SeismicGuy

I came across this style and it is fascinating. I am still pretty much a novice with this program and enjoy using styles for my travelogue shows I create but have never really created a style (but maybe tweaked those I found). But this particular one seems exceptionally complex and I cannot even figure out the logic to creating it. Do you happen to have a description of the basic steps used to create this written in a "for dummies" manner? Thanks, Doug

I have created a number of slideshows from various vacations where the audience is typically family and friends. The "shows" range from about 15 minutes to almost an hour. The effect I have used most was the "Ken Burns" effect which is basically pan zoom. The software I had been using allowed assigning this effect (or other effects) to all of the slides if you wish or just some selected slides. It also had a "randomize" setting which would vary the actual effect from slide to slide (e.g., if all the slides were Ken Burns and you randomize, then the pan-zoom is different from one slide to the next). Then I would go through the "show" slide by slide and tweak individual slides if needed. Sometimes I would reverse the Ken Burns effect to zoom out rather than in. The goal I am generally going for is to not call too much attention to the transitions and effects since I did not want to distract from the images and videos themselves.

Just to add, as I mentioned these files are inscrutably named but when you open each one you can look at the pte or xml file and kind of figure out what they are. And, again, these folders are located in a few locations at least on my machine.

I was in a similar situation last year when I bit the bullet and was finally abandoning MemoriesOnTv since the original developers stopped developing this a number of years ago. After searching around for what would be a suitable replacement I ended up picking PTE. It took a while for me to get as comfortable with PTE as I was with MOTV and you can search for my numerous posts about this on this forum in several places. MOTV was extremely user friendly and intuitive with a bunch of built-in easy to select transitions and effects for images (or groups of images on a single slide) and I suspect ProShow had a similar approach. I believe the audience for each of these products was somewhat different. MOTV was definitely geared towards folks that merely wanted to take their photos and videos and put together a decent presentation for friends and family. You could essentially do this within about an hour of first installing the program given its intuitiveness. Again I suspect ProShow was the same thing. On the other hand I had not realized there was such a huge audience of very serious end-users out there these days that are more semi-professional/competitive/serious hobbyist types that took putting together a slide show much more seriously. IMHO PTE seems geared much more to those users with an emphasis on getting under the hood and creating your own effects, even though there are some built-in effects that can be used. And for those that don't want to get their hands dirty there are effects that have been created by others that are available for download from various places. Just as an editorial comment I think getting too deep into the weeds with fancy transitions and styles sort of gets in the way of the photos and videos that you are showing--kind of like the gearheads that get so technically involved in PhotoShop to produce the "perfect" image. But if you play around with PTE and search out the various tutorials, you will probably end up enjoying the program.

This is similar to a question I posted in the Styles & Templates section about the manner in which the styles are saved and where are they located on my computer. Some appear to be located in the C:\Program files\WnSoft\PTE AV Studio 10.0\Main\All\StylesAndTrsnsitions\Slide Styles folder and some are in the C:\Users|Username\Documents\PicturesToExe folder and/or C:\Users\Username\Documents\PTE AV Studio\Slide Styles folder. Unclear to me whether these are all somehow combined but I also screwed things up by manually trying to move things around outside the program.

Yeah from what I can infer the built-in styles are stored in one location and the styles that are downloaded from other sources (i.e., the *.ptestyle file that generates the various actual styles files once imported) are stored elsewhere. Not sure why you would not want ALL of the styles files to be in the same location but my moving things around outside of the program certainly screwed things up.

Maybe the context of why I am asking will clarify. I may have manually moved some of the Styles folders that are generated after importing a *.ptestyle into the Styles folder that is a few levels within the C:\ProgramFiles folder and this apparently screwed things up. Importing additional *.ptestyle files often times does not work and the ability to rename categories/styles within the Slide Styles window also often times does not work. I guess my manually moving things around outside of PTEAV might have screwed things up.

