nickles

A superb presentation. The music and visuals blended very nicely. Your management of background brightness..darkness..and graduations were very pleasing to the eye...a very nice concept. Canada is such a beautiful country...photographers dream...thanks for sharing a little bit with us. I've used PTE for several years, but only recently began to spend some time on this forum and viewing others work. I've learned much from presenters like yourself. I am just an amateur photographer...with no aspirations beyond... who enjoys using PTE as a personal presentation tool for my friends and relatives. Thanks again..

We lost our dear friend Willie a couple of weeks ago. This is a tribute to him, along with a couple of his lady friends: Dedicated to Willie

A few photos taken at Ft. Worth Botanic Gardens: Botanic Gardens Trying highly compressed .ogg ...64kbits... music format to reduce size of show...not sure I like the quality.

The quality of the photos and soundtrack is dependent on the eyes and ears of the beholder. I normally keep fairly high jpeg quality for my originals but compress significantly for uploads. I use IRFANView to batch compress jpegs. I compress uploads with a compression option of 70 to 75, but could probably compress more. Refer to the following post: Using IRFANView For MP3 soundtracks I normally use 128kbits but don't think I would go below 112kbits but if it sounds okay then use less. For my post of Childhood Sweethearts, I compressed the jpegs from my original slideshow, yielding a reduction from 34.6mb to 18.7mb (IRFANView setting of 70). I also use Paintshop Pro 8.1 and Photoshop 7. Paintshop Pro has an excellent compression wizard that let's you see the result before compression. IRFANView is free, does an excellent job, and so much simpler. Don't need special script or action. Besides compression their are a multitude of batch processing options. Hope this helps.

Don, A very well-composed slideshow.....emotional. Thankyou very much for sharing it with us.

Spike: What a wonderful slideshow. Excellent flow and Wow! what beautiful country. The music was very befitting the scenery. Was anticipating the appearance of a faerie but think I may have glimpsed one's eye. You're a very artistic photographer...use film, digital or both? My wife enjoyed it immensely also. Thanks....KEN from Texas

I often use IrfanView for bulk resizing because it's simple and does an excellent job and let's you adjust the jpg compression. It's also free here: IrfanView I gave a brief explaination of how to do it in the following thread in a different forum: DPReview Forum Just a thought...works good for me...and alot less complicated...once you figure it out.

All the slides are 1024x768. Before I uploaded, I significantly reduced the jpg quality so that the download wouldn't be quite as large. The background music is mp3 at 128kbits. Most transition smoothing lines were set at 200. Seems smooth on my PC but I'm running 1.5 ghz with a fairly fast video card. I'll test on some slower PC's. I sincerely appreciate the feedback....and am very open to any other suggestions you might have. I'm definitely no expert at this but sure have fun doing it. Thanks....KEN

Just a show for a special person. Childhood Sweethearts

Hello Igor, I've been a registered user of PTE for around 3 years and am highly appreciative of this software. I'm a member of several photography forums and often "plug" your software to other users. I like the programs flexibility. It doesn't assume I'm a total idiot as much of the new Windows software does. Of recent times, I also produce non-professional DVD productions for non PC oriented family members (I've always been the family photographer since a small child)...now I'm just an old "far..." with too much free time on my hands. I definitely use your new PTE avi capabilities too create DVD versions of your slideshows with excellent results. I will now plug another useful software package DVD-Lab at: DVDlab DVDlab is strictly DVD authoring software. Oscar, the fellow that authors this software, must be your brother as his style of software is similar to yours. Highly flexible and assumes I'm not a total dummy. One last plug before my suggestions. Over the years I've digitized my entire LP phono collection and used GoldWave audio software produced by a small company in Canada. I occasionally use it for cropping and fading background music for PTE shows. I consider it to be the best out there. It's an excellent audio editor and can be located at: GoldWave My Suggestions: 1.) Occasionally I like to set my own timing on various slides, but most often I chose to let PTE fit the entire slide show to the background music. I would like the ability to set "custom" timing on a few slides but then have PTE automatically fit the timing to the remaining "uncustomized" slides. This may be possible now and I've just not figured out how to do it. 2.) The most compatible video format for the Windows environment is MPEG-1. It would be nice to integrate an MPEG-1 movie clip within a slideshow. Of course this would require an integrated video player for the standalone PTE (exe) slideshow that is not dependent on a Windows player, much like your audio player. 3.) A pan/zoom on slides feature would be nice but I can appreciate the complication of panning a photo, selecting the pan route and pan window size. Although some of your competitors claim to have this feature, those I've tested so far "ain't no good". A simple? zoom in or out from the center of a photo would be a nice alternative. Just suggestions...I love your software...continue to keep up the excellent work...and I may be a dummy but don't try to make your software for dummies and try to second guess what I'm trying to do... Sincerely, Ken

