potwnc

One thing I miss from previous versions is the ability to see the pixel size of my image when previewing the show with the mini player. Previously in the slide preview it was very convenient to see the actual size in the top right of the image, e.g., 800x600. Is there any way to see it somewhere when playing a show in the mini player?

I'm no longer sure what the real issue(s) is (are) being discussed in this thread but here's my input for what it's worth... There are now many (expensive) digital display devices that go beyond the full-HD video standard of 1920x1080 resolution in one or both dimensions. These are generally used in ultra high quality computer gaming environments and professional architecture, engineering etc. workflows Unless you play/work in one of these environments I'm not sure why you would need such a display device. If you plan to create video output from PTE I can't imagine why you would need any device beyond 1920x1080 resolution (which is what I use) to produce or display it. If you plan to create .exe output from PTE you cannot yet build or buy a computer powerful enough to display a slideshow longer than a few seconds that uses 1920x1080 output of true optical pixels with P/Z/R. This is not a limitation of PTE; it is a limitation of the current state-of-the art of computer hardware that can run MS Windows. Even producing video output I recently discovered an MS Windows limitation that (roughly) your images should be no larger than 3x full-HD. That limitation might be increased with a 64-bit version of PTE but, until that day comes, I wouldn't consider the value of owning or targeting your PTE output for any device greater than 1920x1080. Ray

The resolution will never be there... The resolution of DVDs is "standard definition" which is nowhere close to "high definition." This is a simple mathematical limitation that cannot be overcome with any technology. To reduce it to the simplest of concepts, imagine I have three numbers - 734 - and I ask you to "upconvert" those numbers to ten numbers... What are those ten numbers? This means that the whole concept of "upconverting" is yet another of those phrases invented by marketing departments to sell new products into an already saturated market in which they were losing money. (They actually did this because consumers didn't buy DVD-HD and Blu-ray players in large quantities when those technologies first came into the market.) Having said that, there are some "tricks" that some of the so-called "upconverting" players can perform... Jim, you are comparing apples and oranges here... probably the store you went to showed it to you on a high-end Blu-ray player that has the "tricks" I mention above. Whch "upconverter" did you use before you took that DVD to the electronics store? Please be aware that the current version of the software (I assume you are using PTE 5.x?) is not written for HD output to DVD. While it supports raw HD output (and it does so better than any competing software) the DVD burner part of the software is not designed specifically for DVDs played in "upconverting" players. WnSoft are very in-tune with technology developments in the world of HD and have already announced plans to further develop PTE in this area. Ray

Mike, Peter is correct about this. Working recently with very high-resolution images with very large file sizes I thought I'd discovered a limitation of PTE but it turned out to be a limitation of Windows. A large part of the best answer to your question depends on whether you intend to produce mainly .exe files as output or video footage. If you can answer that I can give you some suggestions. Ray

While there's no simple solution here are a couple of observations: 1) The last time I ran spyware/virus/trojan detection on my PC - quite recently - it checked for about 115 thousand known threats! There are that many of them out there because it's worth the time of the *******s who write this stuff if it works for them a tiny percentage of the time. 2) I once was admin of a (minority interest) discussion board. The spam eventually became so common relative to the real posts that I closed the whole board down. Fact is that few people keep their PC protection up to date and the spammers/hackers know this and so we should expect this kind of incident to increase, not decrease. Rather than a "knee-jerk" reaction to this incident (which is the first one I know of on this board), I'd suggest leaving things the way they are for now and changing the policy - to allow PMs only after a certain number of posts - if this repeats/continues. But then I keep my PC protection up to date and recognize spam/phishing pretty fast... we may have members of whom that's not the case. My 2 cents... Ray

All 3 of mine were from "Miss Anta Ngoya." Hopefully Igor can delete/block the account soon and this person will realize they were phishing in the wrong pond.

Igor, this is excellent news. I assume you no longer want to support HD-DVD after today's news from Tokyo? Count me among your beta testers! Ray

In case anyone hasn't heard this already, Toshiba today announced they will drop the HD-DVD format. Blu-ray is the winner (for now) of the HD format war. This is probably why Igor today posted: "We will support Blu-Ray and AVCHD in next versions. I think - in 5.3."

