aaroncgi

Dave, Thanks for the ideas. I thought of the all transitions style, but as you say, it's not truly random without also having the slides randomized. I don't want to randomize the slides as I like to keep things in chronological order, often having several different dates within a specific chapter of my show(s). I suppose if there are enough transitions (must be a bit over 70), a fixed sequence could still seem pretty random to a viewer only watching each show one time. With probably 20-30 chapters in the complete show, though, I bet some viewers would still catch on to the sequence. Not a big deal, as I say, think I am going to just stick with a single type of transition for each chapter, rather than all of them!

Hi All, I've been plugging away with my new P2E happily for the past few days, really loving the program. This question is a bit academic since I have decided to just stick with a single transition type (with multiple directions if available) for each chapter of my show. However, I'm still curious. I have loaded about 50 custom transitions. When I select all of those in addition to a handful of the standard transitions such as Hour Hand, Shapes, Gates, Page, and Curling, the slideshow seems to prefer the standard transitions at least 95% of the time. So in the show, I might get one of the custom transitions for every 20 of the standard, even though the custom types outnumber the standard by at least 3 to 1. And often in that same period, one of more of the standard transitions will have appeared more than once. I know in computers and other electronics there is no 'true' random, but this seems a bit excessive. I wonder if it's possible to somehow put the desired standard transitions into the same folder as the custom transitions, and if so, would that solve the issue? Even so I still think it's not nearly as random as I would like - ideal would be a non-repeating random. But I know from CD changer days, that not a lot of equipment had such a feature built into their random functions. Cheers! Aaron

Great, thank you again!

Great, thanks for the info! Do you have a general idea when Deluxe 9 will be officially released, and what major changes there are compared to Deluxe 8?

Hi all, I have finally decided that PicturesToExe will be my new slideshow software, and likely the deluxe version. I really only will be using a couple of the features missing from the essentials version, but they are biggies. Since I see that version 9.0 is coming to Beta testing soon, possibly available for release later this year I presume, I'm curious about the pricing. If I purchase version 8 Deluxe right now at $129, would I be able to upgrade to version 9 at no charge, or very minimal charge? Cheers, Aaron

Thanks for all the suggestions everone, nice to see such a warm welcome for a newbie! Turns out it actually WAS my media player, GOM Player, which I guess isn't too surprising since it was affecting all slideshow programs. The slideshows all looked fine when played through Windows Media Player. So GOM Player I'll be kicking to the curb and I'll try out the Media Player Classic. I tried to find out what color space my images are using and man that took some digging! All three of my cameras are using sRGB, and that remains after resizing by Irfan view, so I think we're good. Only my new DSLR gives me an option to change that, and default is sRGB. Regarding the slideshow size, maybe I wasn't clear enough. For the images I'm putting into a 1920x1080 slideshow, all the images have a height of 1080 pixels. Width varies, but generally in the 1440 range. My assumption, perhaps incorrect, was that P2E would just add black bars to the sides and not stretch or otherwise alter the portion of the actual image. That does seem to be what's happening. I suppose there's probably a way for me to make the images exactly 1920x1080 myself in a different program, ie add the black bars before importing into P2E, but not sure if that's strictly necessary? In any case, everything seems to be working now! This little fubar actually has been very educational, as it gave me a lot more playing time with several different programs, which has made me appreciate the value of P2E more and ascertain more clearly what I really need and want. Cheers all! Aaron

Where do I find that information? I'm using IrfanView v3.7 to resize the original 10 megapixel images (roughly 3600 x 2700 pixels) down to a height of either 1080 or 480 pixels depending on what I need. I'm using the default JPG settings other than any options related to quality, which I put at the highest setting. I'm not making any alterations to the images other than size, that I know of. I don't see anything in the vast array of options called colour space. There are options to change the color depth, color balances, saturation, gamma, contrast, etc, but all of these are unchecked. For all intents and purposes, the resized images look identical to the original images, when both are fit to the same screen. Just really puzzled at this, as I had no such problems last year on Windows XP. If I take any of these resized images and use the Windows7 built-in slideshow, or a slideshow built into any image software such as IrfanView, ACDsee, etc, there's no loss in quality - and the same is true for the preview within PicturesToExe - it looks the same as the input images. It's just in the creation of a movie file that seems to bugger things up. Now that I think of it, I have neglected a really basic troubleshooting step - playing the movies on multiple programs, my apologies. I believe so far I may have only been using my default player, GOM Player, which has always been a good one for me, and it's the latest version. But maybe it's screwed up somehow. Will need to try Windows Media Player or other video players and see what happens.....

Hi all, I have been searching for a better slideshow program and have downloaded and used several of them, including PicturesToEexe, ProShow Gold, SmartShow, NCH PhotoStage, probably more I am not recalling. I really am liking the interface and features available on PicturesToExe, and it seems very highly rated for image quality. The problem I am having with ALL of them, including PicturesToExe, is that I can't get the output quality to match the input quality, regardless of what type of output or resolution I use, be it AVI, MP4, 480P, 1080P, etc. My input files are JPGs with no compression, and they look excellent. They are 4:3 rather than widescreen, but the vertical resolution is either 1080 or 480 - so 1440x1080 or 640x480. When I use the preview function in PicturesToExe or ProShow Gold, the show looks the same quality as the input images, which is to say great. However, once I create the actual file, there's a tremendous loss of contrast and color saturation, as well as a loss of detail. The detail loss is to be expected if I'm creating a DVD resolution show and then stretching it to fit on a 1080P set - but I don't know why I should lose detail if I'm making a 1920x1080 slideshow. And in either case, there's no reason I should be losing contrast and saturation. The show should just need to add black bars on the sides if I'm using a 16:9 output resolution - not perform any image resizing or resampling, correct? Some of the programs let me bump up the contrast and saturation for each slide, and doing that does seem to fix the issue (other than detail loss). But that seems like an unnecessary step, especially when I thought the preview feature of P2E was supposed to give you exactly the same quality as the final result. I'm using Windows 7 64-bit. Is there some setting in Windows 7 that could be affecting all these programs in the same way? I previously used NCH PhotoStage for several years on Windows XP and did not have this issue at all. Thanks in advance for any suggestions! Aaron