mhwarner

Hi Mike, I have just looked at and downloaded some of your templates. I just want to compliment you on the layout/arrangement of that area of your website and the nice demos you have provided for your templates. Good job, and thanks for sharing! Looking forward to playing with the templates when I have a minute.

Not sure what your problem might be, but I will give you my experience from the other day. I created an .avi to upload to YouTube. Following some instructions I had found here on this forum, I set the format to 320x240 15fps DivX 6 codec. It was a small show of about only 20 slides, but I had no problems. Experiment with various codecs to see if that makes a difference. With regard to the PTE codec, I may be wrong here and if so, I'm sure somebody will jump in and correct me, but I believe that is only useful for creating an .avi that will be used more or less immediately in another program. There is a temporary .avi of sorts created, but it is only valid/available for as long as you keep that session of PTE open. You can pull that temporary .avi into another program (ULead or Roxio or Nero) and do something with it, but you must then save it from the other program or convert it to another format or whatever. That's the way it worked in version 4x anyway. You should read these forum threads and I believe you may find at least some of your answers: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....76&hl=codec http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....96&hl=codec http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....65&hl=codec

No luck for me. I have a Dell laptop with ATI Radeon X1400. The driver for that card does not list Dell among the manufacturers and when I ran the little utility to tell me if the driver update was compatible, it said to check with the manufacturer. When I went to Dell's site, the latest driver I found was 7/2006 -- almost 6 months before I bought my computer. Bummer. I will have to wait for Igor's solution.

Guido, It was so nice to once again see a post from you in this forum. And I wish you and yours Merry Christmas and Happy New Year as well! I hope that the New Year brings you a speedy recovery and good health. We have missed you and I look forward to your postings again! Welcome back. And I wish all other forum members who celebrate it, a Merry Christmas! And a Happy New Year to All. I wish Igor and the team a wonderful holiday and prosperous New Year also -- they certainly deserve it for all of their hard work!

Thanks Igor, I figured it had something to do with timing and system resources. I can live with it. Editing photos directly from within PtoE is not really the problem for me. In the slideshow I recently created, I had a directory for a photo event ("Monument Valley"). Then I had 6 subdirectories for each of the days. I had started PtoE and began a slideshow with some opening slides. Then I began reviewing the slides in my image management program (ThumbsPlus) and I ran a batch resizing process there on the the ones I wanted to use. I have set the batch process to put the resized images in new subfolders of each of the daily folders called "work". When I went back over to P2E, those subfolders didn't show up. I had to expand and collapse the top level folder for them to show. But, as you said, it was very quick and of course, it displayed the new thumbnails for those images with surprising speed. For this case, the best workaround is to create the "work" subfolders initially before even opening PtoE and then run the batch processes as I go along. Thanks for the quick response!

Thanks Lin, I definitely do see the mouse "trail" (kind of a slight ghost) when moving across the monitor. And as I described, the panos are not really blurry, but look more like the images did before I sharpened them. They are sharp at the beginning, then go to not particularly sharp, but not really blurry either, then back to sharp at the end when the pan stops. Extending the time of the pan helps and since these are going to end up as DVDs, it probably won't be that noticeable. I just wanted to be sure I wasn't doing something wrong in setting it up.

... and they have probably been around for a while, but I have just noticed it in the last several 5.1 RC versions because of the way I am working on a particular slideshow. And, of course, maybe they are not bugs but just the way the program has to work. They are definitely NOT "showstoppers", but just minor annoyances. (1) The folders are not exactly "live" in that if I have opened a folder of images using the tree structure in the left-hand pane, and I add a sub-folder to one of them (outside of PTE of course), the subfolder does not automatically show up. I have to contract and expand the next highest parent folder and then expand it and the subfolder shows up. Maybe it works this way so that useless cycles are not expanded monitoring the directory tree. (2) If some images are loaded in a slideshow and I change one or more of those files outside of PTE in photoshop or some other program, the thumbnails in the slide window don't update immediately. If I click on any of those thumbnails, the preview window does display the new updated version, but the thumbnail still shows the old version. At some point, without closing PTE, the thumbnails will update, but I haven't figured out what the trigger is which causes the update. Again, neither item is a big deal, but I just thought I would point them out if they can be fixed in some future version without too much trouble.