Ron, please edit your post to remove my email address otherwise I'll just get lots of spam email because of it! I can be contacted via www.peoplesoftheworld.org/contact.jsp or via private message on this forum. You (Ron) are correct. PTE currently cannot burn Blu-ray discs - or any other High Definition content. But it does support video output to HD format. To burn that output to a Blu-ray disc you will also need authoring software that supports the Blu-ray format, a Blu-ray burner and Blu-ray discs. A better option if you're just getting into this is to burn AVCHD to standard DVD discs. This is covered in the HD appendix of the User Guide, pinned in the tutorials forum. Ray

Colin, Thanks for all the time you've spent repeating all these tests and, in the end, confirming my findings. I've been doing some more research in the meantime and it does appear that this is a Windows issue and not a PTE issue. I'll do some more research before I update my HD tutorial for the PTE 5.2 release. It still shocks me that Windows would produce this error with my small project given the specs of my PC! I guess this is why those who work with such very demanding A/V projects use Macs and UNIX computers. All I can say is that I hope Igor gets the Mac version working very soon! Fortunately, with Lin's "superzoom" technique I will be able to work around this limitation - although it will cost me a lot of time dividing up my images. Ray

Colin, Do you have any new information? Ray

Colin, I don't have Windows 2000. But how strange that XP itself would be the problem in the equation! I wonder if it's any better with Vista - which I also don't have. Igor, is there any way you can report this to Microsoft for them to investigate?

Colin, We're still not comparing apples with apples here... your project has all the images set to "Fit to slide" mode in the Objects and Animation view, whereas mine has them set to "Original." Also, your project does not have defined transition effects, whereas mine does. Also, your project has no music track, whereas mine does. Would you be willing to make the first of these changes and post your results? (If not I can post a .pte file with these changes that you can just download it and try on your PC.) Then we'll see whether that's the difference or whether we need to look at the custom transition and sync to music variables. Again, thanks for your continued help with this - I'm sure all members will benefit once we figure this out!!! Ray

Colin, Thanks for all your help with this. I just sent you a private message via the forum. Ray

Colin, Could you please upload just the .pte file - without the photos? Thanks

Colin, I'm running XP Pro, 64-bit. Can you try with all your slides having zoom? And try with hardware acceleration turned on and your Screen option at Full screen (not Windowed) and 16:9? Thanks Ray

Lin, Thanks for your reply. Some of it makes sense in the context of what I'm doing so let me explain further... They are around 25MB on the disk. The pixel dimensions are about 8,500 x 5,500. No. These images were not taken with a digital camera. They are from (35mm) slides taken with a real camera and scanned at 6,400 dpi optical. There is no optical interpolation. The scan produces 48-bit tif files at around 300MB each which I then convert to 24-bit in Photoshop and save as JPEG with the highest quality setting. Yes. I'm rendering at 30 progressive fps. But look at the specs of the PC I'm using. The SAS hard drives, the video card I have and the 800MHz DDR2 memory are easily capable of meeting the 3GB/s throughput I'm demanding to do what I'm trying to do. When I built this PC about 6 months ago it was the most powerful PC that could be built at the time! I realize that without the PZR of 5.x this is not comparing apples and apples but if I "render" a .avi from 4.4x with a codec other than the PTE codec then there is true video rendering being processed. So a fade from image 1 to image 2 still requires both images to be loaded into memory at the same time to perform the calculation required. But again without the PZR requirement or hardware acceleration being available in 4.x this is also not apples versus apples. That's how I realized that Gary's problem (reported on the thread that lead to this one) is not the same problem. I don't expect PTE's preview or its .exe output to be able to do what I require with my current project; that would be beyond current hardware technology. But your point is exactly why I think this is a bug or an unnecessary limitation in PTE for a PC as powerful as mine. My problem is that the render to .avi output also has the image load error. Given that the rendering to .avi output does not have to be perfromed in real time, why does it matter to PTE how long it takes to load the image and then process the effect? Even in 4.4x the render is also not performed in real time when using large images and HD output. For the project I'm working on the photos have already been taken and can't be taken again. Can you point me to the "Superzoom" tutorial so I can understand this better? Can you point me to this? I'm trying to achieve exactly what PTE can do that these other programs can't... produce exceptional, smooth PZR with the image quality of the original image without downsizing to reduce that quality. I can get PTE to output the .avi by turning off hardware acceleration but the video then looks bad when played back on a 1080p monitor. Ray

Colin, I'm not sure what you mean here. How big are the actual files on your hard drive - 25MB or 5MB? The error is not a Windows error. I've attached a screen dump of it and the Windows task manager at the time it happens. The actual image containing the error message gets zoomed just as the actual image would if it were the actuual image! If it were a Windows error then Windows wouldn't have the necessary information about my zoom settings for this image. I have 2 CPUs - each is a quad-core Pentium Xeon running at 2.66 GHz. I have 8GB of physical memory and the task manager screen shows most of it is not being used at the time of the error. I have no other applications running. Ray

Because I want to produce full HD (1920x1080 pixels) output with long zooms in the images. That requires very large images, which = very large files.

