SeismicGuy

I was in the same situation a few years ago when transitioning from an easy-to-use video-maker program to PTEAV. It helped greatly watching the various tutorials and learned enough to put together a few decent slideshows. Digging into all of the intricate features of the program was a chore and it definitely makes a difference if you are only an occasional user (like myself) or an advanced amateur who are putting together slideshows for clubs or competitions. The magic happens in the Objects & Animations section and I found one way to see how the features work is to download Styles created by some of the experts here and then opening them in O&A to see exactly what is happening. I have not really created any Styles of my own but, rather, modify the ones I have downloaded to suit my purposes. And then I have looked at some of the more complex ones that others have created and still don't understand all the ins and outs of how they were created. Or rather I sort of understand the various components of the Key Frames and Animations but it is not obvious to me how the person who created them came to putting all of these together to create the effect they wanted. Sort of like an expert carpenter knowing what tools he will need for a project and the sequence in which to use them.

As an occasional user of PTEAV I find myself forgetting what I have learned or discovered in the past but I am once again putting together a travelogue and have found a few frustrations. My process it that I pick the jpg's and mp4 files I wish to use and then first move them down into the slides view. All the jpgs have 7 sec durations (the default I might have set) and the mp4's have whatever durations they happen to be. So far so good. Then I generally like to keep things simple and use Ken Burns effect for all of the jpgs. If I select all the slides and apply the built-in Ken Burns theme it applies the Ken Burns styles that are built into the program which also have varying durations. HOWEVERif if I forget to deselect the various mp4 files it also applies the style to those files and also changes the duration (which is why it would be nice to have the mp4 files in the slide view have a filmstrip indicator or something to call attention to them). So the first thing that would be nice is to know whether there is an option of apply styles/themes to only the jpg files and skip over any mp4's or do I just carefully need to go through and deselect any mp4 files. Second the way I get my 7 second duration back to the jpgs is that I select all the ones where the style/theme was applied and choose Slide Options and change duration back to 7 seconds. I figured maybe I can modify the built-in Ken Burns theme by editing but the program does not allow for editing the built-in themes apparently. But it would be nice if when applying styles/themes there was a check box to maintain the original default duration. I expect the experts here will set me straight since I am likely missing something.

OOPS I may have found the issue--I had two folders that I was pulling images from and I had the wrong folder chosen. Picked the right one and the labels in that one are BLUE.

Something a bit strange. I have been working on a show on and off and I know that once you pick a jpg or mpg and drag it down to the Slide List the label of the jpg/mp4 turns BLUE to indicate the slide is being used in the show. For some odd reason when I opened the project today to continue working on it all of the labels on the items in the File List are back to normal white rather than BLUE even though all the items have been put in the slide list. What happened?

I think I may have suggested this before but it would be nice if video files in the slide list view can somehow have the filmstrip symbol to make it obvious that this particular slide is a video:

On the Objects & Animations Editor it would be very convenient to "disappear" all of the other objects except the one you are concentrating on when creating or editing the style. Perhaps some On/Off tick box to make all the others temporarily transparent.

Hi Jill--exactly what I am suggesting. Seems like a feature that should have been there from the get go. I will post in the Suggestions for next version.

That is a possible solution that didn't occur to me. What I believe might be better is to have some tick-box option to make ALL OTHER OBJECTS but the selected object opaque. The reason I am suggesting is that I have tried looking at and learning from some other very complex styles created by others--the one that comes to mind was a stop-motion animation that took the original image and broke it into 30+ parts and moved them around to create the final image. There was so much going in in the objects and animation list that it made me dizzy.

Reading through the linked explanation leads me to believe that there is no particular significance to applying the Main Object designation in terms of what it actually does.

And another objects-related question. When you have a bunch of objects in a slide doing various different things such as moving around, changing size, fading, etc. is there some way of isolating just a single one of those objects to see it by itself while putting together the overall animation? In other words temporarily have something like zero opacity for all of the other objects so that you can more easily concentrate on the one you might be working with?

Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere but hopefully this isn't a dumb question (there are no dumb questions?). In the Objects & Animation editor under the Properties tab the third entry is "Main object". I never quite understood the need or significance of labeling one (or more?) of the objects as a Main object. Could somebody illuminate this?

What can I say--I am an engineer and always making more work for myself

Yeah that is essentially the equivalent for what I do in Faststone but there are other reasons I prefer using Faststone for this is that it is "snappier" and has other nice features like double clicking the thumbnail and getting a full screen image, etc. I guess the sorting needs to be done somewhere and my current approach seems to work fine where I used Faststone to append a number to each filename.

