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This is very strange. I looks like you project file got corrupted.

Could you please email me your .rvl file at chetan AT muvee DOT com

I'll have a look at it.

Your second problem is a little bit hard to understand.

I'll repeat it to make sure we're on the same page.

1. You are using muvee Reveal only.
2. You created a project with pictures, video and music.
3. You saved your project by clicking on 'File' >> 'Save Project'
4. You pressed the 'Play' button and you saw the proper output on the screen.
5. You saved your muvee.
6. Then you closed the application.
7. You opened the application again and you tried to load the original project.
8. The application failed to load the project.

Ok if that's the case:

1. Was your media on a portable drive that was disconnected?
2. Have you changed the location of the media?

Do let me know if I have not properly formulated your second problem.

-chetan

Hello HisPerfectViolet,

The first problem you are experiencing is easy to fix. What you are seeing is actually a feature that we have called automatic captions.

Here's how to fix it:

1. Locate the picture on your hard-drive.
2. Right-click on the image and select 'Properties'.
3. Click on the 'Details' tab
4. You will see a box named 'Comments'.
5. Delete its contents.

We added this feature because some people sometimes put comments about their images in the 'comment' tag of their image.

In your case, it looks like your camera wrongly inserted some data there.

Hi mike,

Jim's issue what that he got a "GDI Generic" message during preview. Derrick's problem is that he can preview muvees without any problems but as soon as he starts burning to DVD, he gets a crash. I take it that you have one of these the same issue.

Can you please send me an email at chetan AT muvee DOT com

and give me a brief description about where muvee reveal crashes.

The reason we're doing this by email is because I need to send you some files and some patches for you to try out.

thank you.
chetan

Hi Jim,

About the note you wrote below:

>>>>>

6. At the end of a created movie, it leaves around 10-15 seconds with no music, even though I have selected summarize to fit song length. Only one song. So you see 10-15 seconds of video at the end with no sound. This varies with the styles, but looks weird.

<<<<<<

I just had a chat with the engineer responsible for muvee construction, he told me that this is a known issue and he is currently working on it. I will update this issue or email you (should you wish to give me your email ) as soon as we start shipping an updated muvee constructor.

There are a number of reasons why you get no sound at the end of the muvee. A bunch of reasons could that, you have a lot of pictures an video and the pacing of the music you added is very low. Or is could be that you have changed the "pacing" style parameter to low with your music. The reason why the "no music" duration varies with each style is because each style is coded with a predefined music pacing.

If possible, could you give us some info about the muvee you were making. eg: what style you used. what music you added. what media (video or picture) you used. Most importantly the total length of the video (if any) added. The total length of the music file.

Anyways, whatever the reason, this is a bug and we are working on a fix right now.

Thank you for your patience Jim. Lots of other people would have been insulting us by now. :)

Hi again Jim and Derrick,

I was just reading the white paper for the 945GM chipset available here:

http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/white...

I would like you ask the two of you to try one thing for me please.

When your laptop is booting up, could you please try to access your BIOS settings. Usually this is achieved by repeatedly pressing the DEL key as soon as your PC starts up.

Once you are in the BIOS, could you try to look for an option that looks like "Onboard Video Memory Size". The wording might be different on your laptop but what we really want is try to change the Video memory allocated to your machine.

Once inside that, could you make sure that the "MAX DVMT" option has been selected. Save those settings and restart your pc and try reveal again. I was reading about DVMT and it looks that this option allows the video driver to increase the VRAM usage of an app on demand.

Now in the case where "MAX DVMT" has already been enabled, could you try the option just before it. Reason I'm saying this is because DVMT might be the reason muvee reveal is working or it might also be the reason muvee reveal is crashing. There's no way to really know.

I thank you both for your patience.

One last thing, could you also tell me how much free hard disc space you have on your C: drive (or the drive in which windows resides). Cos some time back, I couldn't save HD muvees on my machine if I was dangerously low on free hard disc space.

Hello Jim,

Thank you for your patience with reveal although its performance is nowhere near satisfactory for you. I am very grateful that you have been debugging reveal on a 945GM. The info you have given us will be very valuable in the future.

I was not aware that you had dual monitors. If you disable one of them and reveal works slightly better, this suggests a video memory/RAM issue.

Could you please do one more thing for us. Click on "Start" in windows XP and then click on "Run". Type "dxdiag.exe". A new window will appear. You will see a button at the bottom which says "Save all information". Please click on it and email it to me at chetan AT muvee DOT com

When you are done with that, could you please press the key combination:
CTRL + SHIFT + ESC

The windows task manager window will appear. Could you please click on the performance tab and give me the following details:

The Total Physical Memory
The Cached Physical Memory
The Free Physical Memory

I strongly suspect that you are low on RAM and video memory. The flickering you are experiencing while saving, the disappearing thumbnails and the limited stable saving options all point in that direction.

On a side note, yes you can save in 16:9 using reveal. It is just that H.264 does not save in 16:9. If I am correct, wmv-hd and some other formats allows you to save in that aspect ratio.

As for always starting in maximized mode, I have personally logged an issue to rectify that. Ideally reveal should remember on what screen and in what dimension to load based on the previous usage.

That 10-15 seconds of no music at the end of your muvee is strange. I would like to debug it with you if you're still willing to. But I think it's better for us to focus on the stability of reveal on your machine first.

Hi Jim,

Thank you for spending some time debugging this issue. I suspect that any software that uses openGL on your machine might potentially crash. From what you have written, it does point to a driver issue. I've been googling "gdi generic" and I came across quite a fair number of posts concerning people with driver rollbacks to gdi generic.

One post that was interesting concerned this guy who actually installed an old nvidia driver and that fixed his problem. Essentially his trouble started when he updated his drivers and then XP only detected GDI generic. So I was wondering if you could install an old intel 945GM driver to see if it fixes your problem.

The latest driver as you mentioned is 4926 released on 2/15/2008.

I searched the intel archives and found an intel945GM driver released on 12/29/2007. Could you please try to install that and see if it fixes your problem.

The link for that driver is listed below:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Filte...

Alternatively if you still have the original drivers CD that came with your laptop, you could try to install the display driver that's on that CD. If the HP people added that driver on their shipping CD, it's fair to say that that driver has been through a proper QA round. Everytime you change your drivers, do run the OpenGL Extensions Viewer to check your OpenGL version support. We are aiming for version 1.4

Also if you do have the time, could you try installing Google Earth on your pc.
( http://earth.google.com/ )

The reason I'm saying that is because that software actually uses OpenGL as well. If it does not work, then we can be pretty sure it's a general driver issue.

Jim, I'll try to dig up some more information on this issue. It's actually the first time I'm encountering this type of driver issue. Hopefully we'll get to the bottom of this soon.

Hi Jim,

First of all, I'm sorry you are having some trouble running our software on your laptop. I was just checking the OpenGL specifications for the intel 945GM chipset and it looks like muvee reveal should run on your machine.

Could you please tell us at what point do you get an openGL error. Does the software crash as soon as you launch reveal. Or does it occur when you are previewing or saving.

The most basic operation to try would be a bunch of pictures with "classic vanilla" style.

do get back to us.