Hi ralftaro,

As source material i mostly use JPEG's, and on a very few occasions also MPEG/AVI.

When i try to burn it, it doesn't burn at all - the write out lead never finishes, and even if i finish it manually the DVD is never compatible for any DVD player (it doesn't read/load it whatsoever) - hence i have never been able to actually put my finished work onto a DVD that plays on a DVD player.  What I've been doing the last few months is taking my finished AVI's and giving it to a friend who burns it onto DVD's via his MAC - so i know its not the AVI's but the actual burn process that is the problem.

My DVD's don't contain menus - it's simply one completed AVI file or a collection of smaller AVI files next to each other in the same movie that needs to loop over and over.  The burn process seems quite basic, but it baffles me nontheless.

Hope this helps you to help me

:-)
 

Hi again,

Thanks for further clarifying this. After your initial enquiry, I was under the impression that it was some program settings or usage related problem regarding the correct creation and encoding of movies specifically with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Now, I understand that this is basically a technical problem during the burning process in general. I think there's definitely something we can do here. If nothing else, I can at least offer a better workaround solution than the one you're using right now. So, here it goes:

I understand that you've already consulted technical support and performed some disc-burning troubleshooting. Maybe, all possibilities have already been exhausted as far as this goes. However, just to be on the safe side, here's a small burn troubleshooting list again, which I would ask you to quickly work through:

* If you're using the disc version of Movie Edit Pro 12, please make sure the available patch is installed. You can download it from the support website or directly from this URL:
download.magix.net/movie_edit_pro_12_6.5.4.4_us.exe

* Make sure your Magix burn routines are up-to-date to implement compatibility with the latest drives:
download.magix.net/patch_cdr_dll_20071109_int.exe

* Try experimenting with different types/makes of blank DVD media. Possibly your drive's manufacturer can recommend a brand. You might also find third party lists like this helpful:
www.videohelp.com/dvdmedia

* Maybe your drive's manufacturer provides a more up-to-date firmware for your burner that implements improvements and resolves problems. Just check their official website.

* Background tasks or filter drivers instated by other software might behave too intrusive and obstruct the buring process in Movie Edit Pro. The culprits would typically be related to other burning or multimedia packages. This is a little hard to pinpoint and offer advice on, as it very much depends on your system and software configuration, but you could check in the processes tab of your Task Manager and in the "Startup" tab of msconfig whether you can spot anything that looks suspicious and at least disable it when you're working in MEP or permanently uninstall it from the system. Some people have way more burning application on than they realistically need.


If none of this seems to help, this burner may just not work under MEP. In this case, it's time to sidestep the problem and just outsource the actual writing of the disc to another application. There's a way to do this and still get exactly the content you created in MEP, including the menus. All you need to know is that prior to the disc-burning process, Movie Edit Pro encodes the entire project and creates a DVD image on your hard drive. You would just have to use a data-burning application of your choice (which works properly in conjunction with your drive) and burn that DVD image directory onto a DVD blank after MEP is done encoding. So, here are the steps you would take:

1.) Load/create your project in Movie Edit Pro 12.

2.) Go to the encoding/burning stage, put together the menu and initiate the encoding/burning process, but don't insert a blank into your burner.

3.) Once the program is done encoding and starts asking for a disc, just abort the whole procedure. The DVD image directory has now been created on your hard drive under the directory specified in your MEP program settings. By default this would be something like:
C:\Program Files\MAGIX\Movie_Edit_Pro_12\My Audio Video\DiskTemp

4.) Look at that location and you will find sub directories for the projects you encoded. Rename the desired project's image directory to "VIDEO_TS" and use your preferred burning application to write this directory to a disc, just as a simple data-burning procedure. The resulting disc will be your video DVD that should play on a normal DVD player.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for the detailed answer, it is greatly appreciated.  I will definately look into it, and will get back to about what happened.  Thanks again for your prompt assistance, its really excellent.

N