Here is an issue I have always encountered when putting together a vacation show with a variety of still images and video clips. I normally first go through all of the potential jpg's and mp4's to select what I actually wish to use. Then I copy the selected ones ot a new folder named, for example, UK2024 Images. I do this using the Faststone Image Viewer which I have used for years and the default ordering is normally by Filename. The mp4 clips NEVER fall into the right place, order-wise, so I move these around manually in Faststone. I also might want to move images and/or mp4's to other places just for artistic reasons. So in the end everything is sorted the way I want it in Faststone which creates a custom ini file that describes the sorting. Of course when I open this folder in PTEAV it knows nothing about the sorting when I drag down images into the Slide/Timeline section. So now I need to re-sort them within PTEAV into the order I chose in Faststone. I think the answer to this is to do one intermediate step and RENAME all of the sorted images within Faststone or another program to something like Image1. . . , Image2. . . , Image3. . . etc. and THEN drag them into the Slide/Timeline. Then namewise they will be in the proper order I suppose. I hope I explained this correctly but does it seem like the proper way to get the slides in the preferred order without needing to do it within PTEAV? Thanks.

Hi--a bit late to the party here but it was a great find discovering PicturesToExe/PTEAV a couple of years ago and have made a few fun travelogue videos since then--am working on a couple of new ones for recent trips now. I keep discovering new features every time I get around to using the program.

Looks like I found a kindred spirit. I have fun composing travelogues like these on many of our vacations. I spend a bunch of time integrating music clips that fit the location or scene (e.g., John Denver songs etc. for a trip to Colorado) and I also tend to create some funny clips or images when we travel with our friends (like fading in an image of Aiden Turner in full Podark-on-horseback mode for our exploration of Cornwall). It has been a fun hobby.

Very clever

Yeah my "travelogues" tend to have a few hundred slides. I scanned back and forth through the Timeline and didn't find the slide as quickly as I thought I could so it would be nice to maybe have a right-click option for slides in the Slide Viewer that is something like "jump to slide". It would just be a nice handy feature.

Not sure if I or anyone else had already asked this so sorry if that is the case. I know that in the basic Slide View panel when you actually pick slides or videos to be in the project by putting it in the Timeline the label below the slide changes from White to Blue to indicate the slide/video is being used in the project. So far fine. But when you see a slide was chosen in the Slide View is there a quickie shortcut to find where that slide is on the Timeline other than manually scanning through the Timeline? The reason I ask is that I do not necessarily work consistently on a project and am just now coming back to one I started a few months ago and I was trying to quickly locate the slide on the Timeline.

Welcome RCRA. I understand completely and have to agree that PTEAV is not the easiest app to jump into and start creating on day one. I had been using a more intuitive piece of slideshow software for a number of years but that went out of business which is why I transitioned to PTE. PTEAV is extremely powerful and you really need to get into the weeds and play around with all of the features and effects. Watching Barry's videos was a great help as well as posting questions on this forum. My shows are limited to vacation travelogues so obviously I am not using PTEAV on a regular basis so sort of have to relearn things every time I use it.

It's been a while since putting together my last vacation project and I probably forget 80% of what I learned about creating a PTE project. I am nor sure if I asked this before but I would like to use my last project sort of as a template or guide in creating the new one. So I want to have the old project available to view while creating the new one. I am not sure if you can have two projects open at the same time and switch between them or is it better to launch two instances of PTE and load the old project into one while working on the new project in the other? Thanks, Doug

Just my opinion but between the huge advances in quality of photos taken with SmartPhones and the post-processing software available these days, I am sort of at the point that I will be leaving my cameras home rather than lugging around. On my last several vacations where I was figuring one of my Fujifilm bridge cameras would provide most of the photos for my video shows, I ended up mainly using the photos taken with the SmartPhone.

I have Photoshop and On1. It was clear that wanting to do anything past the very basic photo mods required dealing with layers and masks. I went through various video tutorials for both programs but getting a comfortable feel, particularly with masks, never quite seems to totally sink in. Main problem is that it is not apparent to me when a mask would be desired or needed. It is second nature and obvious to those very experienced uses of those programs and people who use them on a regular basis. The only thing that has sunk in with me is black mast blocks and white mask is clear.

Obviously I need to learn about masks.

So I should load one of the mp4's in the timeline and will become apparent?