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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