Lin Evans

Hi Hexeta, My mistake, not yours. I got the information and what you see is my response. I accidentally deleted your part of the message. My response "should" have been beneath. Essentially, it's possible to do what you want to do with PTE - but it will take you a while to learn all the techniques. A good place to start would be to download the free tutorials in the Tutorials and Articles section here: http://www.picturest...php?showforum=8 See the PTE Made Easy - PTE for Smarties section: Best regards, Lin

Hi, I wish I had an answer for you, but actually this "thumb" seems to be something associated with Photoshop Elements and related to creating the actual Panos snowglobe file with your own image inside. Unfortunately, I use Photoshop CS myself and have very little knowledge of Elements so can't be of much help there. Perhaps someone else here on the Wnsoft forum who is familiar with Elements can help answer your question. My part of the puzzle solely concerns PicturesToExe. The portions of the snowglobe which are used in the animation are twofold: First, there is the output from your .ati file which is the Panos snowglobe "action" which creates the actual snowglobe with your own framed photo inside. The "thumb" etc., is part of that portion of the whole. I'll try to explain what my part is: I take a completed snowglobe (it really doesn't matter whether yours or other) and using Photoshop, remove all the interior content except the snow on the floor of the globe which is made partially transparent. I replace the content inside the globe which I removed and replaced with PNG transparency so that when my modified snowglobe is on a layer above your snowglobe created with Elements, anything in between these perfectly coinciding two layers will be seen through my top layer. I then place the three PNG "snow" files on three layers "between" the two snow globes and animate the snow via the pan and zoom features of PicturesToExe. When you play this back either in real time via the "Preview" or as an executable file created with PicturesToExe, the snow falls within the confines of the two overlaying snowglobes and in front of the content of your original snowglobe which resides on the bottom layer and visible because of the transparent nature of the top modified globe. By simply renaming your files as explained in the tutorial, your snowglobe creation containing your own framed picture overwrites and replaces the one I provide as a "placeholder" and PicturesToExe code takes care of the proper size and placement of all these necessary components according to the PTE file which I created for the template. The whole thing is designed to run (animate) for 60 seconds. You can use PTE to copy the slide on the main slide list and paste it as a second, third, fourth, etc., slide so that the animation can continue as long as you wish with each additional pasted slide being a duplicate of the original so that the snow continues to fall for as many iterations of 60 second intervals as you have copied and pasted slides. I hope this helps with understanding the various components and how they interact. Again, I wish I could answer your question about the "thumbs" (icons, etc.) but I really don't know how Elements works. Perhaps Diana on the PanosFX forum might be able to help with that part? You really want to thank Igor and the PTE development team for their fantastic software which allows us all to create many beautiful animated slideshows. I'm just the "carpenter" who did the finish work on Panos' amazing creation using the great PTE architectural features and blueprints as my "tools." Best regards, Lin

Hi, The .atn files are the equivalent of Photoshop actions for Photoshop Elements. Those actions are the creations of Panos at "panosfx.com" where you downloaded the Snowglobe set. What I did was provide Panos and users of his actions with a PicturesToExe "template" along with the png files which I designed to create and animate the snow inside the snowglobe. The template contains the PicturesToExe keyframes and code which allows the animation of snow inside the globe when used with the other modified files provided in the download. You can thank Panos for all the hard work in creating these wonderful actions which allow the user to place their own images inside the beautiful snowglobe creation. As Peter explained, the PTE demo doesn't expire. It's limitation is that it only allows the user to have a total of 10 images in a slideshow and it places the banner which explains that the slideshow or animation was made with a demo copy of the software. The executable files which you create with the demo or any subsequent AVI video files you might create do not "expire." They will not disappear or stop working, etc. My suggestion would be to save a little each month and purchase the very reasonable PicturesToExe program. This software has a lifetime free upgrade. The associated Video Builder portion which makes MacIntosh executable code, creates mp4 h.264 video, allows automated uploads to Vimeo and Youtube, provides for output to iPhone, etc., can be purchased separately at any time. This integrated module has a two year upgrade cycle but the main PTE software has free lifetime upgrades so even ten years from now when something like PTE 12.0 is available, you will still be getting free upgrades. You can use PTE to create beautiful animated slideshows complete with music and numerous types of really great effects and transitions. The Snowglobe animation is just a sample of what you can do with this software and many different Photoshop and/or Elements packages. You can learn to create 3 dimensional cubes and other great 3D effects and objects with this software. It's well worth the investment, even for pensioners like you and me. There are many of us here who are on very limited incomes which is one of the reasons we love PTE - it's not only the "best" software of its kind, it's the least expensive and most powerful! Best regards, Lin

