Jump to content

BLoranger

Members
  • Posts

    1
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by BLoranger

  1. Add one more disappointed pre-sale customer. Using the free version V2.21 of PhotoStage on August 15, 2013, I burned a wedding slideshow to DVD. I used photos shot in high definition with a Sony DSC-HX200V camera. The original photo sizes were all 5 megabytes or larger. There were lots of pixels available for a good, high-resolution slide show presentation. I expected I would get crystal-clear, highly detailed results from PhotoStage. I tested the built-in recorder function by narrating a couple of the photos. I didn't see an input volume-level control nor a visual live volume indicator available in the software. I played the DVD on a fairly new Sony DVD/Blu-Ray player, attached to a flat-screen high definition (1080p) TV. In addition to the narration volume being loud enough to wake the dead, the visual quality and performance of the Photostage slideshow was simply awful. The presentation was choppy; and on occasion, it hung up then resumed later. The specified duration lengths for certain photos were ignored. And worse than anything else, the images on the TV screen were so grainy that one would think they were originally shot with a two-dollar camera. I went back and did the same slideshow (same photos) with my Camtasia Studio software. Camtasia is harder to use, and it takes longer to produce a slideshow. Camtasia isn't built for that primary purpose. But, when the finished Camtasia DVD was played back on the same equipment, it was spectacular, with full 1080p high definition detail and properly controlled sound volume. Camtasia's built-in recorder is professional, with all sorts of control available to the user. The Camtasia version was exactly what I wanted for mailing out DVDs to family and friends. It appears to me that the old saying, 'You get what you pay for' applies here. And a revealing point about all this, is that I'm not the only person experiencing this disappointment here. Yet, there are no encouraging answers being posted by NCH Software staff to help us out, or even acknowledge this is a problem is more than a 'bug'. I did see where and admin on this forum says these issues were resolved in version: V2.21. That's odd. I did this test on V2.21. I won't be spending money on the PhotoStage PRO version, if this forum is an indication of the response one can expect from NCH staff on this serious flaw in the software. It makes the software unusable for serious photo projects. If it's only a 'bug' as it is being represented, this is two months later, and no fix has been issued. As a former developer of medical practice management software, my crew would have been replaced if we hadn't fixed a 'bug' in two months' time. Serious design flaws never made it out the door due to extensive testing done by a dedicated QA team independent of the developers (our workplace misery-makers). To me, it looks like a design flaw -- not simply a 'bug'. I'll monitor this forum from time to time, to see if a new, really fixed, version is out before the holiday picture-taking season is upon us.
×
×
  • Create New...