mhwarner

This is my understanding as well. Thanks for confirming, Dave!

Denis, I think you read my mind! I was going to ask if you could create a transition just like your new "bubble" but was trying to think how to explain it or to provide a very short clip of something similar that I had found in Cyberlink Powerdirector! Thanks for sharing this!

Thanks for the explanation, Jill. I guess I tend to work the opposite way from you. I do all my editing, color correcting, straightening, etc. first in Photoshop, then load the images into PTE. I don't bother with resizing now because I only make .mp4 files so image size is irrelevant as far as the final file size goes. I also create my thumbnail files for posting to Youtube directly in Photoshop as well. But for me, I can see some benefit in exporting collage-type or combination images instead of trying to recreate them elsewhere if I want them for print or something.

Just curious. Why exactly would you use this feature? Would love to hear some ideas. Thanks!

Thanks Denis! Both transitions work well and I especially like the tidal bore.

That's exactly what I did. Maybe my custom theme will be helpful. I first modified the original Ken Burns styles supplied with PTEAV by default to remove any borders and set the chosen image to "cover" the screen. Then I added these to the theme. You can tell by the names what they do. Feel free to modify further to suit your needs. MW Ken Burns.ptetheme

As far as I can tell, the answer is, if you have created the theme yourself or it is another user created theme, you can click on a slide, select "Themes", select the theme you are interested in, click on "Tools" and then "Edit Theme". You can scroll to the bottom of the right-hand part of the dialog and see the various styles which have been included in the theme. This DOES NOT seem to work for the default themes supplied with PTEAV as the "Edit Theme" button is grayed out in those instances. I only have one non-default theme which I created myself. I am only assuming it would work for other user-created themes but I don't think I actually have any. If you have some, try it.

Loved the music!

I have not found an automatic method either and it is annoying but I figured it was useless to complain. If I need to do a lot of splitting on clips, I just do it in Cyberlink Power Director first. For a one-off split I use PTE and go through the annoyance of resetting the slide duration based on the new timing after trim. It definitely would be nice to have it automated or to just have the ability to split clips. Maybe Igor will surprise us in the next version.

If the slides on which you want to use a theme are not contiguous (i.e., you have selected some, but not others -- including movies), the ones you have selected will all be moved together and the style will be applied. The other unselected slides (including the movie) will be moved to a position immediately after the last slide you originally selected and applied the style to. So, it is best to apply any themes before you set your final order, or if there are only a few to which you want to apply a different theme or style, apply the style to a selection of slides and then individually select the single slides you wish not to be included and remove the style or pick a different one. Themes will be applied to movie files if they are selected. Not sure how useful that is but you can essentially apply the same movements to a movie manually in the Objects & Animation Editor (like zooming in or out). Experiment to see what I have described.

I am a Dell person and just bought a new laptop with 4K screen, 64 GB of memory, 2 TB SSD and 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900HK 2.50 GHz processor. This is about my 10th Dell of some sort over the last 25 years so you can see I am a happy camper. The 64 GB of memory does make a huge difference as well as the newer graphics card and processor. Regarding the screen size, My opinion would be that you might be best getting an external monitor as well if it's in your budget. I have the 15 inch laptop for best portability when I am traveling by car but actually use an old 14 inch 2-in-1 for international travel because it's really small and light (at this point it's mainly for photo backup and some work related stuff as I rarely have time to actually work on slideshows or edit photos when I travel). At home, the new 15 inch computer is always in one place on my desk and hooked to an external 27 inch 4K monitor. The screen on the laptop is lovely, but the older I get, the easier it is on my eyesight to look at a bigger monitor. My 2 cents.

