Lin Evans

Hi Gary, Go to the timeline, click on "Timed Points" then "Arrange all Points" and that will spread the slides evenly so that the music and last slide end together (if that's what you want). Best regards, Lin

Hi Ron, Do you mean 5.7.4 (beta of 5.7) or 5.6.4 the release version. I think I'm loosing my marbles - LOL... Never mind. I think I understand. I was thinking about the 5.7 betas which the last version is 5.7.3 beta. I need some coffee and a good night's sleep...... Ha! Lin

Hi Tom, In Objects and Animations screen, to your left of "Close" you will see a small window with 100% in the view. Click on the down arrow beside this and choose a smaller view such as 25% or even 10% and you will be able to see the PNG objects which have gone out of view. To add additional PNG objects, make sure nothing in the Objects list is selected (highlighted in blue) and right click the mouse and choose "Add" then from the popup list choose "Image" and go find the other PNG objects and select them. An alternate way to be sure nothing is selected is to use a very small view such as 10% then right click in the grey area far outside anything having to do with the screen or objects and choose "Add" from there. It's the same as right clicking inside the Object's list when nothing is selected. To bring them in if they are already in the field of view, you may do as Peter suggests. Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, I can't find anything in the way of posts which mentions it.... Maybe the posts were removed too - LOL... Best regards, Lin

Hi Ron, Where did you find 5.6.4? Has it been posted?? Lin

Hi Peter, Actually, I think not. There is no need to redesign the video portions of PTE to make it like some other products because it already has features that they don't have which make it very powerful. More new features are being added such as 3D object transformations, output to MacIntosh and other things on the drawing board. It's really not necessary to have multiple video tracks to do some very sophisticated transitions and timings with PTE. I must agree with Xaver that simply having a couple audio tracks with elementary fades and perhaps volume control via keyframes would suffice nicely and really doesn't imply that multiple video channels are required. These video products which have multiple video channels and multiple audio channels "can" be used to create slideshows from stills (I have a number of these products myself) but it is certainly not as easy nor as flexible in my experience as PTE. I can create complex shows with animations in minutes with PTE which take me literally hours to accomplish with Sony Vegas Pro Suite or with Adobe Encore (when I can do them at all). I can do things in a few hours with PTE which take me literally days to do with Wings (which in my estimation is the finest overall AV product availalble - but terribly expensive for the full-featured versions). I see PTE as having a very special place in audio visual creations software. It's extremely powerful, produces stellar quality and at a very modest price with absolutely the best upgrade policy anywhere. Absolutely it's unmatched in presentation slideshow software. It gets better every few months and from where I sit the future for PTE looks very bright indeed! Best regards, Lin

Hi Eric, I use the Sony Vegas Pro suite (about $1500 worth) and I can assure you that unless you intend to spend a "lot" of time learning how to use it, you will find PTE virtually "simple" to use in comparison. Video editing software such as Sony's which was adapted when they purchased the original software from Sound Forge (now a Sony Product) before they were acquired by Sony, or Adobe Encore/Premier, etc., are complex but powerful programs. Learning to use their myriad features is a bit like learning to use Photoshop. Some parts are relatively simple, but to get the most from the program requires years for most users to assimilate. I can tell you it's a daunting task! Best regards, Lin

Abdol, Could you explain in more detail about scrollbars? I still see scrollbars to enter text. You have the option of programming text to scroll exactly as you would on any screen. You can use a mask to have the text scroll within a particular area, etc., just like you would on any other screen. The difference is that this screen pops up at the beginning of your slideshow and things like hypertext, button, etc., are already placed for you to modify or delete as needed??? Best regards, Lin

Hi Ralph, Moved this from PTE to the Ideas and Suggestions forum. Actually this has been discussed at length in previous posts and on member, Tom, actually created a template for this. Click Here for some history: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....hlite=auto+zoom Best regards, Lin

