CreativeIndulgence

Hi Lin, I have a similar question/requirement. I have a long series of images, all shot in color, that in P2E (and with a very short display time; e.g. 100ms) animate, as they were shot from a moving car with a high frame rate (12 fps). While the client likes the look we're creating for him, he would like to see the last 100 or so frames slowly fade from color to B/W, as well as from tack-sharp to very blurry. While I'm also trying to see if this is something I can automate in Photoshop, I was hoping that there's a transition in P2E to (a) slightly decrease the color sat from one frame to the next, and ( iterate the value of this (since I have some 100 frames to apply this to). It sounds like this isn't doable, and perhaps will never be, but from your quote above: "decide which transitions you want to use" wouldn't be violating the design philosophy of presentation software for the look I need to achieve. Hoping for help/suggestions on how to do this... Thanks, Jerry

Brian - Thank you for taking the time to simply type out all the information! Even with flying fingers, it still takes a while. And yes - YouTube is not kind to those wanting a better than "chunky" look. That's especially true if, as professional photographers, we've put so much effort into creating nice clean images and nice clean productions. Regarding the plethora (love that word) of 'SWF-Makers' - the one concern is that installing and trying a bunch of different apps introduces its own risks. First and foremost, there's no such thing as a clean un-install (the best one can do is restore the machine to an earlier snapshot, however that's been created). And lots of app downloads - again some obvious risks. You're obviously much more experienced with video production so if you do have a particular maker you're partial to (and acknowledging your comment about reviewing for myself), would greatly appreciate your recommendation. Again - thanks for the great dialog! If ever you find yourself in the Seattle, Wa, USA area, please do let me know! Best wishes,

Hi Igor - Interesting suggestion... Once I've uploaded the Uppod player to my site, will that require other viewers to have this or some other plugin on their machines to view my slideshow? Certainly, I want to avoid the SWF format (per Brian's comments) and stay with the better presentation from what was generated from PTE. My MP4 files look and play fine (outside of local issues with one of my graphics cards). Thanks!!! (And thanks for such a great application!)

Hi Brian, Mike. Thank you so much for weighing in, and the comments you and others have offered. Mike - The tool you mentioned looks promising as well, and I'll be giving it a good trial run to see what it produces, and how that compares against the original MP4. Brian - The key point you raised - here's the clarification. I actually am looking for a method to create SWF, WMA, or WMF format files. These are the formats that are natively supported by my web authoring tools (Microsoft Expression Web). Your comments about SWF being very lossy are well taken. When I created the one YouTube piece mentioned earlier in this thread, this was done with 1024x768 mode (when using PTE to create the MP4). What I don't know is how a SWF file will compare to whatever the YouTube "black box" created after my MP4 was uploaded to the server. Now that we're moving in the direction of some web authoring, I'm just looking for whatever will allow me to nicely embed some of our other PTE presentations. The ideal would be if there are less conversion steps of course. Again - thank you both!

Hi Mike - Thank you for the quick answer. I see that the AVI of a presentation I have results in a file size of about 56 mb. However, the MP4 I generated was about 230mb. That's a pretty significant difference in size, and presumably quality. I also see that the AVI appears to be a temporary file that I have to "catch" and clone at the right time, else PTE will delete it. I'm hoping to create as hi-quality a SWF or WMF as I possibly can, something that will be the equivalent of the HD video I've already created on YouTube: http://blog.jerryandlois.com Do you have any favorite AVI to SWF converters you can recommend? I'm always leery of what you may also "inherit" from the various shareware sites out there. Many thanks!