Hi Peter, If you set the value for the 3D pan large enough it will cause the image to "effectively" disappear to a "dot" as far as its visibility on the object on the next layer, but you could do about the same thing with the zoom by zooming out to a point. I really don't see any utility in doing it this way over fading the image via keyframe and opacity. I'm just not certain what Andrew is trying to accomplish..... Best regards, Lin

Hi Andrew, I'm not 100% clear on just what it is you are trying to do. If the slides are in the slide list, you can have a menu which allows you to select any slide at any time. That is you can display slide one then jump to slide 300 if you have either a menu or hot-spot (a hidden button, etc.) programmed to do so. If the slides are in the Objects list in Objects and Animations, and they are in separate layers, the only way you can control their visibility as full screen objects is via keyframe and opacity. You have no ability to change the position of the slides as they exist in their respective layers in real time. You "could" use keyframes to move the slides out of the viewing area and have alternate slides moved into the viewing area. If the slides are smaller (zoomed) to less than the screen display size you could have all three or any combination visible at any time via the pan feature. If you could explain why you want to do this and exactly what it is you are trying to accomplish, maybe someone can help sort it out. Best regards, Lin

Hi Barry, Actually, this package is more designed for those "with" musical experience. With the right skills and understanding of music, Band in a Box can be used to create very useful music in a wide gamut of genres. If you go to the site and listen to some of the compositions, you will find that a skilled user can produce music virtually indistinguishable from that created by some talented musicians who depend primarily on synthesizers to create their primary backgrounds - not unlike some of the music by the talented composers such as Medwin Goodall, etc. I would not suggest this software for someone with no musical training or background, but if you have the requisite background you can produce some very good and quite useful music with this software. Of course, like much of the royalty free music, it's entirely instrumental and there are significant costs to get the necessary "packages" which allow various types of rhythms and styles. What it does is allow a reasonably good musician to have "cheap" backup to perhaps produce his/her own compositions.

Hi Xaver, No, more like 67 year old eyes without glasses or coffee. Best regards, Lin

Hi Xaver, Sorry, I misread your reply. Yes, a minor disadvantage but one which with masking and an inexpensive third party software such as Gimp (free) or PixBuilder Studio (inexpensive) can be implemented in PTE without too much effort providing the user understands the procedures. The combination of selective masking plus opacity levels can generally create about any type of effect possible with more sophisticated blending algorithms although it takes more time to create appropriate masks. Best regards, Lin

Hi Xaver, How and why is this a "major disadvantage?" Could you provide an example of an image which has been so mixed which is not possible with PTE and masking, or with PTE and an inexpensive Photoshop alternative such as PixBuilder Studio? Lin