Hi Dan, On the first error (the blue box) I notice that PTE is looking for your file on the F: drive. As Peter said, when this error occurs, it means PTE can't find the file where it was when the PTE file was saved. The file may not have been moved by you, but when using external drives (such as indicated by the drive designator F:) the operating system is designed in such a way that without intervention by the user, drive designators do something called "cascade" when devices are added to the system. So, for example, if you were to plug in a different external device whether a hard disk, USB storage device, external DVD drive, etc., the designator F: may have been assigned to a different device. PTE will look for your file on the drive designator which was assigned at the time you created the PTE file and if it isn't found on the device currently assigned that drive designator then you will get this error message. If you are using external devices (apparently you are) then there are ways in Windows of making semi "permanent" drive assignments. Do a web search on disk drive assignments for your particular operating system and you will find instructions. Giving an external device a permanent drive assignment will go a long way toward alleviating this issue in the future. Best regards, Lin

Hi Dom, Great use of masks and fantastic photos! Congrats. Runs smoothly on my machine, no flash at end. I suspect the "flash" Ken sees has to do with Beta 3 versus the particular video card.... He has this problem with one of my experimental programs as well. Best regards, Lin

Hi Tom, I misunderstood your sentence, sorry.... The Visisketch idea has uility, but yes, in a narrow sense. It is a very interesting way to "paint" and can be quite realistic especially if you build your own "brushes." This can be done by simply creating the brushes as PNG objects and naming them the same as some of the default brushes. It does take a long time to create some of the sketches/paintings and if you use small brushstrokes, the number of bitmapped files increases exponentially. This makes the file size grow cumbersome. It is a very neat program, but whatever JPD is doing to get around the file size using his own sketch tool is absolutely amazing. I share your and other's enthusiasm and eagerness to hear from him! Best regards, Lin

Hi Jason, Let me add a bit to Eric's comments. HD video is a video of much higher resolution than that which you see on a standard DVD. There are several ways in which you can use HD video. First, you can create a video of MP4 type with h.264 compression. These high resolution videos can be played back on your computer, uploaded to Vimeo or Youtube, played on various devices (iPhone, etc.). The h.264 MPEG 4 four supports much higher resolution. For example you could create a video with 1024p resolution (1920 pixels horizontal by 1024 pixels vertical). You could make one 1600x1200 pixels, etc., or 720p resolution , etc. These higher resolution videos can also be burned to BluRay media via 3rd party software and even to standard DVD media with third party software. To play them back at high resolution on this standard DVD media or on BluRay or HD media then requires the appropriate player. You can't play high definition (HD) shows on a standard DVD player. Standard DVD resolution varies depending on where you live in the world. There are two main "standards" called PAL and NTFS which have slightliy different resolutions and frame rates, but neither are any higher in resolution than SVGA so there are major differences in the appearance of your h.264 MP4 videos when played back on high resolution monitors or televisions and the relatively low resolution standard DVD's. As for the process you now use versus Video Builder, the video engine found in the PTE Deluxe version, there is little difference in the actual video quality assuming each is done in an optimal fashion. The major difference is in convenience and features. You have some pretty powerful menu building features in Vidio Builder which may not be found in your third party software depending on the individual version you use. Also, Video Builder has one of the very fastest rendering engines available if you have hardware (proper video card) to support the hardware rendering feature so the difference in speed of DVD production may be of value to you. Best regards, Lin