Hi Tom, Yes it is an LCD (SamsungSyncmaster 245 BW) at 1920x1200 resolution. In the Display Properties, Advanced "Monitor" tab, it says 60 Hertz under Screen refresh rate. In the monitor's specs, it is shown as "Response Time (in ms) (Typ.) 5 ", but I don't know if that is the same thing as the refresh rate. Unfortunately, I live off the grid and have gotten rid of all my CRTs, so the only monitors I have are to test are LCDs (both external and on my two laptops). I did just reset the options for one of the pano slides from 16 seconds to 40 seconds and it is much less noticeable at 40 seconds. Guess I will extend the timing somewhat for the rest as well. In this instance, since the final output will be DVD, I imagine it will be less of an issue since the overall sharpness on the DVD, even with PTE's capabilities, is not nearly as good as what is available from a .EXE on the computer. Thanks for replying.

I am currently creating a slideshow and have included a few panorama shots. I am using a simple left-to-right pan on the panos and while they are panning, they are not sharp. When the slide opens after initial transition effect, it is sharp. Then the pan begins and during that entire time, it is not entirely sharp. Upon completion of the pan in the few seconds before the next transition begins, the slide is sharp again. So my question is, is this standard/normal or am I doing something wrong in setting up in O&A. I searched and did not find any postings here, although I have some vague recollection of a similar question being asked way back during the early 5.0 beta cycles and I do not remember if there was an answer or what it might have been. Some details: All my slides have been resized to 1024x768 (ultimate result will be a DVD), except I have resized the panos to 768h x whatever width they need to maintain the correct aspect ratio. I have animated each of them with 3 keypoints -- the opening one and a second keypoint a second or so after the effect transition completes (so that it doesn't pan until the transition to the slide is complete), and a final keypoint a second or so before the next slide transitions. The first two keypoints are of course the pano shoved all the way to the left showing only as much as fits in the initial frame. The third keypoint is with the pano moved so that its right edge is at the right edge of the frame. I held down the shift key when I moved it for the keypoint so that there is no up and down motion. I left the settings for everything set at "Linear" and did not do the setup stuff to "Separate here" for the keypoints (the reason being that when I added the first pano and tried setting the buttons to "Smooth", the pano seemed jerky and I figured for a straight pan with no other movement linear made more sense). Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Lin, Thanks for your comments, and for being apparently, the only one who actually understood what I was trying to say. To Brian, Steve and anyone else who may have misunderstand what I said as a debate on the technicalities of the EXIF specification and the intricasies of updating those fields so that they could actually be displayed by PtoE: My point is that if the "Text Macro" functionality is to be useful to a large segment of PtoE users, it has to work with data that is easily updated by mainstream imagement management and editing applications. Exifer is NOT mainstream, is at least 5 years old with no recent updates, has little in the way of help and is generally a PITA to use. IrfanView, which is free and is used by many folks, and is maybe a "least common denominator", easily updates IPTC fields, which are in fact designed to be edited and updated by the user. Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, ThumbsPlus, BreezeBrowser, IMatch, ACDSee, and dozens of other programs do as well. If Igor isn't able or doesn't want to add the ability to capture IPTC data to comments via text macro, it's not a big deal to me. If I would require that functionality for a particular slideshow, I can simply use another program to place them on the photos as I am resizing them. I always attempt to use IPTC fields to store location and title data in my pictures when I finish a shoot so that no matter what program I use or where I store the photo files, the data will always travel with them. JPEG Comments and/or EXIF comments are way too quirky and I am not about to waste my time with something that may or may not be readable by the majority of image management/editing applications. IPTC data, on the other, is so heavily used throughout the world by professional photographers and newspaper people that the capability to read it is not likely to disappear anytime soon. (And just for the record, Brian, I did actually request the capability of using IPTC fields as a future enhancement long before version 5. Further, I do not believe I hijacked this thread. I was attempting to point out to the original poster why he was having so much trouble getting the text macro capability to work for EXIF comments and descriptions.)