This is regarding Windows 10. I always like to know where various files are actually located on my computer and, specifically, was wondering about location(s) of the various Slide Styles folders (i.e., ones with names like 00EBF8AD-0F41-4840-8221-E3FFA1351767. There is a StylesAndTransitions folder that has a SlideStyles folder within it located a few levels below the C;\ProgramFiles folder. I assume those might be the standard ones that come with the program? But then when you download a *.ptestyle from an outside source and import it into PTE, those files generate the actual slide styles folders and them places them somewhere. Is the "somewhere" the location that you can pick in the program preferences (I think the apr.ini entry is "StylesAndEffectsFolder =" which may be a totally different location? If so the "standard" and downloaded/imported styles end up in totally separate locations? Is there some reason not to have them both in the same location such as the few levels below the C"\ProgramFiles folder? I realize this may be a geeky question but I was just curious. Thanks.

As I said my issue was that I often used background music from a variety of sources, mostly mp3 instrumental or sometimes vocal downloaded from various sources on the web. These often have different gain levels and the automatic normalize feature, while doing nothing that could not be done manually, was a very nice one-step quick solution.

I recently asked something similar and there is the Zip option on the Files drop down where you can essentially archive the entire project

Excellent--I hadn't noticed that before. My bad.

I couldn't find if PTE AV had this feature or not but it was available in the program I had been using and is very slick. The "archive" feature in that program would create a zip file of all of the photos, videos, and music clips. You would then be able to take the zip file anywhere, even to a different computer and then get back to editing the project by unzipping the archive to any folder and loading up the project from that folder--all of the referenced files would be property loaded. This was always very handy for me since I generally keep everything on an external drive and the drive letter can change if I happen to add or replace external drives or whatever. Having a single archive zip file that can be unzipped anywhere (even another computer) would be a real plus. Doug

Exactly right. I looked back through my longer projects and there are anywhere from 10 to 20 audio clips from different sources. Sometimes I use the entire clip (song) and sometime I would trim them to be linked with just a number of slides. In any case no matter what method you use it would be a pain jumping back and forth along the audio track to try and manually coordinate the volumes. It was nice to let the computer do the work for me much quicker and more accurately.

I looked back at some of the longer vacation travelogues I have created and there were 10 to 20 song clips used. Sometimes I used the full length of the song and other times I would use trimmed clips to add a certain comic or dramatic effect for a series of slides. For example in a trip to France and Belgium there were a series of images taken at the Normandy beaches. So I downloaded some WWII video clips of the landing mixed in with my own photos and used Saving Private Ryan as the background audio for those several slides. Going back and forth through 10 or 20 clips manually adjusting the volume would have been tedious and the "normalize" feature eliminated that hassle.

Not so simple though. If you have a number of audio clips and there are differences in the loudness between them, it would basically be trial and error going clip by clip. Probably first decrease the loudest or increase the softest and then do the other in-between ones and keep moving the curser from clip to clip to check the effect until you are satisfied (I also posted this in the General Discussion section). Alternatively, you can probably pre-process the clips in some third-party audio software to equalized the loudness and then move the processed clips into PTE. The normalize option in the program I had been using that shall remain nameless was a very nice feature that let the computer do the work all within the program.

Doing that is what I was referring to as the "workaround" but it takes some tinkering--making an adjustment, listening to hear if it was accurate enough, tweaking again if necessary, etc. and you would need to be playing around with each of the clips separately going back and forth to check that they were all kind of same loudness. A normalize feature would let the computer quickly make those determinations for you and probably more accurately.

It would be nice to have a normalize option to smooth out loudness differences when you have a mix of background music, some of which can be louder or softer than the other clips.

Looks like I can also adjust the volume to above 100% for the quietist clips if I enter the number since the slider only goes up to 100%. Normalize would be a nice feature for upcoming versions so that you don't have to jump in and out of different programs.

