probably best to add ALL your slideshows into one Title - that way you can have one menu screen to turn subtitles on or off for all your slideshows and your DVD "Menu" button responds as expected (if you add clips as separate Titles, strictly speaking you need to press the "Top Menu" button on your player - if you have one (many don't).

My only complaints are

1)Only being able to add one audio track (although outside of AW4 you can of course edit multiple tracks together into one WAV or MP3 file first).

2)Frequent "Invalid Sample Format" errors - which 4.0.9.37 was supposed to fix but hasn't. It doesn't seem to like images with large numbers of pixcels. I found anything above 8000 x 6000 or so WILL fail and many 7000 x 5000 images will occassionally cause it to fail (if a specific image failed EVERY time it would actually be easier to locate and reduce the resolution of the offending images, however it's just flakey). OK these images sound unusually large, but are quite normal if you are scanning large format negatives at 3000 DPI.

3) Being able to automatically create subtitles from EXIF image descriptions and filenames would save a lot of time. I find adding the image description to one subtitle and the filename to the other subtitle is quite a useful thing to do - but sadly I you have to manually do this one photo at a time.

What I love:

1) One of the best and well-thought out interfaces I have had the pleasure to use. Well done!

2) Reducing the bit rate to the minimum of 1520 still produces PERFECT slideshows (surprisingly even if transitions are used). This allows you to add slideshows with thousands of photos to one DVD.

3) Great because it's ready for High Definition using Blu Ray. Now if only you could buy writeable Blu Rays at sensible prices. I don't really fancy making coasters costing 20 pounds each!

4) There is actually lots of well thought-out functionality not mentioned in the sales blurb. For example being able to add or remove chapter marks, fade in or out music, loop music, set defaults for which subtitle or no subtitles to show by default, soom in your menu thumbnails etc etc.

Dear Community, Develeopers,

I use the latest TMPGEnc to convert DV videos to MPEG-2, but it seems for me that TMPGEnc generates a nonstandard stream (according to MPEGValidator 1.4). Being nonstandard caused by field order (Bottom field first) that is standard at DV. This means a problem when importing these clips into video editors like Adobe Premiere CS2. TMPGEnc only offers the setting of field order of input videos. Could you implement a feature enabling users to swap fields or change OUTPUT field order separately from INPUT field order?

Thanks
str4ngS

You can't just swap/change the field order of DV. You have to shift all the fields up a line and reverse them. The trouble with DV its not professional. Its consumer. Hence it has a different field order to every other professional pal format.

the simple answer is don't shoot on dv.

I noticesd this about TMPG 4 (4.7.4.299 jan11th2010 build -latest so far)
The quicktime options(settings) are really disapointing.. We own a Quicktime Pro license on this computer and TMPG4 does not even pickup that I have QTpro. .so the QT render functions are super limited to what I can do-- I was hoping TMPG4 would let me batch out qt movies better than doing every movie individually thru QTpro..but TMPG4 definatly is not worth using for QT (ex: H264 QT output render only lets me select "quality"- I did a test TMPG4 vs QTpro render and both set to best the QTpro(H264 all options set to auto and quality to best) movie rendered smaller file size and better video quality-TMPG4 movie was more washed out- also the same frame on both videos TMPG had somehow lost a frame it was off by 1 frame in the rendered movie 1280x720 59.94fps(and even in cut-edit room the same frame was not same frame as viewed thru qt player-acctually off by 2 frames in cut-edit room). The TMPG4 qt movie: 71mb the QTpro rendered movie: 52mb thats a BIG difference if the settings were set IDENTICALY!
It acctualy will pay off to take extra time and render each movie seperatly thru QTpro than to batch them at once in TMPG4.. a shame since i like tmpg and for other formats seems to be worth using..

RENDERED from a original file that is 17mb 1280x720 59.94fps .MP4(extention)

PLEASE FIX QT bugginess in TMPG4.. so that:
1)the tmpg4 BEST options render what QTpro Best options render to
2)if one owns qtpro it will detect it and there will be more options for rendering
3)set so that frame # in source qt file is the same in cut-edit room in TMPG4 (currently off by 2 frames ex: fram420 is 418 in cut-edit room)

i second the motion.
QT formats like h.264 are the de-facto standard delivery format nowadays, i used to use TMPGEnc for all my video conversions but haven't touched it in a year because of its super lame use of QT. i simply cannot deliver the quality i need with the limited options available.

Why not use the MPEG-4 AVC output profile for H.264 encoding? Unless you absolutely have to have the .mov extension...

I've noticed that nVidia has released a new version of their drivers (i.e. 196.21) and was wandering if anyone knows if the compatibility problems the latest update from TMPG Xpress have been fixed. I'm referring here to the problem with using CUDA capability, which causes the Xpress to crash if not disabled or use an older (pre-CUDA 3.0) nVidia drivers.

