Lin Evans

Hi Xaver, Really strange - it doesn't look that way on any of my three systems. Lin

Hi Xaver, That's strange - it looks perfectly normal in my v6.0 Beta here: Lin

Hi David, You may also want to download a new AVI tutorial I just posted on the 3D Transform which explains its use and some of the features... You can find it in the Frequently Asked Questions section on the PTE Made Easy series found in the sub heading of Tutorials. It will be in the last position among the numerous tutorials in the PTE For Smarties series. Lin

Hi Folks, I just added a new tutorial on 3D Transform to the PTE Made Easy (PTE For Smarties) section in the Tutorial forum here: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=7901 It's in the last position among the tutorial linked there. This reminder will be removed in a couple weeks..... The tutorial will show some of the reasons for the 3D Transform feature and explain the use. Lin

Hi Eric, Yes, though you can probably get decent results with just the better video card with a portable, it's actually not PTE which is driving the need for increased performance, but rather the operating system. If you can find an older model laptop which can use XP rather than Vista, you don't need the additional RAM and 2 gigabytes will do fine. That's a huge savings right there. The better video card which would be ideal for PTE is only an additional $250 and with inexpensive external hard disks available (a gigabyte fast USB for about $110 here in the states) there really is no need to buy more than the 250 gig standard drive. The better display resolution is probably a must so if one could find an XP system rather than a Vista system the price would be well within reason. Vista is a huge resource hog. Maybe Windows 7 will be less - it remains to be seen. It's also quite possible that not everyone really wants to take advantage of the potential for video drop-in and for the very complex and resource heavy graphics possible with PTE. It's certainly "possible" to have beautiful slideshows without using huge amounts of resources, but definitely the "cube" would be a less expensive way to go than a top-end gaming laptop. It's very easy to get $7,000 into a really top-end gaming laptop. These things weigh over 20 pounds and are anything but convenient as "portable" machines. Someday, these powerful laptops will be very reasonably priced, but right now the manufacturer's know that they can get these ridiculous prices because "some" people will pay to have to have the latest and greatest. Enough, I suppose, to make it feasible to build these monster systems and call them "laptops." The important thing for someone who is contemplating purchasing a laptop to run and demo PTE, is to have sufficient power to handle 1080p with graphics. Realistically, the video card is the most important piece of the puzzle. Actually, for use in the home, it's quite possible to put a small desktop system together which doesn't take up much room at all. My Dell 530 is only 6.5 x 14 x 16 inches. I was able to shoehorn a 750w power supply into it and add an nVidia GeForce 8800 GT card which is more powerful than about any noteook video card and which will play any PTE Graphics or video. The power supply cost me less that $120 and the video card can be had for about $100.00 right now. Couple that with perhaps a 17" flat screen display and you have a pretty compact system which you can put XP on for about $1200 with a 500 gig HD. It will play virtually "anything" you throw at it and doesn't take up much desktop space. The CPU can set on the floor under your desk and the total footprint for the monitor and keyboard is only 20 inches x 16 inches. Best regards, Lin

Hi Barry, The processor itself is actually "cheaper" than earlier models of quad core, etc., Intel, but how much improvement it will offer heavily animated PTE shows, if at all, is still to be determined. Dell jumped the gun on the Intel non-disclosure agreement and began promoting it on their web site, but what really gets expensive is the addition of a decent video card, the faster processor and RAM. Starting with Dell's Alienware $1499 base price, it gets expensive quickly. The top of the line nVidia m280 with one gigabyte video ram (which has about the same video performance as an nVidia 8800 GT on a desktop). The 15" version of the Alienware M15x only allows the nVidia GeForce GTX 260m as a top of line video card. It has an acceptable 810 rating which is less powerful than a GeForce desktop 8800 GT, but still plenty to run probably any PTE graphic combo smoothly. This adds $250 to the base price. Add the Intel i7 920xm 2GHz (3.06 in turbo mode) processor and that a whopping $950 addition. Add the 1920x180 WLED screen to get 1080p and that adds $150. The system comes with Vista Home Edition 64 bit. If you want to upgrade it can cost as much as an additional $150. The system comes with medium performance 3 gig RAM, but with Vista you really need fast RAM and more of it. Most would agree that 8 meg of RAM is ideal. Add the additional fast RAM to get 8 Gig of Dual Channel DDR3 1333 Mhz and that adds another $800. Upgrade the 250 Gig HD to 500 Gigabytes and that adds $75. Want a BluRay player to play those h.264 mp4's? Then add another $150. Want a BluRay Burner instead of just a reader? Then add another $250. Now we are at the best part of $4000 instead of the $1499 for the base system. The bottom line is that if you want the bells and whistles it's not going to be cheap - and you still have a system which will perform about like a relatively inexpensive desktop with a really good high-end video card such as an nVidia GeForce GTX 285 at 1/3 the price. Portable high-end computing is way expensive, no matter how you look at it. Best regards, Lin