Hi Tom, Yes, it will be interesting to see how JPD was able to get this to work so well. As for the second method being too time consuming, I quite agree, although I don't really see it in any way as a "gimmick". In both approaches you are simply displaying sequential frames. The trade-off is that you have no real control over the speed of playback in terms of frames per second in method one but it's easy to implement. With method two you have complete control over playback speed "and" you have complete control over what else is happening simultaneously during display where with method one you are limited to only those frames in the video itself. With method one you can change the timing of the display of each slide, but when you go too slowly then you have very "jerky" motion. With method two you have the ability to slow down the frame rate and still maintain smooth motion because of overlapping opacity blend. Let me give you something to think about. Once you have laboriously created an object sequence by method two, you can speed up things by displaying these same objects with the same keyframes but in a shorter time frame. That is, you can set the slide time to complete the display in let's say 10 seconds, or you could set it to display for 60 seconds. What would then happen with your "movie" portion is that it's like you have a film reel which you can run in slow motion or in fast forward or at normal speed and everything in between. Also consider that once you have programmed a sequence of say "X" number of frames using some generic file names for each frame and saved this sequence, you then have a "template" which you can plug into virtually "any" video sequence you might have by simply decompiling to get individual frames then using a batch renaming algorithm such as found in Irfanview to match the generic file names of your template. If you have fewer frames in your decompiled video that in your template you simply remove the excess frames from the objects list. By doing this you have then complete control over the speed of your video as well as the content. You can program any desired backdrop or simultaneous animation. It's actually a "very" powerful means of displaying a video yet preserving all the other PTE animation benefits while it's running. Of course the down side is, as we have discussed, the labor and time intensive job of creating the individual template. Also there is the issue of memory resources. There is a limit as to how many objects one can have in a show so your "video" will be limited as to how long it can run unless the animation is cyclical such as a demonstration of something which by nature repeats. The solar system comes to mind. Here is a link to one recent demo I programmed this way using about 640 frames - notice that not only does the Earth spin on its axis, but dynamically changes size and position while in rotation around the sun: http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/template/earthtodom.zip So what you have is by making your "movie" (the earth rotating on its own axis) as a "child" of a controlling parent (transparent rectangle in this template) you have complete control over the placement and size of your video. This dynamic motion and animation is simply not possible with programs which simply "display" a video. For example, this type animation is not possible with Proshow Producer or Proshow Gold even though they allow substantial control over their inserted video. They can move or size the entire video or even use it as a "background" with animation running in front, but they can't "combine" the dynamics of the video as animation as shown in this demo. To do this requires the parent/child relationship. So with PTE we "can" do some pretty impressive things which with the coming new features in PTE are soon going to be even more impressive! Best regards, Lin

Hi Tom, Having access to these temp files allows one to bypass the need to decompile the AVI file to get the individual frames to make the animated show. How these are then used becomes the next issue. To my knowledge, there are really only two "basic" ways to use individual frames to create an animated sequence which duplicates the "effect" of a video in PTE. 1. Place individual frames as separate slides then sequence them at a rapid rate to create the animation. 2. Place individual frames as separate "objects" within a single slide then turn each object on and off via opacity at carefully spaced keyframes. Strengths and weaknesses of the above. The #1 metod, separate slides, let's you play the sequence back but is extremely limited in that you can do little else except see the sequence as if you were playing back a video. You can't have moving backgrounds, you can't have other objects in motion simultaneously, but it is rather easy to set up and it works fairly well but not nearly as smoothly as #2. The other down side with PTE is that any sequence set to faster than about 100ms will drop frames as long as you have the animation engine operational. This method actually worked better with 4.x and earlier versions where sequences as fast as 10ms would generally not drop too many frames and would create a very smooth video appearance. So the strengths of #1 are easy setup, minimal fuss and fair response. The weakness is loss of slideshow flexibility and having to deal with realistically slower frame rates and less smooth playback. Number 2 method of sequencing as objects works really well as far as smoothness goes (there are "tricks" to help make this so), and it is extremely flexible because you can have other objects in animation simultaneously with moving backgrounds, etc. Depending on how you set up the timings, you can have many neat things in your show during the playback of that single slide. The downsides of #2 are serious though. First, it may take hours or days to program the thousands of keyframes which sequentially turn on and off individual objects (slide frames). In the process you must save and exit PTE possibly hundreds of times to keep from crashing. PTE keeps an internal log to allow the undo and redo process. When there are hundreds of objects, this quickly exhausts memory which isn't returned until you leave the program and re-open. Just saving doesn't help. So the strength of #2 is extreme flexibility, smooth playback and versatility while the weakness is that it's very time consuming to program. This brings us to the value of what JPD is developing which is, by all intention, a much "better" way to approach the issue. As an aside, I just created a sequenced PTE show using David's "Le Mans" car, a sketch which is significantly less detailed than the one JPD did in his example. JPD's show was 19 megabytes. The bitmapped files from David's Visisketch Pro Bitmap folder created a PTE show of over 500 megabytes. Perhaps it would be possible to make these smaller by making a smaller than 640x480 image size, but we still have a "huge" difference in file size for a similar type slideshow. I guess my point is that JPD is on to something really neat which may allow PTE users to do some great sketch animations with much smaller resource load than using Visisketch Pro output. Best regards, Lin

