Help with Photostory 3

Can anyone give me a little help with Microsoft Photostory 3? I am the final stage and when I burn the VCD, it looks terrible on the tv screen during playback. ALl the pictures are waaaay stretched out, what am I doing wrong? I am using Nero 6 to convert to VCD and burn.. DO I need to resize the photos I have spent 2 days playing with it and am frustrated.. Any help is greatly appreciated...

This is just a SWAG, but the problem sounds familiar.

When you select pictures for a slide show they are normally in landscape mode and they typically have an aspect ratio of 4:3. This is becaue most digital cameras have most of their available sizes in that ratio (e.g., 1600 x 1200, 1024 x 768, 800 x 600, etc.).

So, when your slide show is created using VCD, the video images sent to the TV are expecting the TV set to have the same aspect ratio of 4:3. However, most of the DVD players, which play either the VCD's or the Movie DVD files are designed for the new 16:9 aspect ratio of HDTV.

However, my DVD player has a switch that allow me to play everything in either format, 4:3 or 16:9. If you look around on your DVD player you may find a control or button or menu selection that changes the format between 4:3 and 16:9. Set it to the 4:3 mode.

On my player that button is labeled "Wide", and when you press it, the aspect ratio toggles between the two modes.

One thing that might help is cropping your photos to a 16:9 ratio and then using a DVD profile to maintain this ratio. Profiles for DVD can be downloaded from papajohn.org -- this is not my web site but I know PapaJohn his profiles work great.

Hope that helps.

Hi there,
Beleive in photo story, you have an option to choose what screen resolution you want. The software do warn you with each selection, what type of system you must have. I do choose the average resolution as most of my customer do not have high end systems.

The file will be slow to open and the timing will not be right if your system cannot match the requirement needed for the specific resolution.

Regards
Bama

most modern DVD players (and TV's?) usually have (in the menu) where you can change the size of the pic from wide screen to full screen to 16x?? letterbox.. id suggest trying that on playback!
-zacker-

If memory serves there's an option to "Leave black borders" (or something like that), which displays vertically formatted shots full height with black space to each side. I haven't used PS3 for a while but I vaugely remember having my photos stretched or cropped (not sure which) when I opted to remove the black borders.

It's a great app for the price (free).

(edit) The option is to "Remove black borders" and it crops the photo to horizontal format. This probably isn't your problem.