BobFlangan

I just created a test and changed the first slide to a quick transition. Initially, google only showed the black screen as before. But after i waited about 10 minutes, google displayed the 1st frame in the video instead of the black screen. I noticed it takes awhile for the 1st frame to appear on all mp4 uploads. On the previous ones that showed a black screen, they still show a black screen, after two days :). I'll rebuild them. This appears to solve. thanks for the help! Bob

Ron, I wish it were that easy. I started with a jpg of my grandsons. The example videos at wnsoft and mine all open the same way: with about 2 seconds of black screen. This looks to be the default background. I can change the default background to a picture with text, but this text will show up at times if it is not small.

When I upload mp4 videos from my phone, Google Photos shows the first frame of the video to identify it. When I upload mp4 generated by PTE, the first frame is Black. Is there a solution? I suspect the only one is to edit the PTE video and trim the first part of the video. Any suggestions on an editor to use?

Lin, that worked! Now to rename all those files ) Bob

I just discovered that I had 72 MOD videos and that PicturesToExe does not show them for import into a show. Does anyone have any recommendations on how to solve? Is there a way to get PicturesToExe to see and open them? Or do I need to convert? If the last, any recommendations on how to convert? I thought MOD files was a fairly popular file type. Thanks for any suggestions Bob

I just released a free Microsoft Excel add-in that should help you solve. It will add the date and time to a copy of your files. Then, when you import these files into PTE, they will be in chronological order. You can find the product, Picture and Video Assistant, at http://www.add-ins.com/pva.htm. I use it to create videos from the 11,000+ files we have from over the years. Bob Flanagan

I just joined the forum, so I hope this is the right place for this topic. One of the things I like to do is to play videos on our TV of pictures and videos we have taken of the family. Deciding what pictures and videos to include in a TV video is difficult, because at last count we have 11,041 files (48GB) with many back to 2005. This doesn't count the 2000+ my daughter and son have taken of their family this year. So, being a heavy Excel user, I created the Picture and Video Assistant (PVA for short). It is a free product. It creates a list of all one's pictures and videos. It then randomly assigns them to video folder destinations. Then it will copy the files for the selected video folders to those folders. When it does this, it adds the year, month, day, and time to the front of the file name. This is a key step! When I import the files from the video folder into PicturesToExe, they end up in chronological order!!! I typically create 2-3 videos out of the 25+ video folders. The result is a unique sample of the many pictures and videos we have. When creating PVA, I discovered that some of the files had the wrong date on them. It seems that editing a file changes the date, and Windows doesn't really keep a creation date. So, I added a feature to re-date files. And then obviously I discovered I had lots of duplicates, so I added features to find them. And then more and more features! When I create a video for the TV, I have PVA copy about 3GB of files to each video destination folder. This is typically 400 or so files. This results in a video that lasts for about an hour and easily fits on a DVD. When we play, the ones who enjoy the videos the most are the grandkids, who are the stars of most of the videos and pictures! Again, PVA is free. It works only on Windows PCs and one must have Microsoft Excel. If you have a Mac, then you would need to either be a closet PC user or run something like Parallels on the Mac. If you have any suggestions on features to add to PVA, let me know!