Hi Dave, I can sympathize with your frustration with this issue, but it doesn't follow "at all" that if there are PTE conflicts with an anti-virus and firewall that it's a problem with the PTE code. There absolutely are known issues where anti-virus software causes issues with not only PTE but with "many" other perfectly good software programs. Symantec NAV 2010 immediately comes to mind. The problem is so pervasive that Symantec has written a "work-around" and even patched the "work-around" so that it would do what they originally intended when it failed to work properly. I have been, and presently am in contact with the Chief Technology Officer at Symantec to try to get this issue resolved. The NAV 2010 SONAR module incorrectly finds PTE created executable code to be problematic and summarily deletes these data filled files. Destroying data is a serious no, no even in the anti-virus world. Companies such as AVG and Kypersky quickly fixed their code which were finding false positives with PTE executables. Symantec is a more difficult company to work with because even some of the senior technical support people have no clue as to "who" is responsible for correcting the problem. Their code is written in numerous countries and like some other companies which I'm familiar with, no one who is immediately accessible has a clue about how to resolve problems which fall outside the normal curve. Windows 7 is not a panacea and has "numerous" bugs which are being discovered and "swatted" daily. It's no different than previous Microsoft products in that respect. It's smaller, less complex and hopefully will be "easier" to debug than the bloatware Vista, but it's far from being a stable product yet. There are conflicts with various manufacturer's hardware, conflicts with thousands of software products and there are numerous software products which simply will not run on Windows 7 at all! We will need to have patience to allow PTE's developers and Window's 7 developers time to work out the kinks. No new product is perfect and a new OS is especially problematic. As has been mentioned by Stu, it will probably be at least Service Pack One for Win 7 before things will completely settle down. The problems people are having could be hardware related (video card), driver related, driver revision related, PTE software related, anti-virus related, firewall related, etc. Most competing presentation slideshow software does not use hardware rendering. This means they use only the CPU rather than the Video card to create on-the-fly images. In the past, some of these software vendors have even asked their users to not use their own software to create DVD's but rather to create ISO files and use third party software such as Nero to burn their DVD's! That's how pervasive these issues of compatibility can be with new operating systems, new hardware and the myriad variables which are involved. Having hardware rendering (using the GPU rather than CPU to create intermediate images for PZR and transform effects) gives PTE the incredible smoothness and quality which set it apart from the competition, but it also makes compatibility issues more complex because it involves more variables such as the video card and drivers and their interaction with both PTE and the new Win 7 operating system. We would "all" love it if everything worked instantly and perfectly, but we will have to ride out the storm until things settle down. We will also have to have patience and cooperate by helping the developers wring out the bugs on the PTE side while Microsoft and others do so on the OS and hardware side. Best regards, Lin

Hi, Thanks for the feedback - there are many new variables which we will have to contend with in the coming months as both users and developers learn to work with the new OS. Best regards, Lin

Hi Jose, Don't forget that it's a two-way street. PTE must make some changes as operating systems evolve, but operating systems also must be debugged and made to work with the millions of existing software programs out there which work just fine with earlier operating systems. The "proof" that Microsoft almost "always" releases their operating systems prematurely, then uses the public as free "beta" testers as is very evident by their release of "service packs" which are not only "security updates" but also code fixes to help quash frequent bugs. Years ago when Win ME replaced Win 98, I modified some of my own Microsoft operating system code to reveal a Windows "splash" which stated "Welcome to Windows ME" "99,000 Bugs and Counting." It wasn't a specious number, but indeed a real bug count generated from actual reports. It will be a while before Win 7 is debugged and everything works as expected. As is always the case, early adopters become defacto, albeit unwilling beta testers. My recommendation would be to go ahead and order your new system, but keep the old one running just for backup. I'm sure Igor and the development team will have PTE working with Win 7 long before Win 7 is properly debugged. Best regards, Lin

