PS memory/disk space bug

[Guest]

Trying to generate a 1024x786 video (288 photo's).
I get the message:
'There is not enough memory or disk space to complete this operation... yada... yada...'.

Anyone has a workaround for this bug?
(Preferably one where I don't have to break up files.)

Note: this is not a problem that is in any way related to disk space or memory shortage.
Plenty of memory and disk space (on all required disks!!) available.
Neither is it a PS install or WMP install problem.
Because when generating smaller files (< 100 photo's), everyting works fine.

 

[Guest]

John Inzer schreef:

================================
Just as an experiment...try creating the
PhotoStory with 50 of those same photos.

PS3 has an image limit of 300 and when
using motion and/or transitions...the number
may be reduced. (FWIW...PS2 had a limit
of 150 images).

50 images failed. WTF??
Ye olde reboot helped a bit.
After a reboot, I could generate a high res movie.
The one with 200+ images failed again.

I really don't understand this.
I've created PS's before with almost 300 images, a fading effect for every image ánd
background music.
And it all worked fine.
Suddenly it doesn't work anymore.

I'currently installing another PC with a clean XP Home config.
Let's see if that is going to work.

 

[Guest]

John Inzer schreef:

================================
If your source files are very high resolution
it couldn't hurt to resize them and reduce the
memory drain on your system. For example
a 3MB .jpg image from an 8 megapixel digital
camera can be 23MB when uncompressed...
multiply that by 300 and you could have
almost 7GB of files for PhotoStory to process..

If PS would work like this, I'd agree. But it doesn't, as far as I can tell (see below).
My images have already been scaled down to approx. 1MB because of widescreen formatting.

I'd say on average you need a 4 times larger footprint than the original PS file.
For example my PS testfile is 350MB. Then I'd need another 1 GB temp storage for all
intermediate files. This is based on the observation that PS generates files in a temp
folder approx. that size.

It gives the error messages when it has generated all intermediate files and starts with
phase 2. Which is, if I had to guess, building the wmv files based on the intermediate pictures.

My average wmv files with 250+ images are all something between 150MB and 200MB (as I said,
I've been generating large files before without any problems).

If rebooting improved the issue you may
need to do some routine maintenance.

Not really. This proves that PS doesn't clean up after itself correctly.

And for your other suggestions: no offence, but they are not related in any way to the
problems I'm having (or to be more precise: they shouldn't be).
(as I said before, your help and suggestions are appreciated.)

The real issue is: PS is experiencing a space problem somewhere where
a. it does not report where exactly the problem lies and
b. it should not have a problem to begin with.
(The second point being the annoying part.)

Conclusion: the cause for all the problems is in one of the Window$ updates between August
last year and today. That was the last time I have succesfully generated a 1024x768 wmv file
with 250+ images.
The fresh install with XP Home on a 3GHZ intel box, with all SP's and updates applied, had
the same problem.

Finally the good I've create a profile, based on the PC4-1024x768 one, and scaled it
down to 960x720 and reduced fps to 25 (I live in a PAL zone).
And that worked.

 

[PapaJohn]

PS3 seems to be programmatically limited to using 2 GB of memory... if you
watch your memory usage as the story is made, and it gets up close to that
level, it could be your limit. I can reach it with a single high qulity
picutre and selected motion settings...

 

[Guest]

PapaJohn schreef:

PS3 seems to be programmatically limited to using 2 GB of memory... if you
watch your memory usage as the story is made, and it gets up close to that
level, it could be your limit. I can reach it with a single high qulity
picutre and selected motion settings...

Where could one see this memory usage?
If I look at the taskmanager, PS memory usage fluctuates, but it's always less than 200MB.
Also total memory usage never seems to exceed any limit (3rd taskmanager window).


@John: I wouldn't say 'useless', just not applicable in this particular case (I'm an ICT
professional).
Your hints indeed kept me going and made me find the workaround

 

[PapaJohn]

Task Manager is what I use to look at memory usage....

 

[Guest]

Michael J. Mahon schreef:

Is it possible that the earlier effort used pictures with a
smaller file size? Larger photo files use more PS3 resources.

Not really. In fact, they were bigger.

If your zooms don't require all the resolution of an image, you
can pre-scale the image in a photo manipulation program, and by
doing so you will reduce the resource requirements of PS3 when
the smaller image is substituted for the original.

-michael

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."

Had already done that.

 

[Guest]

spam2you schreef:

Trying to generate a 1024x786 video (288 photo's).
I get the message:
'There is not enough memory or disk space to complete this operation...
yada... yada...'.

Anyone has a workaround for this bug?
(Preferably one where I don't have to break up files.)

Note: this is not a problem that is in any way related to disk space or
memory shortage. Plenty of memory and disk space (on all required
disks!!) available.
Neither is it a PS install or WMP install problem.
Because when generating smaller files (< 100 photo's), everyting works
fine.