Sorry I can't give you an answer. We've got three of the pesky critters and if I go near the computer they've all got to gather around me. Hey..I'm actually responding to advise you that me and the wife thoroughly enjoyed your slideshows..."Gotta Love Louie" and "Gotta Love Ricky, To"..we've watched them several times..excellent. I've recently made a PTE slideshow of my three critters but haven't posted. Lot's of luck with the keyboard...and continue with your photographic artistry...KEN

Walt: I experienced similar problems. Is the unsteadiness sort of like jaggie lines? It may well be ULEAD's encoder. I'm not real familiar with what they've got. The following is an excerpt of a post I made on an earlier thread: "I use DV encoders by Pinnacle, and Panasonic as well as a M-JPEG encoder made by Morgan Multimedia for producing AVI files. For making MPEG-2 or MPEG-1 files from AVI, I predominately use the Cinema Craft encoder and sometimes TMpgenc. I also have encoders that come with NERO 6, Pinnacle Studio, and Roxio that I never use. If I make a true AVI before I encode into MPEG, I get jittery slides especially along horizontal lines with all AVI encoders execpt the Morgan. By going direct from PTE Video Encoder direct to the Cinema Craft mpeg encoder, I get highly stable and clear slideshows on my TV...in fact much better than I expected. This jitter must have something to do with the still picture. If I use the Morgan M-JEG and create a true AVI (select the Codec as custom in PTE) before I encode the MPEG I get reasonablly stable non-jittery slides but not as good as going direct to Mpeg with the PTE encoder. The DV encoders are terrible for stills but excellent for normal motion movies. I consider the Tempgenc and Cinemacraft encoders as equivalent in quality but the Cinemacraft is a little over twice as fast. I haven't figured the PTE Video Encoder, must be a pure frame server." The full thread is here: Resizing for AVI? The technique dexcribed here works beautiful for me: My PTE to DVD Method The problems is it will cost about $150 US for the Cinemacraft encoder and DVD-Lab software. I run a Windows 2000 OS. Made many DVD's of home movies with it as well as PTE slideshows. I think there's limited trials available for both. I don't think the jitter problem is PTE's. I found this noise to be very sensitive to the encoding method. You may not have any choice of encoding with ULEAD?...If you have access to the TMPGEnc encoder, it may work...Hope this helps...Ken