OK, I stand corrected (somewhat) but here's the problem as far as I can tell. And I believe Lin made reference to this somewhere in another post. The bottom line is that there is no consistency. There are actually 2 "Comments" fields for JPEG files. There is one that is commonly referred to as "JPEG Comments" -- which is the one that is typically written into the file by a large majority of thumbnail editors/image management programs, and there is another called "User Comments" which is actually part of the EXIF spec. Very few mainstream image management applications appear to write to this field. Not Adobe Bridge, not Irvfanview, not ThumbsPlus (I don't have time to do an audit of ACDsee and some of the others). Then there is also the "Description" field that is part of the EXIF spec. Again, apparently not used by the majority of mainstream applications. Exifer (which is not, as far as I can tell, one of the mainstream, typical applications that is used by the vast majority of people to manage their images), does in fact write to both of these fields (but doing so is a chore and not easily accomplished -- I'm sure there is help somewhere, but I didn't find it in the application). It can also read and write the typical "Comment" field written to by most of these other standard applications -- but it does so on a separate tab entitled "JPEG Comment". If you use this field, which again is the one that is most commonly written to by the vast majority of image management applications (and the most easily accessible field), it doesn't show up in P2E. FYI: If you use Exifer to write something in the description field, it will in fact show up in Adobe Bridge under the IPTC Core fields as "Description" and in ThumbsPlus, as well as IrfanView under the IPTC "Caption" field. However, writing data into either of these fields from other applications DOES NOT make it show up in the "Description" field in Exifer, nor does it show up in P2E. This (mostly) uneditable Description field shows up in IrfanView EXIF information as "Image Description", but again, it is not editable. So this is my reason for suggesting that it might make more sense to use IPTC information, if it is possible to get the information easily (and it can't be that difficult since it seems that most image management programs can do it). As far as I can tell, most, if not all, image management programs have the ability to read and write IPTC data directly into the file without using "sidecar" files (which by the way is a universal standard for news exchange that is used by virtually every major news organization in the world). I am not saying that we shouldn't still have the ability to use EXIF for file name, date and time and camera-related data, but as far as doing "automatic" captioning of slides and slideshows with textual information, I believe that IPTC would be a far better choice. My 2 cents.

I think the bottom line here is that EXIF comments, no matter what application they were created or entered with, do not yet work in PtoE. Things like the file name, date, time, and maybe some other fields do, but comments and descriptions do not yet work. I have tried it in beta 10 and still could not see them (but then, I see no mention in the fix list that this item has yet been resolved either). I tried adding them in both Exifer and Thumbs Plus and can see them in both programs (the ones added in the other program). Check the postings below for additional info. Some of them are as recent as October and November, so I don't think there has been any resolution yet. (My personal preference would be to read IPTC information, which I think is more universal, but maybe Igor can't do that easily.) http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....ost&p=47703 http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....ost&p=46295 http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....ost&p=43952

Igor, I think you've got it! I use ColorVision Spyder to calibrate my monitor (with ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 graphics) card. I first created a show with the 2 files in your Test.pte and beta 10. There was still a gamma shift which I could turn off and on by using Alt-Tab or the Windows key. Then I ran your Test_FixForATIbug.exe file and there was no shift at all, no matter what I tried. Great work! One thing I did notice, which may or may not be a bug. I see that you set the slides to "Wait for a key press or mouse click to show next slide". The only key that works to advance the slides on my computer is the right mouse button. Is that the way it's supposed to work?

Hi Igor, I use ColorVision Spyder to calibrate my monitor (with ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 graphics) card. I would love to help you beta test to see if you can resolve this problem which ATI apparently can't be bothered to work on.

Thanks for the quick reply Igor. I will continue to add my own borders in Photoshop for now and wait until a future version when we have color borders in O&A. Maybe I'll also experiment with some masks in the meantime.

This may not be something introduced by this beta, but it is the first time I have tried the technique and it seems like a bug to me. I have some animation which includes 4 snapshot photos on a background. Each of the photos animates in individually. There is no problem with any of the animation itself but the problem is with the picture objects displayed on an angle. The first time I did this, I actually created resized photos with a 4 or 5 pixel white border on them. They seem to display ok and if there are any jagged/stairstep edges on those which are displayed slightly rotated at an angle, it is hardly visible. Here's a sample: On a new project I tried the same technique, but this time I thought I would save a bit of time on processing the pictures with white edges. I didn't feel like fooling with png masks either. So I simply added four white rectangle objects to the main picture and then added each of my 4 photos to the 4 rectangles as children. I made the photos slightly smaller than the rectangles so that it would mimic the white edges. The animation is fine and I have the effect I want. Unfortunately, the rectangles behind the photos which are set off at an angle are quite jagged (and of course more noticeable full-screen on my large monitor). It seems like the picture objects when added have some sort of anti-aliased edges but the rectangle objects do not. Again, this may not be something new, but it is the first time I have noticed it.

Hi Lin, Thanks for the explanation. I just thought it would be nice to have a method to group multiple text objects to treat them as one (without breaking any of the other functionality that you describe). Someday maybe we'll get beveled text in PtoE. Until then, now that Igor has fixed the problem with the rasterized text, it will probably just be easier to go that route or maybe I'll just continue creating the PNG title files in Photoshop.