Hi, Unfortunately, five images at three frames per second won't give too much of a video type effect regardless of how you attempt to do it. You can use a "Quick - No Transition," put them in as individual slides at about 33ms each (that equates to about three frames per second). The other way would be to stack them as objects and use the opacity setting and keyframes to display each sequentially. You do this by setting the opacity on the first slide (first keyframe) to 100. At 29ms add another keyframe also set to 100. At 33 ms add a third set to zero. For the second object, set the opacity to zero at the start with another keyframe at 29ms to zero and a third at 33ms point set to 100% (this keeps the slide from fading in slowly over the first 29ms) The other three slides should be set to zero at the beginning with a second keyframe also set to zero until you want them to begin fading in. Then add a keyframe at the point where you want them to fade in fully set to 100 percent. This is how you can simulate a frame by frame play using opacity. Best regards, Lin

You may also want to consider my template here: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=10658 It's being expanded to include more time. It's not for long clips, but works very well for short duration (up to about 30 seconds) video using decompiled frames. The disadvantage is system resources. The advantage over putting decompiled frames into individual slide slots is versatility and being able to control size, placement, etc., because the frames are made a child of a rectangle which can be controlled as any other object. Lin

Hi David, I see little difference in "most" manufacturer's RAW converters and ARC. Adobe does a pretty good job with the majority, but in some cases such as Sigma, the manufacturer's RAW converter has features which ARC doesn't which can be very useful. Of course "quality" is most important and where there is a difference, I'll always choose quality over convenience, but when you are converting hundreds of photos and tweaking them in Photoshop as I often must do, convenience becomes fairly important. The install default on CS4 Extended includes Adobe Media Player, so if you don't have it, undoubtedly you did a "custom install" rather than the default. Adobe Media Player screwed up the installation on all three of my working systems, and it was only after some lengthy Adobe Forum inquiries when someone suggested doing the custom install and omitting Media Player that I was able to get it to install. Best regards, Lin

Hi Matthias, I have an AVI tutorial on the waterfall animation creation, along with a PNG file available so you can create both waterfall and snow animations. Essentially, these involve using a Photoshop created PNG file or sometimes files which are moved between a background jpg and a PNG duplicate of that background with a transparent layer and transparent "cut-out" areas to show the movement. The PNG "snow" or "water" file is moved about via keyframes and shows through in the areas of transparency (for the water) and over the background with sometimes some transparency for the earth (ground) areas and sometimes not depending on conditions for snow. Sometimes the same PNG file is used multiple times within the same image to achieve different snow conditions, depth, texture and position. You can download the waterfall sample here: (look among the samples - I think # 11) http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=7901 Best regards, Lin

Hi Mary, There is no option to apply a universal border across multiple images - it's handled image by image. There is a probably a reason for this from a programming perspective. Along with the new border feature, there is the ability to change the "canvas" size. One can automatically then apply the new border feature to a totally different portion of the image as if you had cropped the image before loading. By using the "Canvas Size" you can absolutely select any portion of your image as the entire image and surround it with the border. This is useful for a variety of reasons because it allows real-time cropping and a border to fit as well. If the border were applied universally, then it would require that the program look at each individual image which may or may not have been "cropped" via the "Canvas Size" feature in order to make a proper fit. Perhaps in a later version it might be possible to have an "either/or" type selection. It is easier to universally apply a border created as a PNG in Photoshop, etc., until you consider that everyone may not be displaying "all" their images with a similar size or aspect ratio depending on individual preferences. The way it is now is much more "versatile" even if problematic from a convenience perspective. Best regards, Lin

