I received a request from a reader named Mary concerning Boinx FotoMagico, reviewed recently:
https://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=2537
Peter Baumgartner, FotoMagico’s developer, personally answered Mary’s message. Below is what PETER wrote to MARY, with his text interspersed into hers.
Subject: Re: Fotomagico Guru PLEASE HELP!
PETER — Hi Mary,
PETER — John just contacted me with your plea for help. So I’ll try to answer your questions.
MARY — I just read your review of Fotomagico. I am a graphic designer and have been using the program (v 1.2.3) for a while now and encounter a lot of glitches when it comes to music. I can set up my slideshow perfectly, using music from my itunes library but when I export it as a Quicktime movie and bring it into iDVD the file size exceeds the maximum burn size and it won’t fit on a DVD. I am thoroughly frustrated and am getting no response from the company. I have experimented and deleted the music from my show and the file size is just fine. It has to have something to …
PETER — Version 1.2.3 is fairly old and concerning export quite a bit of progress was made since then. Please try the newest version 1.8.1, which should fix the problem you mentioned further down.
PETER — FotoMagico creates an intermediate QuickTime movie file, which is then passed off to iDVD as input data. It’s possible that this intermediate movie file is quite large, as we want to preserve as much image quallity as possible. iDVD will recompress and encode this movie into DVD compliant data (called MPEG-2). However, it’s possible that the slideshow is still too large after this recompression to fit onto a single layer DVD. In this case, I suggest you either burn it onto a double layer DVD, or you break up the slideshow into multiple segments, and burn those onto single layer DVDs.
PETER — I will continue researching so that future versions of FotoMagico will hopefully yield smaller export file sizes without sacrificing image quality.
MARY — … do with the music. I have made shows in the past but usually have had some sort of music issue. Is it a problem with using music I downloaded vs. off a CD? I’m at my witt’s end!!! I can’t find anyone else out there that has mentioned this issue so perhaps I am exporting it wrong?
PETER — If by downloaded you mean songs that were bought on the iTunes Music store, unfortunately you cannot use these for slideshows that you intend to export to QuickTime or burn on DVDs. The copy protections in these songs prohibits this and there’s is nothing we can do about this. Any songs without DRM protection (like those you ripped from CDs) can be used without any restrictions.
[Note from Nemo — Simply burn your purchased iTunes onto CD, then convert them into MP3 using iTunes, and they will be available to FotoMagico. If you don’t know how to do this, email me for instructions.]
MARY — Version 1.2.3 does not really have any exporting options, though. I did just download the latest version (1.8) but when I make a slideshow and export it, I get an error message that the video portion is wrong!
PETER — Version 1.8 uses a QuickTime codec that is not installed by default, but comes with either iLife 06 or Final Cut Pro (and other Pro apps). Is it possible that you have neither iLife 06 nor Apple Pro Apps installed on your Macintosh? Version 1.8.1 fixes this problem. You should no longer get the “video portion” error message. Please again try with 1.8.1.
PETER — Hope I could help…
Best regards,
Peter Baumgartner
Boinx Software
support@boinx.com
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