I tested the new nVidia drivers and can confirm that they work TMPGEnc Xpress now. Thanks to Pegasys for advising us (NOT!). What a lousy customer service they have. I know it wasn't (probably ) their fault, but at least they should have an audacity to tell us it's been fixed.

I get this error when I try to open an AVI file but when I open a DVD everything is OK.

Can anyone help?

Do you have the right codec installed? Use GSpot to find the right codec and make sure you have it.

i had this, and i had to unistall, clean the system and then install newer packs of codecs (re dowenload them) and then try.

i believe i also had to for soem reason encode in a different format.

but sayign this the recent verison do seem to act odd with some files for no reason.

i edited a project which i hadnt a single issue with and then suddenly it didnt wnat to know, and when i woudl go to edit the d2v file it came up with an error that according to google is an issue that arisen back in v3 days.

I want to archive my PAL DV tapes to a near lossless format (I can't just keep DV as my mediaplayer device (WD TV HD) doesn't support AVI DV files).

After some testing, I quickly gave up with formats like MPEG4 or VC1, because of imperfect interlacing support (I want to keep interlacing as deinterlacing would dramatically change the perceived quality of the video)

Since I have no size limits, and my goal is to achieve "near lossless" encoding, I tried converting to Mpeg-2 using the following parameters:

VBR 100%
DC Component precision: 10 bit
Motion search precision: High
GOP: I, P pictures only
Low-pass filter on color channels: disabled

all other settings are left to their defaults.

(Source: PAL DV interlaced 4:3)

Problem: in some scenes with lots of "difficulties" (many small details, like small leaves, etc.) the resulting output is disappointing compared to the source: there is quite some mosquito noise around sharp edges, blocky color patches and other artifacts in the "busy scenes"; note that the camcorder used is a reputable DV SD one, producing very detailed images and known for very high sharpness for SD resolution (SONY TRV900). I was hoping that going from 25 Mbps DV to 15 Mbps mpeg-2 would be nearly lossless, the decrease in total bitrate being "absorbed" by the IP encoding scheme; obviously it is NOT the case.

Question: to achieve the goal (best visual quality & essentially no constraints, except bitrate limit for MP@ML = 15 Mbps) what should I change in the encoding settings ? Should I e.g. change the quantization matrix (what settings ?). Is it necessary to keep IPB GOP vs IP, despite the high bitrate ?

(Interestingly, while in other situations the TmpgEnc mpeg-2 encoder yields better results (at "DVD" bitrates: 4 to 8 Mbps) than my editing program (Avid Liquid 7.2), in this case, I get less artifacts with the latter outputting 15 Mbps mpeg-2 (IPB) than TmpgEnc using the above settings (IP).)

Thanks !

I'm trying to remove some logo's using DeLogo filter in Virtualdub MPEG2. I have a DVD in "VOB format" and i use the frame server funktion in Virtualdub MPEG2. I open the server file in TMPGEnc DVD Author 3 and follow the wizard.....

Now to the problem.

When I press Start output button, it says:

Unsupported file. (error code 0x80048003)"

Output preview is okay, subtitles and audio is appears and its running well.

Please help me how to make it works, thanks

I converted an AVI file (which has sound) and when I converted it to DVD there was no sound. The audio format is AC3. How do I get sound into my projects?

Thanks

It might be a codec problem. What codecs does the avi file use?

Has this error come up for anyone else?

I have 6 open projects currently and only one of them gives the above error when I try to open it. It worked yesterday, now it doesn't. I haven't updated anything since then - not with this program or windows or anything else.

I'm running Windows 7 and until now have had no issues.

Forget it, man. Happened twice to me with the largest project you could imagine: a lot of time on it, was really nice, almost finished. Like you, from one day to another, I couldn't open the file no more. No one has ever given an answer on this issue. Forget it, and start looking for another software, cos this will happen again to you, no matter which windows or TMPGEnc version you install...

Cheers

I am having problems validating my license, I just purchased a new license and now have two licenses on my account. I am trying to put the new license on my computer and it comes up with the old Serial and will not let me change it nor will it validate the old license. My other comp has the other license and it works so I need to get this one to the new license ? I uninstalled and reinstalled the old number is still there?

Please help.

You need to remove the license file from the application data folder.

Go to C:\Documents and Settings\(whatever your user name is)\Application Data\Pegasys Inc\TMPGEnc4XP

and then delete the .lic file.

I would really like to be able to delete or add a sub to a file that has already a sub embedded. ConvertXtoDVD is able to do that, but I don't like to work with that program, that's why I use TMPGEnc Authoring Works.

It's as simple as that. Why do I need to use another program to delete subs from mkv and/or avis?

I just want to import my video, select the subtitle and delete it to add my own.

Please, can someone reply on this?

tried to convert an avi file but it says audio part can't be opened anyone knows how to fix this problem thanks.

use nandub to demux the audio to wav.

import the video with xpress and then in its audio section import the wav and done.