Hey, everybody-
I'm hoping somebody can clear something up for me. Forgive me for the length; I don't know how to ask this question without providing all this detail. I've been making DVDs for four years; I've always gotten fantastic-quality avi's using ADVC-100, and I've used TMPGENC when I want the highest quality mpg's from it. For avi that needs to be edited, I've always used Showbiz DVD 2. The quality of the mpg isn't as good as TMPGENC, but it lets me do the cutting, pan-and-zoom, adding text and other effects. I've also often combined digital and scanned pictures (jpg and bmp) into the videos, then added music and other effects to create really nice quality stuff that's always turned out perfect DVDs. The digital pictures I've traditionally used were taken with an HP Photosmart 2.1 megapixel camera. My nightmare started when my wife bought a 7.1 megapixel Kodak EasyShare and took a batch of pictures. I transferred her jpgs to my computer and intended to combine them with some related video the same way I've done all those other times, but for some reason, ShowBiz slowed to a crawl in working with those pictures and just made a horrible mess of the output. (I suppose I should mention my computer is an HP Pavilion, 2.133 GHz processor.) For some reason, the pictures would flutter and balloon and snap back and forth and the output file was ruined. I couldn't make any sense of it. According to the filesize properties of the pictures, jpgs from her camera are only a little larger than the ones from my own (1.1 mb as opposed to 0.9), though when I'd check their attributes they were about 4 times the size (twice as high, twice as wide). When I suspected that might be what was causing the problem, I used Irfanview to batch-convert them to a quarter that size. Working with the smaller files solved most, though not nearly all, of the fluttering problems. I just kept messing with the problematic pictures (changing the pan/zoom boxes, etc.) until I finally had an mpg with no visible problems. (I know I should've just given up, but I was hellbent on making it work) I imported that mpg into ULead Movie Factory to create an .iso file (again, the same procedure I've used for years to create perfect DVDs), but it created a DVD that one of my DVD players can't play right, and the other won't even recognize as a DVD! Does this make any sense? Can the camera make that make difference? Even though the Kodak jpgs STARTED larger than my old ones, they were shrunk SMALLER than the old ones by the time of the output file. Why wouldn't they work? Is there some kind of strange digital encoding or something that could throw at least two long-working programs out of whack like this? Again, I apologize for what seems like rambling, but I have to assume the answer is somewhere in all these details. If you've got even a guess as to what the problem I might be, I'd appreciate hearing from you. Thanks- KBesq