Hi Joanne, On skinning cats....... There are several ways in which PTE can achieve what you wish, but I think the terms used in our description the transition might be, at first, a bit confusing. The transition effect is called "fade-in/fade-out" but it is non intuitive requirement that in order to "fade out" there must be a subsequent slide in the slide list. I suspect this may be one reason the developers are adding the "blank slide" feature in the next release. If you take a single slide in PTE at the default of four seconds and set the transition to "fade-in/fade-out" for a value of "2000" (two seconds) you will have a two second fade-in and an abrupt ending. In order to have a "fade-out" for this slide and to use only the slide list, you need to add a black file (jpg, etc.) as a second slide and set it also to fade-in/fade out. Another way to achieve this is to go to Objects and Animations and add a black slide on the Objects List and use the opacity feature and keyframes to fade-in the black slide at the appropriate time. In addition to this, you can do the whole thing as Peter suggests by putting the second and third slide in as "objects" on the object's list and control the timings of the fades via keyframing as explained. PicturesToExe is a very powerful tool, but with this low-level functionality comes a certain need for practice and the resultant experience which you will quickly obtain once you begin working with Objects, Layers and Keyframes. In addition to the above, it's also quite possible to manually "pull" and "push" the keyframes into times before and after those dedicated to the slides. This means you can start a second slide via keyframing while a previous slide is still displaying simply by pulling the second slide's start time (via the keyframe and mouse) into the time slot for the preceding slide. The myriad ways in which various effect can be created makes this a most versatile tool, but one which requires a little time to master. This may, at first, sound confusing. However, if you take a couple slides and experiment with it, you can achieve some very unique effects this way. Hopefully, in the near future I will have some time to create an AVI tutorial on this and add it to the existing twenty two or so which I have made available via the Tutorials and Articles Forum (PTE Made Easy - PTE For Smarties). You may want to avail yourself of these to help you get a jump start on learning to work with PTE. Best regards, Lin

What happens if you put the .scr file in a different folder location then point to this new location? Since I don't have a Windows 7 system, I'm not certain how 64 bit Win 7 handles 32 bit files, but the fact that you can run the preview means that a valid PTE exe file can be run on your system. Can you run the .scr file with the "Run" command? If so, it sounds as if Windows 7 may have some restriction about files in the System32 folder. Can you run other screen savers from the System32 folder? Best regards, Lin

Hi Andrew, Very nice! The only area of possible improvement I could suggest would be to change the linear motion for the text block movement and motion of multiple image simultaneous motion to smooth rather than linear to be more in keeping with the graceful nature of the photos. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, As you can see above, it only "crops" a widescreen image on a 4:3 aspect ratio screen. It also allows "maximum resolution" on the same screen and gives a "full-screen image on an analog TV" If you make a widescreen slideshow without Pan and Scan and try to display it on a 4:3 monitor it will be cropped anyway but it will not display on PAL or NTSC at the full possible resolution. Now that you know how it works, you can choose to use it or not. You can use Google or other search engines to find terms you are not familiar with. I don't know why you couldn't find information on it by simply typing in "Pan and Scan" on your search engine. I found numerous explanations, even on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia....ki/Pan_and_scan Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, It would only make sense to have it disabled by default if the "majority" of users were creating slideshows for wide screen television. Right now, even with the great influx of the new 720p/1080p televisions, the majority of televisions in the world are still the older style with 4:3 aspect ratio. Pan and Scan will autocrop wide shows for these so it still makes sense to have it as a default when more users are seeing shows on the more common aspect ratio screens. It may be that in the future it will make more sense to not have it disabled as a default. For those creating DVD rather than HD, it still makes sense as the default. For those creating 16:9 aspect ratio wide screen shows for viewing only on wide screen monitors or newer televisions at HD resolutions, it doesn't, in my view. Best regards, Lin

Hi Eric, LOL - That was a "major" clue. I was the first to congratulate Igor on the new announced features: My response to Xaver's question was; Logic lesson: Sounds fantastic! Many with be "very" happy with the improvements for sound!! - Translation: of latin: of many, one. Therefore I am one of many who will be "very" happy about the improvements for sound. I'm very happy about "any" improvements in what is already a fantastic program. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, Read here: http://www.divxland....pect_ratios.php Best regards, Lin

Hi Xaver, E Pluribus Unum Lin

I believe it's just a spelling error. I assume Igor means "blank" slide. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, The reason the text "Jumps" or "Shifts" is because on slide three you do not start the slide at zero time on the timeline, but already into a "zoom". Move the first keyframe on slide three back to the zero point on the timeline for slide three and everything will work as expected. Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, Sounds fantastic! Many will be "very" happy about the improvements for sound!! Best regards, Lin