My problem with videos seems to have disappeared. I did not update any drivers (Device Manager says they are current anyway) or make any other changes. I opened and closed PTEAV multiple times, rebooted the computer several times, loaded a few older slideshows which had no videos in them and previewed them with no issues. Finally reopened PTEAV, loaded the slideshow which was showing choppy videos, previewed it, etc. No problems whatsoever. Closed PTEAV and also had no problems with any existing videos on my computer. So it seems like there was something running in the background that may have been causing the issue. I have no idea what as I did search through Task Manager and Resource Monitor at the time but found nothing. Hopefully, the problem is gone for good. If it comes back, I'll see if there are updated drivers offered at that time. For now, my Dell Support Assist says all my drivers are up to date as well. So I am leaning toward some sort of conflict with another program or process rather than drivers. Or possibly a gremlin snuck into the computer while I wasn't looking. Thanks for the prompt responses from both Jill and Igor.

Just upgraded my laptop to a brand new Windows 11 machine. When I open an existing project (or if I create a new one) in PTEAV, it does not preview .mp4 files properly. I am talking only about videos created with my camera or with my phone. Most are 4K, but several have been edited and are 1080p. The videos are jerky, choppy, stuttering and just plain look like crap! This is within the program preview window and the full screen preview. Not only that, if I close PTEAV down, then try to look at any video files downloaded from my camera or my phone after that, they all look just as bad. I have tried with the native "Movies and TV" app and with VLC media player. However, if I reboot the computer and DO NOT open PTEAV, then there is no problem and the files play just as smoothly as they should. Surprisingly, if I publish just some of the jerky videos in PTEAV to 1920 x 1080p High Quality 60p, the resulting .mp4 files look ok (after I have rebooted). Just FYI, the very same files and the very same PTE show that I have been working on have no problem on my 4 year old computer which is Win 10, 16 GB memory and Intel Core I7 8th gen processor and a Radeon TM 530 and Intel Graphics. This new machine has the following specs: Device name MW_XPS_15 Processor 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900HK 2.50 GHz Installed RAM 64.0 GB (63.7 GB usable) System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor Windows 11 Pro 21H2 Graphics: Intel Iris Xe Graphics NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU Just to be sure, I disconnected my large Dell monitor to see if there was just some sort of issue between the computer and external monitor and the videos are still a problem on just the laptop's monitor itself. Both the laptop screen and the external monitor are 3840 x 2160. Is there a setting or preference I need to change within PTEAV or on my system to get rid of this problem, or is it some sort of bug? It is very frustrating considering how much I paid for this laptop that I am having this problem and there is no similar problem on a 4 year old machine with far lesser specs. I have several slideshows that I need to create and have spent a full day scouring the internet to be sure it wasn't some sort of Windows 11 issue, but I couldn't find anything and again, it only happens if I open PTEAV, play some videos within a slideshow and then close it down. HELP!

Hi Essexlad, I created a very rough style to show you one way of creating the rolling text. It's quite simple and there may be more elegant ways of getting the same result but this will get you started. The style requires two pictures, one for the background and one for the overlayed image. You could just apply the style to some images and then copy/paste only the frame into whatever slide you are using to get the scrolling text effect. Mary Scrolling Text Next to Photo.ptestyle

Thanks Dave! I bet I opened that dialog 5 or 6 times and totally missed the first item. And I did scan through the online help and missed it there too. After midnight, I guess it was just too late for me to be totally cognizant of what I was reading. I figured out the answer to my second question this morning. Click on the red x and you get choices. If you click the button for "Objects & Animation window" (or whatever it is labeled) and tick the box that says "Don't ask again", then it will always close only the O&A window. I can't get back to the dialog for the exact terminology since I ticked the box to hide it.

I don't want double-click to open Slide Options as seems to be the default. Once upon a time I knew where to set this, but it's been a few years since I've installed PTE AV on a new machine. I thought it was in Preferences but couldn't find it. Also, where do I designate that I want the red X in the O&A window to just close the O&A window and not the entire program. Better yet, where do I just find the file on my old computer which has all of these preferences set so I can just copy it to the new one. I've been through Uses\Mary\AppData etc. and it wasn't there. Thanks in advance !

Thanks Igor! I am leaving on an extended trip shortly and intend to upgrade my laptop when I return. In the meantime, I have just found and am installing an AMD driver from Dell for my laptop. Hopefully that will make a difference. And thanks Rosemary! I have turned on the "Autosave project every 10 minutes" for now in case I have more issues. I appreciate the help from both of you.