Hi all, I'm sure this question has been raised before, but the search results seem to all address "flash" in conjunction with YouTube etc. The question is this - is there a way to save a project as a Flash file (.SWF)? I'm working with a web authoring system (Microsoft Expression Web) that allows me to embed flash files, and need to see if P2E presentations can be saved in this format. Similarly, the same question but for any Windows Media file formats (.WMA, .WMV, etc.) Thanks as always for your help! Best,

Lin - While we've only communicated a few times, you've been extremely helpful and offered great insights. Wishing you the very best as you address your wife's health issues; that is just not easy to contend with. Best wishes to you and yours! Jerry

Hi Lin - Interesting animation... In HD on YouTube, both the falling snow as well as the very slow zoom in are very smooth. I'm not sure what that tells me though. I'm not a hardware dude (unless it's DSLRs) so the discussion on various video cards and modes isn't that enlightening I'm afraid. You're spot on that it's the card, however. I had just finished paving and reinstalling Windows on our hi-end laptop. On that machine, the HD mode for our YouTube video looked great. It doesn't have any other players installed on it (we have to keep it very lean), so I'll probably not be able to see how the MP4 looks. Then again - guess I don't need to... I'm curious about one other thing - and that's you have a 1600x1200 video. What were the other settings you selected when creating this? In particular, "mode" and "fps". If I increase the quality more, is that something YouTube will reflect (realizing it's a much longer upload time of course). Again - thanks for your help. PS - hope you enjoyed our presentation - the travel in Alaska was beyond incredible!

Hi Lin - Thank you so much for your continued support! First, the video card I have is NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS, with 256mb Second, here's a link to the YouTube video (what you saw was a quick 'n dirty chop-up of the real thing) I'd love to find out if this animates smoothly when viewing with the HD option turned on. For us, it's also stilted like what we're seeing on the local machine. Then again - if it's a limitation of the video card, that puts my mind at ease actually. I'll look at the other info you provided, but wanted to get an immediate reply to you now... Again - Thanks!

Hi Igor - Actually I haven't. The MP4s are then uploaded manually to YouTube as that's the final target. What's happening there - the same jerkiness shows when playing on YouTube HD as it does on my local machine (hi end PC, using Apple software to watch). I also have Windows media player, v11, but it doesn't have the codecs for MP4s. Since I am seeing the same behavior on both the local machine and on YouTube (both Firefox and IE7), it didn't seem necessary to look for other local machine players. Suggestions - greatly welcomed! Thanks!

For myself, a very new user to P2E (though I've owned versions going back a few years), I greatly welcomed the new menu addition. I'm still working through some of the kinks as I'm now trying to produce a quality versions that are optimized each for both .EXEs as well as YouTube (i.e. two separate output files). I'd love to know more about what the various HD choices are, especially when I explore the custom menu options, but the overall notion of a "Create" menu was a great idea. All that in the FWIW category

Hi all. Again - many thanks for this latest version. Another item I'm seeing, and wondering what I may be doing wrong (or if anyone else is seeing this). I have a presentation with a number of slides that have nice slow buttery-smooth pans and/or zooms. When I use create a HD version, (using the any of the pres-set settings), the resulting MP4 plays back very very jerky; nothing like what we see in P2E or the resulting .EXE files. The higher the resolution in a HD version, the more the jerkiness is pronounced. I've uploaded an abbreviated version of the slideshow to a secure server so you can download this safely and see what I'm talking about: http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?acti...OOW50TWxMWEE9PQ Would love to know if there's a way to get smoooothhhhh output... Thanks!

Hi Lin - Thank you for the quick response! It looks like P2E is not creating the intermediate MP4 file. To clarify my process slightly, I'm simply selecting the "Publish to YouTube" option from the Create menu. I've tried this with two variations on the output choice 1. Using the default folder (i.e. the same folder that the project lives in), and 2. Using a separate folder for the output Regardless, no MP4 gets created. All the other steps of the process work just fine (and you can see the progression through the slides as they're being converted). So, if I understand you correctly, your suggestion is to manually create the MP4, and then upload to YouTube. If so, I have a "major however". The MP4 that was an intermediate file from the first (successful upload test) was about 55mb. If I instead simply opt to create the MP4 by itself, from the same project, the file is about twice as large (100mb). The new project has about the same number of slides (around 55), and is the same play time and with the same music. So it looks like I need to find out why P2E isn't creating the intermediate file... Thanks again!