Igor, Does PTE have a limit on the file size of images? I have a show with only a few (6 or 7) very large (25MB) images and I get an "image load error" picture instead of my actual image. This happens in preview mode and .exe and .avi output with different codecs, but not on the timeline. My PC is poweful enough and has enough memory to load all the images. So it looks like there is a limit designed into PTE itself - but why not give an error message that the image is too large? These same images load fine and produce perfect .exe and .avi output and previews in PTE 4.49. They also load fine and produce perfect .avi output from Windows Movie Maker, Vegas Pro 8b and Pinnacle Studio Plus 10.8. So I don't see any reason why PTE 5.1 can't handle them. If I resize them down to about 5MB then PTE can handle them. Your answer is greatly appreciated as it will determine how I revise the HD appendix of the next version of the User Guide. Ray

André, That's not always true. There are HDTVs that can work in other color spaces. If I am targetting a Blu-ray disc for my medium I will save the photos in NTSC (for N. America) or HDTV profile. Also, many video codecs can be configured as to the color profile output.

My testing is now complete. The bug I have found - or maybe it's just a PTE limitation - is different than Gary's problem and it only affects users trying to work with very large image files - like I currently am working with. I will start a new thread tomorrow with the details of my tests and I will also contact WnSoft support about the problem.

Al, I'm still experimenting here and I've found some interesting things... at the slide where I get the "image load error" if I replace that image with the image immediately before it in the show then "poof" no more "image load error" but if I replace it with the image before that one the "image load error" returns. So I think it really is an image loading error that PTE is having. But why? I have a 70% free space 15,000 RPM SAS drive, 8GB of memory and 2 quad-core 2.66 GHz processors! I load all the same images into PhotoShop at the same time with no problems and my memory usage is tiny! I'm going to resize the images to smaller ones but I have a different project with much larger disk and memory requirements that works fine with PTE 5.1. So the problem makes no sense to me! Ray

I'm thinking I may actually have a different problem/bug. I do not want "Autospread" in my show. I want my own custom synchronization. So checking "Autospread" is not a workaround option for me. I've also tried removing the music track, selecting "Autospread" (just to see what would happen) and using a different music track. I still get the "image load error." I also don't have the red line indicating the music ends early - like Gary's project does. I sure hope Igor will look into this.

Hopefully this will help to get to the bottom of this. I generated both a .exe and 2 .avi's from Gary's project - a .avi using the PTE codec which I then put through Sony Vegas 8 Pro to render to .avi and a .avi using the XVID codec. The results are the same in all 3 cases. It skips slides 6, 7 and 8. These were not the same slides that it skipped for Gary on his PC. That suggests to me that the problem is not with any of the image files themselves, or I would have expected it to skip the same slides for both of us. I then produced a .avi using Gary's same image files (Gary, there are 33 in your .pte project zip file, not 31) but usingWindows Movie Maker. The output was perfect. No skipping and perfectly synched and smooth. If Movie Maker can process his images I would expect PTE to be able to also. I then took the same image files from the project I'm working on that has this same problem when I use PTE 5 or 5.1 and made a show using PTE 4.49 - as above I generated both a .exe and 2 .avi's from Gary's project - a .avi using the PTE codec which I then put through Sony Vegas 8 Pro to render to .avi and a .avi using the XVID codec. Again all 3 outputs are the same - no skipping, no image load error messages, perfectly smooth fades etc. The 4.49 of course doesn't have the PZR effects but nor does Gary's show. By the way, these images come from taking the .tif files from the scanner (scanning 35mm slides) output and using Photoshop CS3 to save them back out as JPGs. They open in and save from Photoshop without a problem. Gary, would you be willing to create the exact same show using the exact same files but using PTE 4.49 instead and let us know your results? I'm now convinced this is a new bug introduced with version 5. While my files are huge at 25MB the fact that I get (almost) the same problem as Gary with his files and we both have PCs that should easily be powerful enough tells me that PTE 5.x itself has to be the culprit in this.