Digital Workshop

I am having a great deal of trouble trying to get video to work in my publications. I have created a publication in Opus 5.5, this works fine. However, when I try to publish, or run the .imp file on my laptop machine the video simply doesn't play.

The desktop machine is is a dual core Athlon with 1gb Ram with a GeForce 6600GT video card. The laptop is a Pentium 4 3Ghz processor with 1Gb Ram.

The video is approx 21Mb in .mpg format. I derived the video from a stock video using Nero 7 to produce the edited file. The video file plays fine on both computers. However, I do notice that when I look at the imp file on the laptop the video does not show in the edit page (just the rectangle palce marker) I tried to reimport the video on the laptop.

I am new to this program so I assumed that when it said I could import a video then that is what it would do. It seems that things are not that simple! Do I need to import some codecs or similar?

I am still unable to play video on my laptop machine.

I can import video OK on the desktop machine but nothing will play on the laptop machine. I have tried both .mpg and .mov files with similar results (I used very short videos to test the system).

I have DirectX 9.0+ on the laptop.

I believe there's a sample MPEG file within a sub directory of OPUS. Find it, then use that as your sample Video Object. I'll bet it works fine.

While many files can have "MPG" as their extension, they aren't all the same. Some maybe MPEG-2, which require special DVD software to play. Others use unique CODEX which may not work on your computer.

I've built hundreds of Video Objects using OPUS. It works. If you are making your own MPG files, take a look at what output format you are using. I've always used Pinnacle's Studio 9 Plus, and have NEVER had a problem.

I tried downloading yor publication, but it was missing resources.
So I just did a quick trial with a 25Mb mpg and it worked without any problems on my laptop. It started running withing a couple of seconds. I know this doesn't help you much, but it shows that Opus can do it.
I have a 2.2Ghz laption Pentium 4, 1Gb ram and only about 32Mb of video memory. Try publishing to an exe file with the video embedded and I will try that.

I'm using OP ver2x.

I'd like to reiterate what Fred says.

I've created MPEG1 files using TMPGEnc a simple and NOW a very GUI-friendly freeware solution to producing very fine mpeg1 files. Played ion a TV I'm hard pressed to see the difference between mpeg1 and mpeg2. I use Sony Vegas for my corporate DVD rendering and Sony DVDA4 for my authoring.

After a little hair pulling I used the "Video" template that provides the video control bar, and it works - works well.

G

Thanks Guys

What I have now done is to import the videos into Nero7 Movie 4 and then trim them a bit and then export as an MPEG-2. For ease I chose a VCD template and they now play beautifully. Also, as a bonus the file are about 30% smaller.

The compressed files seem much smoother than the originals and there is no noticeable loss in quality. I am not sure what the original files were, they had an .mpg filename however, Nero was able to cope with them so I am much relieved.

Thanks again for your help

Grazie,

Where did you find the video template?

Thanks, Linda

Click on Page Templates in the Organiser, Linda.

Regards

Ah, thanks.

When Grazie said "Video Control Bar" I was thinking of the sliding bar (like media player) that used to be around. I spent months on and off trying to perfect that, but gave up in the end.

I was just hoping for an improved version!

Thanks, Linda

Here's a zip file of a video template I downloaded some time ago, Linda. It was easy to modify to suit my needs, and looks professional. See what you think.

Regards

Roger

Roger:
Your player does a nice job of reversing video. This is pretty close to what I need for my simulators. Any way to get reverse playback with a mouse over trigger instead of a click and drag?

Dave

Dave,

I'm attaching something for you to look at. Maybe I'm not understanding what you want to do, but take a look and see if it's sort of what you were wanting to do. You'll have to change the video to something you have so you can test it because the video I was using was too big to send.

bwpatric:
You may well be a genius. It appears to do what I need. I attempted to reconstruct it on my controls and was partially successful, but Opus locked up.

The way I need it to work is a three button column, Top button=FWD, middle button=PAUSE Bottom button=REVERSE.

As I have six controls that will all be doing that to differenct clips (UP/PAUSE/DOWN, CLAMP/PAUSE/UNCLAMP, etc) I'll have to figure out how to handle mouse exits from the TOP/BOTTOM buttons, but a simple reset of the video would be fine if no more elegant method presents itself.

Attached is the imp file if it will help to see what I am talking about.

Regards,
Dave

I have video running ok within an Opus Creator publication, but compared to viewing the avi file in Media Player alone, the quality seems to be reduced when I preview the page.

Is there further compression built into Opus? I am using the standard video page template at this stage for 4:3 video - 640 x 480. I also want to embed Camtasia generated files at 800 x 600. And want to keep all my video embedded within the page.

(Edit after further experiments; I discovered that using the "on Top" setting instead of the Chroma Key keeps my Camtasia content looking the same as the original and less "grey". So not sure why that should be??)

However, having sorted that, I would still appreciate any ideas on codecs/compression values etc that work well for content that will only be run from a computer?

Thanks
Peter

I downloaded and tried the vidscroll imp file - but it doesn't play the video in reverse or even allow me to scrub the video using the blob if I move it it just goes back to its original position of play... And the forward seek and reverse seek buttons do nothing other than pause the video. I'm using AVI as the video type - should this make a difference?

The other imp testvid does a great job of reversing the video - Hopefully this will be easy to attach the actions to a button - rather than a mouseover on the object and it would still work?

I want to load several videos each chosen by a button press and I need them to be seekable too... I think its probably a case of using a variable for the video and each button sets the variable to the name of the file it should load - am I correct?