Now I am really pissed. Just spent the last 2 hours working on an existing project and before I had a chance to save my existing project again, PTE crashed. When I reopened it, it said it was opening the "Recovered Project" but all it contained was a single blank slide. This has happened to me at least 3 times in the last couple weeks. What gives and what can I do to stop it. Running version 10.5.7 (64 bit) build 4. Windows 10 pro 21H2. 32 GB of Memory, 237 GB of space left on my harddrive. I installed 21H2 on 5/11. It is very possible that the crashes started then but I can't be sure. This is getting very annoying. Yes I know I should save every few minutes but in this case I was just about to do so after dragging a slide to the timeline when it crashed. The subject file was a .tif in case that was helpful. Info from event viewer for today: The program PTEAVStudio.exe version 10.0.0.0 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel. Process ID: 3820 Start Time: 01d879587094e1b2 Termination Time: 34 Application Path: C:\Program Files\WnSoft\PTE AV Studio 10.5\Main\PTEAVStudio.exe Report Id: 797b0397-9875-4295-93d7-3536df2cd889 Faulting package full name: Faulting package-relative application ID: Hang type: Cross-thread

Thanks, Igor! Yes, I am in the USA. No hurry. I just hope to look at these shows one day, particularly as Maureen's are always so well done.

Igor, I cannot download this other file either. My internet speeds aren't always the best, but I can easily download files that are much larger than the 111 MB of this file. The download speed from Slideshow Club is much, much slower than most other sites and the download seems to get to about 20 MB and it just stops completely and disappears from the download window of my browser. My download speeds at the moment are upward of 3 Mbps for other pages or downloads but the speeds on the attempted downloads of these Slideshow Club files rarely show at more than 5 to 7 Kbps! Sometimes it stops with "Couldn't download - network issue". I can restart it then, but it starts over and never finishes. Frustrating!

No. It just stops downloading. I just downloaded a 2 GB EXE file from another site with no issues whatsoever so I'm thinking it's not my connectivity problem. I also tried downloading the recently posted "Aspects of the Algarve" file and am having the same issue.

Rosy: In the original posting, he said it was actually an .MP4 file, so it should work on any system if that is in fact what he uploaded. Having troubles downloading at the moment so I can't confirm. If it is an MP4, it should be tagged as both "PC and Mac".

I really like the title blocks with the lines. Thanks for providing the .pte file so I could pull them out and use for my own presentations. And thanks for sharing your work here!

Sure would like to download Maureen's latest "Hills and Dales" file because I know Maureen always creates beautiful shows. Unfortunately, I have tried at least 10 times and have never successfully downloaded (the Windows version). The file quits downloading about midway through the length of it without even notification. If it does show up (not always) in my browser download window, it always has the notation "Cancelled" . I have tried with both Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. I know I don't have the best internet connection, but I have been able to download other files from other sites of at least this size or larger. Is it possible that there is some sort of slowdown with Slideshow Club or a timeout if the download isn't completed in a certain amount of time? If this is no the correct place to post this issue, I apologize and will move it to wherever is suggested.

