Menu irritation in Pinnacle Studio 8

[Lyndon]

I'm using Studio 8 (with the recent patch), and am trying to make a movie with menus. The movie is 58 minutes long, and I am creating the eventual DVD contents on my hard drive rather than burning straight to DVD (one of the options offered).

The menu is simple: just a straight 24 chapters.

When I go to 'Make Movie' and create the disk contents *without* a menu, everything goes fine. Rendering seems to consist of a very slow pass (so about 3 hours for the whole film, which is what I'd expect) followed by a faster one, after which there is a pause of a few seconds before the screen says 'compiling disk', followed a while later by 'disk content created successfully'.

However, as soon as I add a menu, I run into problems. The first, slow rendering goes fine - the cursor gets to the end of the film. There it stops, and there it stays. The screen reports 'rendering, please wait' but the system has, in fact, completely frozen up.

If I remove the menu, the problem seems (largely) to disappear.

Does anyone else get this problem with Studio, and have they found a work-around?

Many thanks for any advice.

Lyndon

[burdell1]

I think I am having the same problem as you...have you found a solution yet?

[BobK]

Not much help here. I used Studio 8 for 6 months until I had enough of the program hanging up during rendering after 3-5 hours. I found a number of solutions that would work sometimes and not others.

My final solution was to buy a new capture card that captures in mpeg. I no longer use Studio for anything but VCDs and I no longer have to wait 3-6 hours to render a DVD (I use TMPGEnc DVD Author and it takes about 20 minutes.)

[Lyndon]

I think I am having the same problem as you...have you found a solution yet?

Well, I've had one slight improvement: if I change my display from its usual 1024x768 to 800x600 before rendering, it seems less likely to hang up. I've also increased my RAM to 1Gb, but have still had a few hangs (but not while rendering - usually when trying to scroll horizontally along the timeline perhaps a bit too quickly and, on many occasions, just AFTER I've closed the program!

Most of my projects are just under an hour long, and it seems to be the length that makes a hang more likely.

[Fairhope]

I've had the same problems. The only way I've been able to fix them, is to edit the video while it is in avi format.

I capture my video using the Pinnacle DC10+ and capture in avi. Studio then lets me scroll through the video, add transitions, include menus and even edit the menus with no problem - as long as the video is in avi.

I used to capture the video in avi and then convert to mpeg. When the video was in mpeg the program would hang or freeze if I tried to scroll too fast, add a transition, menus, etc. etc.

I have never tried to render a disc image and then go back to add menus. I use about 15 gigs of hard disk space using the avi method, but the final output is great - with no loss of audio sync, no hang ups, nothing.

Hope this helps.

[burdell1]

I am using DVC-150 which coverts the footage to MPEG2 right away. Is there any other way?

[Fairhope]

I'm not familiar with that type of capture card.

When you begin capturing within the Studio 8 software, you can specify to capture in avi format. It's in the settings directory.