Hi all, First - just loving the new release. Congratulations on all the hard work done! Here's the issue: Yesterday I successfully "published" my first test slideshow in HD format to YouTube. All's happy, everything worked great. Today, I have a real presentation to publish. P2E goes through all the steps just fine, except for the very last one: "Uploading video file". For that stage, it took just a split second and then updated the "progress" indicator to indicate it was Done, at 0 kbit/s. My net connectivity is just fine (I'm writing this message now). P2E didn't indicate any issues with my YouTube logon credentials. It just quit exactly the same way in two different attempts. The new slideshow is about the same length as the test show I uploaded yesterday, so I don't understand what happened here. Would appreciate any insights, as this presentation is actually important and time-sensitive. Many thanks,

Hi all. I've just finished creating my first presentation, to be used/viewed at a very large week-long boat show here in Seattle. Using version 5.5 deluse of PicturesToExe was excellent, once I understood the basics for simple pan and zoom. It's SUCH a fantastic application!!! But - ran into a behavior I need to better understand. Details: 160 slides, with a soundtrack of two songs, exactly 11:00 minutes long. I want the slide show portion to be the same time length as the sound track. I have customized 25 of the slides to have longer display times, some with pan and zoom animation. All slides have the same fadein/fadeout transition, just their display times that varied. If I selected the project option to spread the slides' play time to forcibly match the time length of the sound track, I lost all the time settings of the 25 customized slides. This was true, even if I selected "use customized settings" on a per-slide basis. If I don't use that project option, then I have to manually update the times of all the slides, look at the overall presentation's play time, and match that to the soundtrack's play time. Is there a way to get the best of both worlds here (both customized timeframes's time frames + still have the overall presentation match that of the soundtrack)? Hope the question makes sense... Many thanks,

Hi all! Awesome info, and thanks to everyone for weighing in. Actually, Hawk had the insight that solved this. I had done everything else correctly (thanks for the confirmation, Jeb), but all my image files were about 600k to around 1mb. And these were my "lo-res" JPGs. Simply downsizing took care of everything. Judy, thanks but I absolutely will be using PZR as well, and actually have been wanting this for some 2 years or more. Also, thanks to "The Dom" for his tutorials. Just went through the PZR and P2E is even more fricking awesome than I realized! Thanks again. Doubtless there will be more questions down the road... Jerry

Hi all. New here to this awesome looking product, and looking forward to what we'll accomplish. I have an upcoming project that I'm gearing up for, and hope that P2E will allow me to do the following: Suppose I have 100 images. And suppose that I want to have the first 10 images play at a frame rate of <say> 3 images per second, and then have a 3 second duration on the 10th image. Repeat for all 100 images. Said differently, what I'm hoping to do is to have a very rapid-fire sequence play (no transition effects needed), hold on an intermediate image, and then repeat this cycle for the next group. Is this possible? [uPDATE] With P2E 5.1 deluxe (full version): I just tried creating a simple slide show with 100 images. After clicking on the Timeline button, then Timed Points, then Set Time of Points, I assigned all slides to 333ms (i.e. 1/3 second). The playback both as preview as well as from a .EXE had very inconsistent timing. A lot of images in the project were skipped during playback (perhaps accounting for the irregular timing). A quick guess is that easily 30% of the images don't display, perhaps more. I also tried assigning a 1 sec time for the opening slide, and hit the Update button. This also did not work during preview, etc. Trying to manually update the length of a timed point (i.e. slide duration) doesn't seem to "stick" in that no matter what value I assign, it reverts to the earlier value. It's also quite hard to select a time point, when they're all crunched together in the timelines dialog. Is there a better way for me to do this for the "exception slides"? I have all transition effects turned off, a 4 gig very fast computer. Many thanks in advance - this looks like a very helpful user's forum. Best wishes, Jerry