Just received my weekly copy of the "Ask Woody" newsletter and Gary's question did indeed become a story. I thought I recognized Gary's name and when I flipped through our forum here, I found this thread. Congratulations on being famous, Gary! ______________________________ Secret Photoshop feature won’t open images with certain filenames By Brian Livingston An undocumented feature of Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and related programs makes the applications open but fail to load an image — and the apps then close abruptly — if you launch the apps using a filename with specific characters, according to numerous licensed users. This weird behavior, which is either an inadvertent bug or a deliberate Easter egg programmed in by some Adobe developer, can be seen on releases of the software all the way back to Photoshop version 5 (1998) and through Photoshop 23.2.2.325, which is the current version in Adobe’s Creative Cloud 2022. Developers insert secrets into applications all the time I’m not at all interested in whether some obvious bug has survived in Adobe products for more than two decades. All software has bugs. What’s much more interesting is whether some Adobe developer deliberately but quietly inserted a tiny routine — “do not load files that have this name pattern” — as a quick-and-dirty way of preventing co-workers from seeing some files when using Photoshop. Over the years, I’ve found many major software products with undocumented features that departmental managers had no idea their underlings had tucked in. Figure 1. Several versions of Adobe Photoshop and related programs reportedly won’t open images — such as this photo of a colorful Ecuadorian crustacean called a Sally Lightfoot — if the file is named SA-Quito.jpg or something similar, making some users crabby. Photo by Gary Oddi The honor of discovering this particular bug — or feature — goes to a photographer named Gary Oddi. He retired several years ago as an accountant for the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC). As an avid traveler and amateur photo enthusiast, he recently passed through Quito, the capital of Ecuador, and took hundreds of pictures while visiting that country’s scenic Galápagos Islands. (See Figure 1.) To organize his best photos into a slide show, Oddi first used an app named FastStone Image Resizer to give his camera’s randomly titled photos some meaningful names: SA-QuitoGalap-001.jpg SA-QuitoGalap-002.jpg SA-QuitoGalap-003.jpg ... SA-QuitoGalap-400.jpg Oddi’s shorthand obviously served as a memory aid that these photos had been taken during his trip through South America, Ecuador, and Galápagos. But to his surprise, when he right-clicked any of these photos in Windows and selected Open With > Adobe Photoshop, a strange thing happened. The application launched as usual and looked as though it were about to open the image. But unexpectedly, Photoshop immediately shut down, displaying no error message. That’s where the fun of sleuthing begins! It’s not you, it’s Adobe Photoshop and its siblings I won’t bore you with the details of exhaustive tests that have been performed on Photoshop. We can thank the active members of the PTE Forum (a discussion group for users of PTE AV Studio editing software) and the PATACS user group (Potomac Area Technology and Computer Society in Fairfax, Virginia). To make a long story short, numerous techies were able to reproduce Oddi’s findings and discover some additional ones: There’s nothing wrong with the JPEGs. The testers could rename any JPEG file to match the above character pattern. Photoshop would immediately exit after trying to load any such image. It happens with Adobe products other than Photoshop. An administrator of PTE AV Studio’s user forum confirms that the error occurs on Photoshop Elements, also known as PSE (the less-expensive, lightweight cousin of Photoshop, aka PS). The bug isn’t caused by a Windows flaw. Testers reported the Photoshop problem on various versions and builds of Windows. The error occurs with numerous variations of the “jinxed” filenames. The AV studio admin reports that giving a JPEG file a filename as short as SA-Quito.jpg causes the same problem that Oddi’s longer spellings do. Oddi himself additionally confirmed that the “A” isn't necessary. For example, the filename S-QuitoGalap-001.jpg (omitting the “A”) generates Photoshop’s same “abort” behavior. By the way, if you ever have trouble with an image — perhaps Photoshop complains of “a problem parsing the JPEG data” — you can test the file or fix it by following the steps in a Repairit article. I was able to reproduce the “abort” problem myself. I simply launched a licensed version of Photoshop Elements using Open With and a perfectly good JPEG file I’d named S-Quit.jpg. The app unceremoniously closed itself mere seconds after displaying its splash screen. Oddly, Photoshop’s disappearing act is case-sensitive. The app immediately closed when the filename was s-Quit.jpg but not when it was s-QUIT.jpg. Of course, I’m just a sample of one, which isn’t significant, so I bow to the superior testing abilities of the forum users mentioned above. Is it a bug or a feature? Some Adobe developer probably knows. This brings us to the heart of the matter. Is this a bug that Adobe hasn’t fixed for years, or is it a feature that some Adobe developer inserted, choosing an uncommon filename