Video issues re color, size, placement and quality

Hello.

In the lab that I'm working in, we're showing a series of videos through DirectRT to our subjects and we're running into all sorts of weird glitches.

All our videos are edited to be shown in black and white for 80 seconds. All videos are in .wmv format. In running the input files, the first video would show normally, in black and white, full screen, which is exactly what we intended it to be. Then after showing instructions/script on the next screen, and then showing the next video, the second video would turn up looking green and the ratio is shrunk so the location of the video is in the upper left corner instead of filling up the entire screen, looking green. When we quit the trial and run the same input file again with the videos, the second time around, it would be that of the green screen and shrunk display ratio shown first, and sometimes consistent for all videos. There are times when after playing one video normally, the second video would play, but at the smaller ratio, with an image from the first video still displaying in the background (at where the first video ended. The second video overlapped) at full screen. This all happens randomly when we run the input file. So its sometimes starts normal, then glitches, or its the glitches throughout.

Also the quality of the videos, is there any way to improve them in DirectRT? They all look perfect when we play them in Windows Media Player but in DirectRT, the quality looked bad and it made some parts of our video (such as having the shadow of the stimuli in our video exaggerated and enlarged than it suppose to be) look distracting to our subjects.

We can't start gathering any data or any clean data until we get the this weird glitch fixed. Can someone please help us?

What version of Windows and DirectRT are you using? Also, have you tried this on multiple machines or different screen resolutions (via options in your dtyle (.drt file)? And have you checked out the use of a [I]colour.txt[/I] file in your experiment folder to ensure that your session is run in 24 or 32 bit colour? These aren't solutions necessarily but just getting at possible factors involved.

[I][edited by moderator][/I]

The computer that runs DirectRT uses Windows XP Professional and the version of DirectRT we're using is version 2008.1.0.11.

We tried the suggestion of making the colour.txt file and specifying the color bits, but instead of fixing the glitches, it affected the text files we have to display the instructions before presenting the videos. The videos still appears green with a shrunken ratio and the display of the instructions has been altered by the colour.txt file. The display of the instructions went back to normal after i deleted the colour.txt file but the glitches are still there, with the file or not.

We do not have the .drt files in our folders either.

As for trying on another machine, we are waiting on trying to run the same DirectRT session on another computer as you have suggested that we do. In the meantime, what can we do?

Did you get the code yet from sales? You should have a .drt file in the same folder as your input file. Otherwise, DirectRT will simply use the default style (styles.drt) located in the main DirectRT folder. Try making a copy of that default styles file and copy it into your experiment folder. Then play around with the screen resolutions under the display settings when you click [I]Options[/I] in your new style file.