Hi Steev, I understand now - I couldn't quite make sense of what you were trying to achieve from the original sample. Yes, it seems that there must have been a change in programming formula math between 5.7.2 beta and 5.7.3 beta - perhaps Igor can look at this and it will help with diagnosis. Best regards, Lin

Hi Tom, Let's start a new thread so we don't get off-track. If you will, copy your post above to a new title and start a new post and we can continue with discussing how to implement Visisketch output in PTE. Best regards Lin

Hi Tom, Just some observations. I too have used Visisketch Pro but I believe what JPD is doing is significantly different in numerous ways. There are superficial similarities, but the essence, I believe, is quite different. First, Visisketch creates an AVI video file, and as you say the file size is quite large. Then it works on a flat palette limited to 640x480 pixels (at least in my version). Of course it would be "possible" to decompile these individual frames, use them as objects but only with a tremendous amount of effort and time. What JPD does is all in extremely smooth executable format and of quite compact size (only about 19 megabytes or so), the palette is 3D and in an artistic perspective rather than lying flat as with Visisketch, and he overlays images and remove them, something not currently possible with a video file. The brush is "dipped" numerous times for different colors and the result is nothing short of spectacular for PTE. Perhaps in the near future JPD can reveal how he was able to accomplish this. Visisketch Pro provides a way to construct a sketch, painting or both and create a really nice AVI, but what JPD is doing is, I believe, quite different. Best regards, Lin

See if this is what you are looking for: http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/endev...onChange584.zip If it is correct, the problem is that you have accidentally clicked on the small box between the zoom (Horiz and Vert) which makes your animation non-linear in circularity resulting in asymmetrical opposing objects. Check your numbers against my numbers to see where I made changes. Best regards, Lin

Hi Douglas, We are trying to recover JPD's thread. I deleted the entire thread by accident rather than just the annoying last spam post. It's one of the problems with the way the forum software is designed. The moderator has to use great care or these accidents happen. Ken has a backup archive (posted above) and JPD has been notified as well as Igor. We are waiting to see whether Igor can recall the thread before "posting" the "Printable" archive version which has all the responses and by whom, but doesn't show the incredible number (over 2500) of "hits" that JPD's original post had. This is one of the reasons why we would like to see changes to forum software to prevent spammers from being able to easily post. Moderators try to use extreme care but late at night we get tired and sometimes click on the wrong "action" which removes the entire thread rather than just deleting the offending post. I will try to do better in the future and hopefully Igor may be able to recover the original. Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, Congratulations to Wnsoft for the best Presentation Slideshow product available! It was the best in 1999 and still is in my opinion!! Best regards, Lin