This is a simple 3D Transform with a "stack" of images which "fall" forward one at a time. The purpose is to demonstrate how our vision handles perspective relative to our position viz the images. Run the zipped executable and position yourself to the far left of your display. As the images fall forward, look at the left and right corners, specifically the "triangls" created by the perspective. When you look from the left side of your display, the left corner seems longer than the right corner. When your view is from dead center, it the two appear symmetrical. When you view from the far right, the right corner seems longer and the left corner shorter. In reality, they are exactly the same, but our viewing position creates the illusion of the difference. This can give you an idea of the issues involved in the development of the 3D Transform feature of PTE and why it took a good deal of time for the programming of this feature so that we would have similar views on both the preview and mini-viewer, etc. http://www.learntoma...tackfalling.zip (about 15.5 meg) Best regards, Lin

Hi David, Actually, my report on the cause for the inability to load CS4 may have been lost in the shuffle. The reason it would not load on any of my systems was the Adobe Media Player which is a non-necessary add-on which Adobe elected to install as a default. For whatever reason, on all three systems (all with Windows XP home edition - two with SP3 and one with SP2) the only way to get the program to install was to do it manually and not select Adobe Media Player for installation. After that the installations went smoothly. The graphics drivers were fine on all three systems. Two were nVidia cards (8800 GT, 8600 GT OC) and one was a 3D Labs AGP Wildcat VP880 Pro. The older Wildcat doesn't support Open GL with present drivers and since the company was purchased by Creative Labs and they no longer support it, apparently won't support the 3D functionality of CS4. Most camera companies actually do have very good RAW converters. Sigma makes an excellent one, Cannon's is excellent as is Olympus and Nikon's. I can't speak for Pentax or Sony, but the ones I have for Sigma, Canon, Olympus and Nikon are all fine. The reason for the complaint about Adobe and RAW converters and my only reason for actually using the ARC converter is convenience. It's nice to be able to simply click on a RAW file in Photoshop and work from that point through the conversion and various settings to whatever is necessary for the final product without switching from one software to another. Other than convenience, I have no complaints about the RAW converters for my cameras from the manufacturers. Best regards, Lin

Hi Barbara, That's great news - problem solved! The reason for the explicit instructions was not that you were not familiar with how to choose an effect, but rather to set parameters so that it could be determined precisely the conditions your software was set to, and more specifically, which "effect" you were seeing rather than the 3D effect. For example, were you getting a fade, a quick, no transition, etc., instead of the 3D effect chosen? That way it would be easier to know where to look for the solution. It sounds like your video card was not actually rendering 3D because of possibly a corrupted driver or 3D not being "enabled". Had you reported a fade transition or a quick, no transition after setting up PTE in the way suggested, then my next suggestion would have been to run "dxdiag" and find out the condition of your video card and driver vis 3D. DXDIAG reveals whether or not 3D acceleration, etc., is "enabled" or "disabled" on your video card. This would probably have led to an understanding of why you couldn't see a 3D effect. The important thing is that you now can use not only the 3D transitions, but also the 3D transform features in the new beta. Best regards, Lin

Hi Barbars, Try this: Make a two slide slidshow. Go to Project Options and click on the the "Effects" tab. Put a check mark beside "Enable Transitions" Go to the far right of "Enable Transitions" and click on the little squares and all checkmarks should disappear from the various effects. Click on O.K. Go to the Main Screen Click on the first slide then click on Customize Slide Click on the Effect Tab Put a check mark beside Use Own Transition Effect Scroll down and find "Swap 3D" Click in the circle beside "Left Right" Click on O.K. Repeat this for the second slide exactly. Run a preview and report back on what effect you see between slides one and two.. Best regards, Lin

