Lin Evans

The button use was covered in an AVI I created under the Tutorials section - number 8 as I recall in the PTE Made Easy series. This tutorial covers the feature of changing the color when the mouse "hovers" over a button so that the initial color of text changes with hover then changes again when the button is clicked. If you can tell us specifically what it is that you wish to know about the buttons and a "menu" perhaps one of us can explain. Essentially, a menu consists of a background image or blank screen with buttons added for the purpose of calling an external executable file or some function. This could be another slideshow or opening email or any of the features assigned to that button. By introduce shows I'm assuming you mean to actually "run" the slideshows? If so, just create a new slideshow called "menu" and place buttons on it. Assign to each button a particular slideshow to be run. If you would like a sample I would be glad to make one for you as a template which you could use. Best regards, Lin As for repeated questions, isn't that what Peter has done??

Hi Laszlo, I understand now what you are doing. Please zip up the PTE file and post it and I'll try to see why your opacity is less than 100%. I would set the opacity for the PNG file to 100% at least for the ending few seconds of the animation to avoid the transparent appearance. Best regards, Lin

Hi Guys, Perhaps "Photoshop" isn't the best product to compare with because they have "never," in my experience, had adequate documentation. This product has had countless third party users who have written extensive books on how to use Photoshop and its myriad features. Most users are totally lost when trying to digest Photoshop with the included documentation. Adobe's documentation, unless it has vastly improved since earlier versions, is sadly lacking especially in the "how-to" department. PTE is a rather unique product in that if one does not use "any" of the PZR effects, the current version 5.6 functions very well with minimal hardware resources just as the 4.x versions did. It's when the user decides to avail themselves of pans, zooms, rotates, opacity changes, parent/child relationships, masks, etc., etc., that things can get dicy with older equipment. These features are absolutely necessary for PTE to stay competitive because younger, computer savy users who indeed do have and maintain current state-of-art equipment expect this. We older codgers who may have limited incomes and perhaps less interest in newfangled technology can often be content with just being able to do the basics. From a business perspective, there will always be a market of sorts which we older users provide, but we constitute a niche market while the mainstream market consists of a broader spectrum of users, many of whom are not content with the status quo. To remain competitive, PTE needs the new 3D features and video capabilities which is where the market is headed whether we like it or not. The computer industry is, by and large, market driven. Both business and game users want faster data access, realistic animation, high quality video and HD TV. Unfortunately, for those of us who can't afford to upgrade every couple years, this means we can't always enjoy the latest and greatest innovations. We may not be able to have large, high quality images "and" smooth, flawless, animations with all the bells and whistles. In some sense, Microsoft has forced more powerful hardware on us by creating operating systems which are genuine resource hogs to say the least. Because of this, as we eventually upgrade our equipment, we will have the resources necessary to run optimal PTE shows complete with all the bells and whistles. But to do this, we also have a larger and longer learning curve. Just because we are getting older doesn't mean we have to stop learning! I'm always reminded of our now deceased, great old forum member Ron Wilkenson (ronwil). Ron stayed on top of the technology and incorporated it with zeal in his shows. We can all learn from Ron's example. As the technology and feature set of PTE evolves, we users are faced with new challenges which we shall surely overcome with dilligence and dedication. If you really want to see frustration, try the competition's top-end software and discover what really poor documentation is truly like! I believe that the future of really good technical support will lie in the user base rather than with the developers. PTE is very close to catching the competition and perhaps surpassing them with the really important fundamentals of what drives the market. We truly need 3D object animation, the incorporation of video and a few other important features. We already have the smoothest and highest quality image reproduction available of "any" presentation slideshow product at a reasonable price and with the very best upgrade policy of all. I think we need to give the developers the freedom to unleash their creativity and let them build us the finest product of its type. We users will provide the necessary support and documentation, but to do this effectively we can't do it with every iteration and change. We need to take it in larger steps and perhaps rather than try to make a unified document, we may need to compartmentalize and perhaps create smaller, more precise user help documents which deal with individual features rather than trying to write a tome which covers everything. As Peter says, documentation takes much time and effort and it is doubly difficult for the developers because of the wide language disparity which exists among the user base. This was, and is, a tremendous issue for even huge companies like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell, etc. They have entire divisions devoted to documentation so imagine what it is like for Wnsoft! We all have different uses and needs for PTE and we probably will never all agree on the direction the company takes with this unique product, but we can all help and support the developers and in the process reap the reward of having a truly great product. Best regards, Lin

