AV News 200- May 2015
It achieved a highly commended, but I have binned it. The new V6, and beyond, will include narration in the two quiet spots. Watch this space!
I found the ' 5 to 8 ' competition to be easy to enter, with their excellent online submission and payment approach. The very detailed feedback from the judge, Malcolm Imhoff, was for me, the icing on the cake. His feedback on ' Scotland ' and ' Iceland ' were spot on and I accept them completely. I look forward to viewing all the shows and then comparing them with the judge ' s feedback. I am sure that I will learn a lot from this experience.
As the NIPA Secretary, I will encourage our camera club members to enter this competition next year. For many, creating a slideshow without narration is the first step into the world of Audio Visual. The next steps are to either; add narration and build a sense of story, or to create a work of fine art- in a photo harmony sequence.
Malcolm Imhoff FRPS FACI( M)
I ' ve just been sent a bundle of AVs to judge. They are all between 9Mb and 65Mb in size, except for one which is over five hundred megabytes, and it ' s only just over three minutes long! This would struggle to play on a lot of computers, and it ' s pretty obvious that this massive file size is because( a) the pictures have not been resized for projection, and( b) the soundtrack is an uncompressed WAV file.
Does it play on any of my machines? No. Is it because it ' s too big? No. It ' s because it ' s a Wings production. The whole point of creating an executable file for our AVs is so that they can be sent anywhere and played on any computer. Why don ' t the folks at Stumpfl realise this? I ' ve lost count of the number of times I ' ve tried to play a Wings AV and received the error message‘ System Error- The program can ' t start because‘ d3dx9 _ 41. dll’( or similar) is missing from your computer.’ I have‘ d3dx9 _ 40’,‘ d3dx9 _ 42’,‘ d3dx9 _ 43’,‘ d3dx10 _ 43’,‘ d3dx11 _ 43’, and dozens of others, but without that specific DirectX file all you get is a blank screen. It appears that every version of Wings requires a new‘ dll’ file and they are never backward compatible.
What can you do? I would caution against searching on the internet for a free download as some of these carry the risk of viruses. So, if you use Wings, you need to send the appropriate library file(*. dll) to the organisers with your AV, and tell the recipients where to put it, usually in the Windows \ System32 folder and / or the Windows \ SysWOW64 folder on a 64bit system.
The other annoying thing about many Wings presentations is that you sit for ages staring at a blank screen before working out you have to hit the space bar to make it start. The same happens at the end where you have to hit ESC to exit.
As long as the. dll file is in the same Folder as the sequence then it should work. Eds
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