string? If it’s a bug, here’s where it might live. Methinks the filename fragment -Quit is being read by Photoshop and its siblings as a command to exit. That would be a pretty bad job of input validation, but I’ve seen worse in billion-dollar software suites. If it’s a feature, don’t bother looking for a coder named Quito Galap. Causing the app to abort if a filename begins with a string “that no one would ever use” — S followed by a hyphen (-) followed by Quit — might have seemed like a clever privacy measure to someone inside the Photoshop environment. As I mentioned above, finding this problem’s exact cause isn’t the point of this column. Of much greater interest to us is the habit of developers coding into commercial software various cool features that never get mentioned in the “help” file. As I reported in the May 3, 2021, AskWoody Newsletter, I’ve raised the ire of some upstanding Windows users just by revealing various secret keystrokes developers quietly inserted into the classic Solitaire game. (For example, users may be able to evade the usual draw-three rule.) How many more secret features are just waiting out there for us to discover? Adobe tech support can’t find the problem Oddi and other testers reported Photoshop’s aborting problem to Adobe tech support. The group received an official reply on March 22, 2022, from tech-support representative Tina Carter: I do not believe that this has anything to do with Photoshop 2022. I’m sorry — I still believe this has something to do with your files, etc. Also, please keep in mind that earlier versions of our apps are not tested on new versions of the operating system — so that’s not supported either — and could be causing the issue as well. That response raises the most important questions of all: Let’s say Adobe becomes convinced that the problem exists. Would the company decline to issue a patch for people who paid for a “perpetual license” to Photoshop? Millions of people purchased lifetime licenses for Photoshop prior to 2017, when Adobe switched the app solely to a cloud-based monthly subscription (Wikipedia article). What about people who bought Photoshop Elements? This simplified version of Photoshop has always been sold with a perpetual license, and Adobe still sells it that way. (Currently, PSE is even a so-called Amazon’s Choice.) Would Adobe make a patch for them? The company’s website says of Photoshop: “Adobe provides technical support and security fixes for the current version and the prior version. Bug fixes are only provided for the current version.” Check Adobe’s Legacy page for information on your particular Photoshop version. To be sure, it isn’t the biggest problem in the world if an app aborts when a filename happens to contain an uncommon string of characters. You have easy workarounds for this issue, which I describe below. Much more important is the ethical question of how a software corporation should support users who paid a company’s asking price and now need patches for security flaws and other really serious bugs. Adobe tech support did not reply to requests for comment for this column. However, a source within the company says at least one employee was, in fact, able to duplicate the problem on PS CC 2022. Adobe has not posted a bug report as of this writing. Simple solutions for simple problems — just don’t expect security To put it mildly, if a developer deliberately made Photoshop and its siblings abort when images’ filenames start with something like S-Quit, let’s just say that isn’t a good way to secure images and keep people from seeing them. Figure 2. Oddi is converting more than 10,000 slides, including his Galápagos photos, into JPEGs. He considered it preferable to use a projector and camera he already owned rather than paying a commercial conversion service. Source: Gary Oddi Facebook page There are many easy ways you can open an image — even in PS and PE — if you run into a problem with any such file not opening: If Photoshop is already running, you can open an S-Quit file with no problem. It’s only when you start Photoshop by double-clicking a JPEG — or you start the app using Windows’ Open With menu item — that the app exits before displaying the image. An image may open just fine if lowercase letters are in the filename. As testers have noted, simply changing the Q to lowercase — i.e., S-quit.jpg — makes Photoshop open and display such a JPEG normally. Other image-editing programs may be able to open a tricky JPEG. Even the free tools in Windows, and others that can be downloaded from the Web, may be able to open images that Photoshop tells you it cannot parse. On the other hand, what if you truly don’t want strangers to be able to open and view your files? Attorneys, for instance, are required to keep potential corporate mergers confidential. For true security, compress the files into a ZIP or similar format and use a long, strong password. Use a password manager or keep a written record of your passwords locked away — not written on a sticky note that’s glued to your monitor. Photoshop’s “launch then immediately exit” behavior is one of the strangest quirks I’ve seen lately. But I’m sure there are many, shall we say, more entertaining undocumented features out there. If some app has a cool trick that can be used only by those who know the secret handshake, tell me all about it, using the email address below. Thanks in advance!