Hi Laszlo, Though I can't see the executable (only the PNG sword), I have manipulated your file in Photoshop so that it is now a sword with PNG transparency surrounding it. I couldn't tell from the original how much transparency it actually had, but the one I have posted the link to below has 100% transparency other than the sword itself. If I understand correctly about what you wish to do, make this PNG file (link below) a child of the image, position and size the sword and you can then adjust its transparency anywhere from zero to one hundred percent. http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/pngsword.png Best regards, Lin

Hi Laszlo, If you would post the image or a link to the image perhaps we can help determine the problem. PNG images, like Compuserve GIF images "can" have transparency but that is not automatic. Any image such as a tiff or bmp or jpg can be saved as a PNG image and will have no transparency. The way you get transparency is to have more than one layer with the bottom layer being transparent. Then you can erase any part of the upper image and the part that remains is the transparent bottom layer. When you erase, the "opacity" of the eraser tool used to erase determines how transparent the image or part of the image becomes. If you post your image or a link to your image and tell us which part you want to be opaque and which part you want to be transparent, one of our forum members will help. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, Whether you have two slides each set to four seconds or one slide set to eight seconds the total time remains unchanged. You said: "In a recent slideshow, I was able to create the panning of 2 identical slides so they look like one slide being panned. However, apparently that was just some luck because I can't quite reproduce this panning to be seamless......." Then you said: "I have an image that I want to have it pan from left to right. If I put this slide in only once, it would pan too fast......" Putting the slide in once and setting the timing to the total of what you had before as the total time in the two identical slides will not change the overall timing of the slideshow. What it will do is allow you to not have to worry about trying to recreate something which you did before by more or less "accident." To understand how scale keyframes works, just make a little sample show having a single slide with two keyframes and a Pan or Zoom. Set the timing to 10 seconds via Customize Slide. Run the preview and observe. Now change the slide time to 20 seconds without checking "scale keyframes" and run the preview again. The pan or zoom action will happen exactly as it did in the original so that the actual duration of time between keyframes remains identical even though the slide will stay on screen for 20 seconds. Now repeat the same but put a check in the Scale Keyframes" block and observe. The keyframes will be spread out and the pan or zoom will happen much more slowly because the animation is "scaled" to the new slide time. That's how "scale keyframes" works. So to make your pan or zoom happen more slowly, animate the pan or zoom as you wish it to look, then adjust the timing of the slide with "Scale Keyframes" checked to make it happen slower or faster. It will happen more slowly if you increase the display time for this slide and quicker if you decrease the display time. What you are trying to achieve doesn't require you to autospread slides, it only requires you to match the total music time with the total time of the slides. How you divide this time among the slides is not important except to achieve the synchronization you desire. I'm assuming your new "single" slide will occupy the exact total time as the two identical slides did before you removed one. There is absolutely nothing to be gained from using two identical slides to achieve a pan of some sort which can be done with a single slide having a longer time duration, it just makes it much more confusing to try to animate properly. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, You're making this way too hard! You have complete control over how fast a slide pans - there is no need to put the slide in two times to do what you want. Use the "Customize Slide" feature to control the individual timing for any slide. This value overrides the default value in Project Options for the particular slide you set the custom value for. Set the keyframes to make the slide do what you want it to then control how fast this happens with the time value in Customize Slide. The "Scale Keyframe in Objects (on Time Change) allows you the option of either keeping the timing between keyframes precise or spreading the change over the new timing. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, I think perhaps a misunderstanding. Setting a slide in Customize this Slide overrides any global setting so that if the slide shadow setting in Customize this Slide is set to black while the global Project Option is set to white, the slide shadow will remain black. I had no trouble getting these slide shadows to remain white. The best way is to check the Customize this Slide setting. On the slide which was located at the bottom rather than where you set it, I have no explanation - only the observation that it indeed was positioned very low. If I change the position it remains where I place it after saving the show. On your large show, I fear you have some local resource issue. This could be available RAM (try a Ctrl Alt Del and check resources available in the Task Manager) or such. Also perhaps an anti-virus program may be usurping your resources. I had no problem creating the executable for you. Click the link below to download the zipped executable. I did find one problem with the word "Bogota" and I took the liberty of rasterizing the text to PNG because it didn't fit on my screen (ran off to the right side). I suspect it's because you used a font not resident on my computer so this may change the font you selected. It's probably a good idea to rasterize any fonts which are not very common (Times Roman, etc. are common) to png rather than leave them as text because there are many differences in local computers - that way your audience will see the same fonts in the same positions as you do regardless of which font you select. http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/gary/Quindio2.zip If you want to make changes and can't create the exe file, upload the altered file as you did the original and I'll be glad to save it as the exe for you. Look for RAM issues, etc., locally. It's a fairly large show and this problem of not being able to create the exe file undoubtedly is a resource issue on your system. Best regards, Lin P.S. On the issue of saving - Brian discovered a bug in Vista/XP where if you use "save" frequently and you have lots of images, photos, etc., and you do not use "save as" at least once during a session, the system will revert to the last "save as" thus causing your previous "saves" to be lost! This is a Windows bug and not a PTE bug so it is indeed "possible" that you may have run up against this issue. This happens on systems which do not have PTE even on the hard drive. The work-around is to use Save As rather than "save" on a frequent basis. This situation could be exacerbated if "auto-save" is set on in PTE so perhaps a bit of caution is advised.