Hi Peter, I'm not certain about how they specifically market the product with the SONAR module. My friend is a U.S. Government employee and it's possible that his version of 2010 is one which was suggested or provided by the Government for his system. I'll have to check with him about whether it's the normal 2010 version, but I suspect it is. I'm as we speak on hold waiting to speak with a Symantec Norton AV engineer which I will do before contacting their CTO. I'm willing to give them an opportunity to correct this before jumping the "chain of command" but I've been dealing with large companies like Symantec for many years on technical issues and past experience has shown me that usually it's the "squeaky wheel" which gets the grease, and that "top down" often works better than going through the ranks to get resolution. The fact that Igor was able to get a quick resolution from AVG and other anti-threat software companies means that at least some of them are willing to cooperate. Symantec is very difficult to deal with because their top executives are, as is common with large companies, isolated from contact with the public. Fortunately, I have lots of experience in getting through the "corporate firewall" to the right person so I expect to have some success shortly for this issue. It's apparent from the fact that Symantec has provided an "exclusion" feature that they have had problems with other perfectly good software being tagged as problematic. Further, the fact that there is already a "patch" for the exclusion means that it's an ongoing issue and even the "exclusion" is apparently not working properly. Of course a file and "folder" exclusion is not a satisfactory "solution" for PTE. It would be a huge imposition for PTE users to try to gather all their PTE executables into a folder and sub-folders to prevent the SONAR module from affecting them. In addition, this would be an unworkable solution for the thousands of "potential" users who might buy PTE and already be running NAV 2010 with SONAR who would have instant "issues." In addition, anyone sending their slideshows in zipped executable format to friends or clients would have to warn them that if they use NAV 2010 they would have to create "special folders" for just their PTE files and exclude these folders from NAV 1010. In short, the "exclusion" work-around works for "application software executables," but not for software which creates "data" executable files. Symantec must "fix" this problem or face potential litigation from those loosing data. Software simply can't delete good data in the interest of "protecting" the user from viruses, trojans or other perceived threats. The proper solution is for Symantec to fix the module. The alternative solution is for NAV 2010 to be blacklisted, for the problem to be made widely public on the internet and for litigation to be initiated against the company preferably as a "class action" lawsuit. Best regards, Lin Followup: 2:23 pm MST I had no real resolution with the technical support people who simply have no power to resolve issues where the NAV software needs revision. I called and left a message for Mark Bregman, Chief Technical Officer of Symantec and hope to get a callback soon - if not, I'll keep calling him until I do. Symantec has a "form" which can be filled out by the developer to challenge "false positives," but the form is designed for false positives on application executables and not for data executable output from the program. Imagine what would happen if NAV 2010 were to flag each and every PowerPoint show as a threat - think there might be a speedy "resolution? LOL... We'll give Mark a chance to answer and try to get a resolution to this problem..... Lin

Hi Peter, Just an aside question. Are you, by any chance, using Norton Anti-Virus 2010 with SONAR? The reason is, I'm presently in contact with Symantec about the issue with the defective SONAR module erasing PTE executable files and finding them as "questionable." Perfectly good PTE exe files are being deleted by SONAR using the very latest iteration. I have been in contact with the Symantec technical support, who have been less than helpful. They keep telling me that the "solution" is to put all PTE executables into a "folder" or "folders" and "exclude" these folders from the SONAR testing. I have explained to both the first and second technical support level that this is absolutely "NOT" a solution. People who use PTE and purchase Norton Anti-Virus will summarily have their files deleted the first time they run the anti-virus. Users of PTE who send their slideshows to unknowing clients who are using NAV 2010 with SONAR will assume that the PTE files are infected. I'm awaiting a call back which was promised yesterday. If I don't receive a call in the next few hours today, I will contact the Symantec headquarters in California and speak with their Chief Technical Officer Mark Bregman about this issue and totally bypass their inept technical support which is somewhere off-shore - probably in India. Let me know if you are using NAV 2010. I have a very close friend who is very technically experienced who is using it and keeping me updated about the lack of progress in eliminating this issue. I send him files for testing every week since he downloads and installs their daily AV data updates. Thanks, Lin