Lin Evans

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: lin@learntomakeslideshows.net 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

Posted 15 June 2009 - 12:41 AM O.K., it's been a long week, but I have finished a template which will allow the dedicated PTE user to rotate the included images of Earth or their own transparent background PNG images prepared properly through 360 degrees of rotation. The template took many, many hours over a number of days to complete. It's not a project for the faint hearted - LOL. There are 640 separate PNG objects which were decompiled from a video I made using the excellent freeware Celestia Astronomy program. The saved files were converted to transparent background PNG files then sequenced as objects in PTE using over 1900 keyframes. Because of memory issue in doing this type thing, only about 20 image could be programmed and sequenced before saving, quitting and re-opening PTE. This meant hours of frustrating data entry from my prepared Xcel spreadsheet to get proper opacity on and opacity off for each object. I'm only telling you this because this template will save you days of work if you decide to pursue this approach. You will still spend a day or so to create your own transparent PNG files so first play with the provided ones and see if it's something you want to do. There is a demo file below which I created quickly using the template. It shows some of the extreme flexibility of PTE. This demo could not be done with Proshow Gold or Proshow Producer, etc. They simply don't have the features which are needed. Some have asked why not just throw in the 640 images as separate files and sequence them to get a rotating image such as Earth? That can be done, but then you essentially have a "video" which is severely limited in utility. You can't have other things going on simultaneously, you can't size or position the objects unless you want to attempt to create programming for all 640 slides. In essence, doing it this way is like running a video. By making each image a child of a single controlling object such as a rectangle or frame, you can dynamically control the position and size of the spinning object as you will see in the demo. In the demo below, the Earth rotates on it's own axis very slowly and smoothly while orbiting the sun. The Earth is "canted" 26 degrees to the left as you view it and changes size as it orbits the sun. I didn't spend a lot of time with this little demo so the Earth doesn't become shadowed like it should when it crosses the sun. The size and speed of rotation are obviously not to scale, but it does show the possibilities of doing things this way. The down side for some systems is that this method is heavy on memory. The demo show uses 342 meg of RAM while running, so best to not have lots of other programs running simultaneously. However, most modern systems will not be taxed by this but I would appreciate learning how the demo runs on various systems. Any feedback will be welcome. Have fun if you decide to play with this and let me know what you think: http://www.learntoma...hrotatedemo.zip (about 30 meg) http://www.learntoma...ewithreadme.zip (about 23 meg) Best regards, Lin Best regards, Lin PTE AV Tutorials http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net lin@learntomakeslideshows.net

Posted Today, 10:24 AM Hi Guys, This is a template you can use to make the reflections show I posted on the Slideshows forum: Unzip into a folder of its own then just name your images image001.jpg through image020.jpg and copy into the folder overwriting the placeholder images. You can add additional images by just copy and pasting one of your twenty then changing the names of individual files to image021.jpg....... http://www.learntoma...iontemplate.zip Best regards, Lin

Moved my templates Under This Heading: In the future I will place all my templates (not all that many) under this title and put a temporary note in the PTE section of the forum which I will delete after a couple weeks. I think this will help organize what could be a difficult thing to control. Lin

Hi Isabel, You're making this too difficult on yourself. Did you read my last message to you?? Go to the tutorials section of the forum. Download and play my AVI tutorial on PZR in the PTE Made Easy - (PTE For Smarties) section here: http://www.picturest...?showtopic=7901 Some of the menu features I discuss at the beginning of the tutorial have changed over the past year or more, but the essential timeline process of Pan, Zoom and Rotate are identical in function. If you play this AVI you absolutely "will" understand the essentials of PZR. Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, Congratulations! This represents a MAJOR change and improvement to an already fantastic program!! The decision to call this version 6 is absolutely justified and makes perfect sense. You and your development team have done an incredible job of releasing this last beta with a plethora of great new features which make producing a delightful presentation even easier and more effective. We are proud of your work and I think I can speak for the majority of users who will definitely appreciate and enjoy these terrific new features you have integrated into this great product. Thank you!! Lin