Quickflicks: A good way too detemine if your cropping proportions for a slide is right(aspect ratio) is as follows: If your going to size your slide for making video at 702x540 (not quite 4/3) then make a pure white "test" slide that is 702x540. Draw a perfect black square that measures approximately 400x400 in the exact center of the white rectangular slide with a line width of approximately 5 pixles. Create a one minute slide show with this slide then create a PTE video for your NTSC TV. Play the video on your TV and measure the sides of the square with a ruler. If the sides are equal then your aspect ratio is perfect. Get the concept? You could also do the same with a circle and see if it distorts to an elipse. When I developed my suggested technique, I created a 1024x768 white slide with a black border. Making the video at 90% display verified a near perfect fit on three different TVs, with none of the slide being cropped. This varies somewhat from TV to TV and is dependent on how well the CRT guns are aligned. Another interesting note: I use DV encoders by Pinnacle, and Panasonic as well as a M-JPEG encoder made by Morgan Multimedia for producing AVI files. For making MPEG-2 or MPEG-1 files from AVI, I predominately use the Cinema Craft encoder and sometimes TMpgenc. I also have encoders that come with NERO 6, Pinnacle Studio, and Roxio that I never use. If I make a true AVI before I encode into MPEG, I get jittery slides especially along horizontal lines with all AVI encoders execpt the Morgan. By going direct from PTE Video Encoder direct to the Cinema Craft mpeg encoder, I get highly stable and clear slideshows on my TV...in fact much better than I expected. This jitter must have something to do with the still picture. If I use the Morgan M-JEG and create a true AVI (select the Codec as custom in PTE) before I encode the MPEG I get reasonablly stable non-jittery slides but not as good as going direct to Mpeg with the PTE encoder. The DV encoders are terrible for stills but excellent for normal motion movies. I consider the Tempgenc and Cinemacraft encoders as equivalent in quality but the Cinemacraft is a little over twice as fast. I haven't figured the PTE Video Encoder, must be a pure frame server. Wish you much success... I love using PTE....I'm no expert...just sharing my experiences....KEN

Regarding Aspect Ratio for Video, the following site covers it in depth...complex to understand... A Quick Guide to Digital Video Resolution and Aspect Ratio Conversions Maybe this will help or confuse....

Read my post here: My PTE to DVD Method I had the same resizing concern, and tried resizing to 640x480(NTSC size). I found little if any difference in quality, by resizing to 640x480. TV is not the same quality as what you see on your PC, not even HDTV achieves that quality. TV pixels are different than PC pixels, very confusing. A PC(640x480) has square pixels and a DVD(720x480) has rectangular pixels. A standard TV tube has a 4x3 aspect ratio. The DVD player (decoder) stretches the 720x480 video to fit a 640x480 aspect. The way this is done causes 90% of the picture to be lost unless you zoom out the DVD player or put the TV in widscreen mode. I'm not very good at explaining this, but trust me, the technique I explain at the above post works very well for me. I make a PC slideshow and a video(DVD) from the same PTE source photos at 1024x768. When making the video I check "fit to screen" and select 90% of screen to fit slide image with solid color black background. I then produce the PTE video. When you look at the final DVD on a PC it has a black border around it due to the 90%. But when the DVD player stretches it, it just fits the TV screen with no noticable border. If you don't put in the 90% part of your slide will not appear on your TV screen as it is effectively receiving a 90% crop from the DVD player. Hope this isn't too confusing but try my technique...it works great on Windows 2000.

For those that might be interested. The following is my totally trouble free method for converting PTE slideshows to DVD: 1.) I normally create a standard slideshow for 1024x768 screen resolution. The background music is normally mp3s @ 128kbits. 2.) To make a NTSC DVD, I use the PTE Video Codec in custom AVI mode with settings of 720x480x29.97fps. 3.) Under the slideshow screen options, I set for fit to screen at 90% of screen. The 90% makes the resultant video just fit the entire slide on a standard NTSC TV. 4.) I then feed the resultant PTE vid file to a Cinema Craft Encoder Basic Mpeg-2 encoder. Set at 2 pass vbr with an average bit rate of 6000kbits. A min of 2000kbits and a max of 9000kbits. The audio is mpeg-1 at 224kbits. 5.) I the use Mediachance's DVD Lab to author and burn the DVD. Very simple and works great. Cinema Crafts encoder is fast(relatively speaking compared to tmpgenc) and yields excellent results. DVD Lab is also excellent, much..much better than my experiences with Pinnacle Studio or Roxio, or NERO, or ULEAD. CinemaCraft MediaChance Just thought I would pass my excellent experiences along....

I often produce menued slideshows on CD. Oftentimes anxious end-users give a menu item multiple clicks that results in the slideshow running in multiple instances concurrently. Is there a way to prevent this? The user thinks their is a problem when they here multiple soundtracks that are out of sink.