Hi Tom, Most of the modern vehicles with fuel injection do fine at 14,000 feet. Really older vehicles with carburetors which haven't been jetted for altitude run quite rich and blow lots of black smoke, but the vast majority of people driving up Mount Evans have no real issues. Using lower gears both in automatic and manual transmissions usually can prevent excessive use of brakes. I can actually descend from Mount Evans with my Dodge RAM V10 pickup without ever applying my brakes unless I have to stop for traffic, pedestrians or animals crossing the highway. Of course supercharged or turbocharged vehicles have no problems at all with the altitude. The road up, with the exception of a couple places where seasonal damage occurs, is quite good. Years ago there was a restaurant called the Crest House at the summit. The propane fuel tank was struck by lightning and the place burned to the ground. They never rebuilt it, but the "ruins" were made into a scenic view area and are frequented by Rocky Mountain Goats today: Lin Lin, Off topic but I've always lived at sea level and always wondered about higher altitudes. Will a regular vehicle run at 14K feet or does it require a turbocharger? It must be hard on brakes going down. Thanks, Tom

Hi Maureen, Great news! Major congratulations to Robert! Best regards, Lin

Hi Luc, That's great to hear! Usually, on either the rotating 3D snow scenes or the rotating Earth orbiting the sun will show up any weakness in a video card or system. The fact that your iMAC plays it smoothly means that your have a system which should handle just about any PTE show with intensive graphics! Best regards, Lin

Hi JPD, I too used Mediashow for years - it had some of the greatest text handling I've seen in presentation slideshows. I suspect that the reason that CyberLink was able to do this was that their background and core competency was in video. I seem to remember that the company was actually sold and moved to (I believe) Taiwan. They continued to develop their video segments, but really neglected the slideshow side and were never able to work out the transition bugs created when they increased the display size from 800x600 to 1024x768. It's a shame because they did have some really nice features (drop-in video, etc.). It would be nice if PTE could have some of those twirling, spinning, rotating, text "ribbon" effects possible with Mediashow. Those automated text effects were quite spectacular, weren't they? Here's a little sample of Mediashow text... (less than a meg) http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/mediashow2.zip Best regards, Lin

Hi Malcolm, It is a shame that the Adobe Photoshop support can't be handled by people who have a clue. I too have been unhappy with the RAW converter issues. When Adobe first put out their ARC product I bought it as a stand-alone product for $99 U.S. They then left me high and dry with any upgrade when they elected to "bundle" it with Photoshop. Finally, I elected to purchase Elements just to get the converter because it was much less expensive than upgrading to each new version of Photoshop. Of course that left me with yet one more software product on my system which I didn't really want or ever use except for the RAW converter. The DNG path also leaves me dissatisfied. It's an extra step outside of Photoshop which results in additional storage requirements and yet more clutter on the hard drive. Also, DNG doesn't support every camera I use (it doesn't support all my Sigma Foveon based cameras) so not a perfect solution either. I've since discovered a bug with CS4 where using the 3D "tool" to rotate an object doesn't result in the proper numbers in the keyframe log making it virtually impossible to rotate a 3D object on one axis plane smoothly without introducing "wobble" on the other. Adobe has been no help at either resolving or even admitting the problem. No one on the Adobe forum has a clue either so it will probably not be addressed at all. I suspect that the 3D portion of Photoshop is more of a last minute "add-on" to try to bolster the "features" adds rather than a true and completely useful tool addition. Maybe they will work out the kinks by the time CS5 is released. I've run out of "evaluation" time with CS4 so will probably skip the upgrade since I've not been able to get any answers from Adobe support. It's too bad that an otherwise excellent product is flawed by mediocre support. Best regards, Lin

Hi Cor, If I understand you correctly, I think it's not possible when one uses the right/left 3D flip transition. To be able to not see a hard edge where the reflections are cut off, it would be best to use a fade transition or one which doesn't display the edge of the image. If you want to try it, just go to the template section and download my template for this reflection show. Go to the Projects Options, Effects Tab and change to a fade rather than the 3D left/right flip and that should eliminate seeing the hard edge. Best regards, Lin

Please send me the files and I believe I may be able to extract the images for you. Email me at: [email protected] If you zip up the executables and post a link for me, I'll take a look at them immediately and let you know... Best regards, Lin