Well, I've done some more tests and maybe I've found something.

I've created a new PS and imported all 200+ images that I want in the slideshow.
Next I update the project.xml: change all movements to manual movements.
Next I generate the wmv file, accepting all default movements.

To my surprise: this works!
Resulting in a 310MB wmv file.

The only difference between this succesfull PS file, and the one that failed before, is that
on the old situation I updated the movement for *every* photo. So none of the photo's had
movement that PS originally proposed.

In my opinion this should not make any difference.
What's the diff when I make a movement myself or when I accept the defaul movement PS proposes?
Any thoughts on this one?

 

[PapaJohn]

I think the specific choices of movements.... starting to ending
positions.... makes major differences in memory needed to save the strory.

Tight zooms of large pix need more than wide-angle zooms.

 

[Guest]

Michael J. Mahon schreef:

I had a similar experience about a year ago, and chalked it up to
flakiness...

Apparently, PS3 treats user-specified transitions (starting and ending
positions) differently than its own, or perhaps it simply fails to
recover the space used by its original "suggestions".

To respond to PapaJohn's suggestion that it had to do with requiring
more space for the manual operations (because of more use of the
original photo, for example), most of my "touch ups" were simply to
the starting and ending positions, and my changes should have netted
out to the same or less of the original photos being used.

Photo Story 3 is clearly not designed for large projects, and does
not reclaim space or encode transitions in a particularly space-
efficient way. If it did, then it would simply save the photos,
the music, and the parameters of the transitions, which would be
tiny by comparison with the photos and music.

The "idea" behind Photo Story was to use the capabilities of modern
video cards to do the pans and zooms, so very little actual computation
would be required unless encoding the result as a .wmv file. This
makes it all the more curious that its intermediate file is the
apparent limitation to story complexity.

Maybe Photo Story 4 will do a better job with large projects...

-michael

I think you're right.
It's just disappointing that the software doesn't deliver, even when you use it well within
it's limits.

One last thing though: what is this intermediate file?
The only thing I can find when PS is doing it's wmv magic, is a directory with a large
number of jpegs.

 

[Guest]

spam2you schreef:

Trying to generate a 1024x786 video (288 photo's).
I get the message:
'There is not enough memory or disk space to complete this operation...
yada... yada...'.

Anyone has a workaround for this bug?
(Preferably one where I don't have to break up files.)

Note: this is not a problem that is in any way related to disk space or
memory shortage. Plenty of memory and disk space (on all required
disks!!) available.
Neither is it a PS install or WMP install problem.
Because when generating smaller files (< 100 photo's), everyting works
fine.

So it's a memory allocation problem after all.
Discovered that PS allocates 2GB of memory (at the beginning of the 2nd stage, no music) for
even the smallest of stories, and at a random moment, will complain that it doesn't have
enough memory to generate a wmv.
Even a PS with only 25 photo's (1.5MB average size) will make the generation process crash.

I should have listened to the voice in my head a few days ago: DON'T USE PS3 OR YOU WÍLL
REGRET IT!
This software is really, really, really bad.

 

[Guest]

Michael J. Mahon schreef:

Yes, and the .wmv is apparently encoded into the same 2GB space, so its
total size comes out of the budget for the story!

This kind of storage allocation simplifies the programming to a degree,
but it imposes limits that could have been easily circumvented by a
different design.


When it bites you, it definitely hurts--especially if you have put a lot
of work into customization and are working to a deadline. ;-)

But for smaller projects, it is a simple and effective solution--and you
can almost always break a larger project up into "chunks" that will not
stress it to a breaking point.

Put another way, it's free, and worth every penny of its cost. ;-)

It is, after all, a "toy" application--a simple hack based on slide show
software created originally for WinMCE, if I'm not mistaken.

I'm using it for pursonal purposes. So no deadline here
But yes, I have spent quite a lot of time in creating 2 stories and now, when I try to build
the wmv files for DVD authoring, it does not work.
That's disappointing.

I've also discovered the actual problem: when you create a PS with, say, 50 images, and
accept all default motions, the memory footprint during the generation process is approx. 1GB.
When you manually change the motion for all images just a fraction, the memory footprint
increases to 2GB and eventually will make the generation process crash.

I know it's free. And for the average user it will do just fine.
Ease of use and quick results were the things that attracted me in the first place.

But I wouldn't mind paying $40 or so, for something that actually works.
(Which is why I have created my last Photostory and am now testing commercial software.)

 

[bordoni]

I know this topic is a little old, but mabe I can help someone like me who has spent some hours trying to make Photo Story 3 work. I had the same problem described here, and was able to solve it by using a WAV file for music, instead of a WMA. That also solved the same render problem in Windows Movie Maker.