Hi Isabel, Why don't you go to the tutorials section and download some of my free AVI tutorials posted there. The Official PTE User Guide and the Unofficial PTE User Guide which Jeff, Ray and I authored isn't really designed to teach you how to use the program, but rather what each feature is designed for and just to give a brief example. The tutorials I have posted in the PTE Made Easy (PTE for Smarties) section will show you exactly how to do keyframes and such and after watching it I don't think you will have any problems at all. Start with the one on PZR (Pan, Zoom, Rotate)... Here's a quick link: http://www.picturest...?showtopic=7901 Best regards, Lin

Hi Mike, Hang in there! I will have an AVI tutorial up in the PTE Made Easy series in a day or so which will show you how to do the 3D transforms, etc. In the demo, the things which take advantage of the 3D Transform are the rotating snow scenes, the OOB (out of bounds) photos where the perspective changes dynamically, and the reflections at the end, etc. The OOB shows are very easy to make. You simply adjust the perspective using the 3D Transform (which as you will see is very easy) then adjust the "canvas" and "border" right in PTE. The only thing you must do outside PTE is create that portion of the scene which you need for the portion which lies outside the frame as a PNG object. Just take the original photo, copy and paste it on a transparent background and erase the areas you don't want shown. Then simply make that PNG object a child of the original image, adjust to fit exactly over the original and the PNG object overlay will extend out over the borders after you adjust the canvas size in PTE. It's then very easy to set the 3D Transformation via keyframe so that it changes dynamically as you like. The animation within a 3D Transform is also fairly easy to accomplish. When I get a chance I will also make a tutorial showing how this is done. I have already posted a template so you can just drop in images for the reflection animation. That's also done via the 3D Transform by just a horizontal flip of 180 degrees and some masking for shadows and opacity, etc. You can see how it is done by examining the template PTE. The Earth rotating around the sun was done with my video clip template which uses decompiled video for the Earth's Rotation. The apparent rotation of the sun was done with a technique developed by Dom which involves masks and flat pano type images of the sun, etc. Best regards, Lin

Hi Isabel, You are really going to enjoy PTE Version 6. One of the new features allows you to put a border around your image right in PTE without creating anything in Photoshop or other software. You can simply decide how wide and which color you want for your border. Just go to Objects and Animations, select your image in the Objects List, click on the Properties Tab then on the Adjust Image and Border and you can decide how wide and what color you want. You can also adjust the "canvas" which means you can decide all or any part of the image to be surrounded by the border. Essentially, this feature allows you to "crop" the image and place a border around it without actually affecting the real image. It's really a fantastic feature! Best regards, Lin

Hi JPD, Great demo of the potential of PTE. I love the waving flag!! Best regards, Lin

Do you want to test your video card and system for animation stress? Do not download this 100 meg show unless you have a pretty powerful video card you wish to test. This one demonstrates a bit of many of the animation possibilities with PTE 6.0. as well as animations of snow, water, OOB (out of bounds) and video clip template transformation, etc. This one "really" stresses the video card and will reveal any weaknesses there may be. If you can run this one completely smoothly, you can run about anything which will be created with 6.0, etc. http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/pte60demo.zip Best regards, Lin

Here's a sample of one of the things you can do with new Version 6 Beta 15. This entirely done in beta and an actual demo of how you might use this as a real slideshow. http://www.learntoma...ereflection.zip Here is a quick demo of using "slices" - this is not meant as a serious slideshow, or even suggesting that you may want to do this with a real slideshow - just a demo of the "possible" with using slices of an image and 3D Transforms. Just fun playing around folks... http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/slidedemo.zip Lin

Moved to Lin's Templates

Hi Bill, Give me a few hours and I will download the codecs and install them on one of my other systems which is not online. I have to be gone for a few hours today, but will do this as soon as I get back. Since I haven't actually used this codec pack I can't say until I install it how to proceed, but should know something this afternoon. Best regards, Lin