I suspect there is an answer but not yet obvious. In my slide shows I generally have a number of songs for background music, all of them mp3. When doing this the "volume" often differs from one song to the next, either due to the way it was recorded or the songs themselves (one song might be just quieter by nature compared to the one before). The program I was previously using had an option at the end to "normalize" all the music clips so that they sounded equally loud. Is there something similar in PTE or is the workaround just to reduce the volume on the loudest clip? Doug

Hey Wideangle--after 10+ years of using a certain tool or process it just gets ingrained and subsequent alternatives are naturally compared against the first. That being said I am not saying that PTE needs to have a look and feel like MOTV (or any of the other programs out there that users have migrated from). HOWEVER it is just comforting to know that everything I could do in MOTV has an analogous procedure in PTE. The multi-image slide thing is really almost exactly the same but just presented in a different manner. You could hit the "multi-pictures slide" button and move slides in afterwards or you can pick the slides first and then hit the "multi-pictures slide" button. After the slide was created you could double-click it and do more editing and add more slides or remove/replace slides. The key nice usability thing was that there was a clearly marked "multi-pictures slide" button to begin with and usability is a big thing for me. Doug

Sorry again--just figured it out. No need to "move track up" just click the audio and slide it up. Duh again!

Here is another minor annoyance but I am sure there is an answer. My slideshows typically have background music often made up of several selections downloaded from the internet or from music I already have. With MOTV you these would just all be on one "track" one after the other and you could do whatever trimming/manipulation you wanted to do for each of the selections along that track. In addition you could do some limited manipulation of any audio that is contained in an mp4 video slide (fade, mute, etc.). You can do the same thing with PTE AV but the difference is that you have to Separate the audio from the mp4 slides first and they show up as separate tracks. If you have a bunch of mp4 slides in the show you get quite an unwieldy "thick" panel that shows each and every audio piece on a separate track (see the image for what I mean). I don't really see a reason to have such a wide display of the audio, especially when the audio from one slide is far away from any other separated audios. So I tried to move the right small track upwards to condense the view thinking it would end up on the same track as the next audio up. But what happened was that the track did go up but the other one went down so the overall width of the audio track area did not shrink. I figure there is a way to have the several small separated audio tracks on a single track but not quite obvious.

I think I might have done something wrong and it comes down to the way I created what I would refer to as a "multi-image" slide. The first time I think I selected the first slide, went to Objects and Animation, ADDED the second slide (which happened to be next to the first) added another Key Frame, did the tweaks and that was it. The result shows up as a single slide both on the Slide View and the Timeline. But I guess my mistake is that the Second slide (that was used to make the multi-image slide) still shows up as a second slide following the multi-image slide. I guess that is as intended and all I need to do (if I want) is to delete that second slide from the Slide View (or Timeline). The second way I tried this probably makes more sense. I first inserted a Blank Slide and chose the two images I wanted to use for that slide. It looks to me like those images do not necessarily need to come from the File List window but can actually come from anywhere on your computer. When I was done doing it this way the multi-image slide (that had been an inserted Blank slide) shows up as expected. So it looks like my "mistake" in the first attempt was not removing that second slide from the Slide or Timeline view since it was already integrated into the multi-image slide. I guess my confusion again originates from the way this type of thing was handled in the MOTV program I've been using for the last 15 years. You could start forming the multi-picture slide by first selecting the slides in the Slide view or Timeline view, hit the "multi-picture" button, select the effect you wanted, then the program would render this into a single mp4 slide and insert it in the program while at the same time DELETING the individual slides used to create the multi-image slide. Of course you could always re-insert the individual images as slides again if you wish.

Think I just figured it out although the answer seems very unexpected. The two slides still show up separately on the Slides view but my "creation" shows up as a single slide on the Timeline view and it seems to work correctly.

Thanks. Here is another question I just stumbled on and am stuck. I went to Objects and Animation and am working with two images. I played around with what I wanted to do (basically have the first image fade out to reveal the one below) and the preview seems fine. HOWEVER I cannot figure out how to add the resulting 2-image custom creation back into the slideshow I am working with. Unless I am missing something I do not even see a "save as" option anywhere. Am I missing something?