Hi Bill, Usually, Windows will inform you if removing a particular running process is going to upset the applecart. Actually, no permanent effect will be seen because when you reboot or cold-start, all applications are automatically reloaded by the startup program. The very first thing I would do is remove anything related to Roxio. Absolutely, there may be a conflict there. I think I mentioned this in the past, but I'll repeat it here in case I didn't. At one time it was impossible to have both Roxio (formerly Easy CD Creator) and other burning software such as Nero resident and create a CD at all. It was conflict city. So definitely look for anything in the Task Manager list which says Roxio or CD this or DVD that and kill that process. Next try to create an AVI. If it works, problem solved. If not, then eliminate each process which Windows does not prevent or tell you is necessary then try. If successful, then reintroduce and try each time until the culprit is discovered. Just make a one slide display show so the time will be minimal for creation for the test. Best regards, Lin

Hi Mike, LOL - I wish! Actually, Mount Evans was named after one of our former governors of Colorado in the 1800's, John Evans, who actually was a relative. http://en.wikipedia...._%28governor%29 The nice thing about Mount Evans is not only the great wildlife available there (expecially mountain goats) but the fact that it also has the highest paved road in the continental United States on which you can reach an altitude of over 14,000 feet without stepping out of your comfortable vehicle. Once at the road summit of about 14,150 feet, it's a very easy climb to reach the 14,268 foot peak. The entire area has amazing photo opportunities... Best regards, Lin

Hi Bill, Just for a moment, let me backtrack and explain something you may already know, but perhaps will shed a bit of light on the present issue. The way an executable file works, in the relevant sense, is that the computer is given a set of "instructions" by the executable software telling it to create images. The image you are panning, zooming or rotating is stored inside the executable code. When you create your original PTE file using keyframes, etc., you give the program an ending position and size for pan, zoom, rotate (PZR) and the software instructs the computer to create all intermediate images necessary to create the animated effect. For PTE this may be as many as sixty images or more per second. All that is contained within the executable file are the original image and the "instruction set" to create the desired effect. The computer creates all the necessary intermediate images on the fly as the executable code is interpreted by the GPU and CPU of your computer. This is why executable code is so "lean" compared with video code. When creating a video file such as an AVI, MPEG, etc., these intermediate files are all created and "saved" within the file structure. So something like a simple zoom which lasts five seconds will have between 150 and 300 images (30 frames per second to 60 frames per second) created and saved. So a slideshow with animation which runs for 10 minutes could easily have as many as 18,000 to 36,000 stored images plus the instructions telling the display device how to present these. Of course to keep file size to something manageable, this huge mass of data must be compressed. For playback, the files must be decompressed in memory hence the CODEC (COmpressDECompress). The thing which is problematic with your situation is why codecs which you have installed are not appearing in the Windows list of available codecs. PTE and other software simply read the codecs which Windows makes available and present this list in a tabular format for choice. Ignoring mp4 h.264 for a moment and concentrating solely on AVI, a codec is used to both compress the video files and then during playback to decompress these files. It appears from the error messages which you are getting that there is not a suitable codec available to compress the files to create the AVI. This is why I suggested downloading a codec pack and selecting a few of the more popular ones to install. There are a few possible explanations and one which immediately comes to mind is some sort of device driver conflict in your system. This is the reason I suggested using the Windows Task Manager to remove all unnecessary running applications while testing this. Something appears to be preventing both the use of and proper display of available codecs. In past years, and even today, there are a number of people having difficulty making DVD's, etc., with Producer, Gold and PTE. Some have absolutely zero problems and some have nothing but problems. It's all very confusing to the user. A quick peek at PSP troubleshooting in this forum shows the extent of issues with DVD, etc. http://www.proshowen...7305fd6f022f406 So to me, the best way to proceed is to first start up the system and use the Task Manager to unload all unnecessary files and then try to create an AVI file and see if you still get the same error message. If not, then a conflict is undoubtedly the issue. If so, at least most of the potential conflicts have been eliminated. The fact that thousands can create AVI's with no problems with PTE mean that there is something specific to your system which is causing this issue and what we need to do is to find out what that specific "something" is. The most problematic and telling clue is that the installed codecs are not appearing in the list. This screams "conflict" loudly to me... Best regards, Lin