Igor, thanks for fixing the bug on rasterizing the text. That will certainly help some. Lin, thanks for your response. I had initially created my text as children of a frame object (all three at the same level) which I did use successfully to manipulate the size and motion. I tried it with a transparent rectangle as you suggested and it appears to work the same. Is there a difference in using the rectangle versus the frame for the parent object? The main issue I have still exists, however. Say that I want to zoom the text (a title) onto the slide from nothing to full coverage of the slide. That works fine using the parent rectangle (or frame) object. But then I would like it to sit there for a second or so and then slowly just fade away. At that point, I cannot change the opacity of the parent because it is already 0. So I have to change the opacity of each of the separate text objects. But I cannot manipulate them as one. If I select all three text objects and click the "Create New Keyframe Here" button, nothing happens. I assume the program can't do that. So a suggestion would be that when I select all three text objects at once, the button should be grayed out. But anyway, at that point, I have to select the objects one at a time to create a separate keypoint for each one in the exact same spot. Then I have to go to each of those 3 stacked keypoints and change the opacity for each text object to set it to 0 (or whatever). I'm guessing that want I want to do isn't possible currently. Obviously a better answer would be that we could somehow add "bevels" to our text, much as we can add shadows. Igor will have to comment on whether that is even remotely possible. Maybe even the ability to add a second shadow (maybe on top instead of underneath), say in a lighter color, to a single text object to simulate a bit of 3D. If so, I can add it to the "wish list" for next versions topic.

In order to avoid having to create some fancy beveled titles in Photoshop, I have been trying to create something similar in PtoE v. 5. I came up with something reasonably decent by stacking 3 different text objects with slightly different shades and offsetting one and lowering the opacity on another and playing with the shadows. Fine so far. But there doesn't seem to be any easy way to manage these multiple text objects. For instance, I want to be able to zoom them in from very small to large enough to cover the slide, while at the same time going from an opacity of 0 to 100. It does not seem possible to group these three text objects to manipulate them as one. I tried first adding an empty frame with 0 opacity and then zooming it, which seemed to work somewhat, but it still doesn't give me the control I would like. Even worse, if I try copying the frame and text objects to another slide to manipulate differently (or change the actual letters in the text), it gets really screwed up. Is there any trick for dealing with multiple text objects on a slide, or is this something for a wish list in a future version. I also tried rasterizing some text to a PNG file to stylize in Photoshop, but unlike an earlier version of 5 (one of the betas, I'm sure), instead of getting colored text on a transparent background, I simply get white text on a transparent background which is a PITA to colorize first. For now, I just create the text in Photoshop, stylize it and save as a PNG. But I really prefer the flexibility of working with the text directly in PtoE. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Here are a few places I have used or at least looked at. Some are a bit pricey, but others are fairly reasonable. All of them allow you to play samples before committing to a purchase: First, one of our own members here has a nice selection of royalty free music on his site which can be used for the purposes you describe: http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/royaltyfreemusic_new.htm Also: http://musicbakery.com/ http://www.freshmusic.com/ http://www.music2hues.com/ http://www.instantdownloadmusic.com/demos.asp

Great news, Igor! I'll be waiting impatiently for the ability to include multiple MPEG2 files in DVD projects as well as the increased speed of burning. Thanks to you and your development team for taking such good care of us!

There is also another possible work around mentioned here: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....20&start=20

I have an ATI card and this does seem to be a good workaround. You might have to get the slides properly resized for your particular screen resolution initially to fill the screen, but using window mode seems to eliminate the annoying switch to an all black screen initially then (in my case, at least) much darker slides for the show than I see in photoshop or otherwise, and then an annoying switch to an all black screen when the show quits or is cancelled. Most of the shows I am doing are being burnt to DVD, though, and this ATI problem doesn't seem to affect the Video Builder. Thanks for the suggestion!

Igor, that sounds like a wonderful idea to me! I sometimes avoid using the timeline for the very reasons you describe. It is annoying and sometimes time-consuming to switch back and forth. I believe this change will make using the more sophisticated controls available in PtoE much easier for newer and less experienced users. This (and the upcoming great news about the ability to include MPEG2 files in Video Builder) are both things I am looking forward to! Thanks again for a wonderful product.

If nobody is able to suggest a possible solution, you could try editing the .PTE file directly. It's not necessarily intuitive but if you can add your new effect to, say, the first slide, then save your project. Make a backup copy of the .pte file for the project and then edit the file with Wordpad or Notepad. See what additions have been made to the first slide that differ from the other slides and then copy/paste this into each slide in the appropriate place for each slide. Try it first with a small show with 8 or 10 slides and see how it works. I have used this method to modify some of Dom's templates as well and it has been particularly useful to change the names of his default picture files to the directory structure that I use. Maybe not the best solution, but perhaps a bit speedier than editing each slide with the O&A editor.