Hi Dan, It doesn't work exactly like that. The way it works is you create a menu which has buttons. Each button represents a slide number. This works very well as long as you don't have an excessive number of slides to jump to. Some time ago I created an example of this. The easiest way is to place your "jump to" menu as the last slide. You may place a blank slide before this "last slide" so you can manually stop the show before the last slide shows. On each slide you may place an invisible button which you can click on - or even just program a mouse click on each slide to pull up the "jump to" menu. Then you simply click on the appropriate number on the "go to" menu and that slide is immediately selected and displayed. Being able to enter a number via the keyboard would be nice, but the program isn't designed to be interactive in that way. The practical limit as to how many slides you can jump to via the menu is determined more or less by the memory resources available on the system you use to build the menu. Each "button" on the menu is a separate object. As you are programming, PTE has to keep track of each command so you can "undo" and "redo" if you make an error. This begins to impact the memory after about 20 or 30 objects so when you are building your "Jump To" menu it would be wise to save, completely exit PTE and reopen after about 20 objects to avoid a crash. Unfortunately, there is no way around this, however, PTE can handle hundreds if not thousands of objects. I have made shows with as many as 1000 objects and the shows run fine but making them can become tedious. Of course the "practical" consideration of having a single menu with say 100 objects becomes problematic for space considerations. Also remember that if you do this should you add or delete a slide, you will have a "sequence" issue because the slide you add will appropriate the sequence number which is represented by the position of that slide. This will then push the slide after into the next available slot number. So if you had a particular slide as number 10 and the total was 20 slides and you added a slide at position 9, now nine becomes 10, 10 becomes 11.......20 becomes 21. Best regards, Lin Later: I made you a test show using this approach. Open the linked PTE zipped file in Beta 5.7 (it won't open in 5.6.4). Here is how it was done. The "Go To Slide Menu" was created with 30 buttons. Each button is programmed to go to the slide number written on the button. I called the slide numbers to be displayed at the top center of each slide so you can check the accuracy of the program - that is you can see which slide number is called by the menu. I removed the "Pause" button from the Navigation Bar because it is no longer needed. The show is set to do nothing unless a mouse click is detected. You can use the navigation bar to go forward a slide, backward or go to "home" (first slide). If you click the left mouse button anywhere on the slide "except" on one of the Navigation Bar Icons, the "Go To Slide Menu" will appear. You can then click any number on the Menu and that slide will appear. Each slide was set to respond to a mouse click by going to slide 30. Slide 30 is the Menu. Just before the menu for slide 29 I placed a blank so if you are simply navigating by the Navigation Bar the show would effectively "end" at slide 29. Press ESC to exit the show. Try compiling this to an executable with Beta 5.7 and you will see how it works or just use the "Preview" feature. Study how the buttons are programmed, etc., to get a feel for how to do this for your own shows. http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/testshow.zip and the executable zip for those who don't yet use the beta. http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/testshowexe.zip Lin

Hi Mike, Not exactly a "style editor" but one of our forum members "Stu Rands" (nobeefstu) has created a PTE reporter which gives the variables in an easily read format. The essence is that the .pte file contains a data set which holds all the variables as you have programmed them with the PTE software. This set of variables is used at the time of Preview or Creation of your slideshow and it contains all the variables such as timings, zooms, rotations, pans, opacities, colors, shadows, fonts requested, keyframes, etc., etc., which are vital to the creation of the slideshow. Sometimes, when a user wants to make changes to a show which affect multiple slides and they don't want to have to go to each slide to individually make these changes, they instead alter the PTE file itself with a text editor. However, this can be quite dangerous so if you attempt this be sure you are working on a duplicate backup instead of the original pte file. Of course when a PTE file is edited and saved, the save must be non-formatting such as an ASCII file. Most of what you will need to do in the majority of cases can more easily and safely be done with PTE itself especially until you really understand the internals well. The best way to understand how PTE works in terms of the file layout is to study the PTE file itself. That's best done by simply duplicating it under a different name and studying the duplicate so no harm might be done by accident. Do a forum search for "nobeefstu" and look for his download link for his "Project Reporter" which displays the variables in an easy to read format. Best regards, Lin