Hi Gary, I'm going to look at one problem at a time. For this post, I'm only discussing shadow color. First, slides 12, 13, 15 and 16 have the shadows set to black, not white. Could you have not saved your work after setting the shadow colors? The "default" is black. If you neglected to save the file after making changes then the original shadow color would stay black. Lin

Gary, There are literally dozens of free file transfer sites on the web where you can transfer files up to a gigabyte and sometimes more. Just pick one (do a Google search for free file transfer), upload your files and put a link here. There is no need to reduce the file size, just upload the whole zipped PTE file. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, It would help greatly if you would post the zipped PTE file - it's very difficult to test this per your inquiry without the files.... You say you "have it set correctly" but without independent verification by seeing the files as you have programmed, it's difficult to do anything but guess. It sounds as if perhaps you have a problem with some program running in the background interfering, but without having the zipped PTE files it's virtually impossible to help. Best regards, Lin

Hi John, Have you encountered this problem? The reason I'm asking is that there are thousands of users of PTE and only two members have mentioned this, and of these two only one currently has this issue. Though it "may" be a bug of some sort with PTE, without others being able to reproduce it, and since it has only shown up in a tiny, tiny percentage of systems, the probabilities are much greater that it is either a user or input issue rather than a PTE issue. Do you have some reason to believe that the developers of PTE intend to move to another version without correcting existing bugs? That certainly has not been their predisposition in the past. PTE is one of the "least" buggy presentation slideshow software programs I've ever used; and I've used nearly all of the current and past major presentation slideshow software programs for many, many years. You must realize that a great number of "issues" about which people comment on this forum are not PTE bugs but rather user problems and misunderstandings. Many of these would be easily solved were users to carefully read the user guides and tutorials available for download. True "bugs" in this software are rare, and the developers generally get to the bottom of the issues quickly and efficiently. One of the nice things about PTE is that we are all beta testers and each have the opportunity to "ring out" the software before the next version is released. With the myriad operating systems, drivers, Windows bugs and other related variables, it's a wonder to this old programmer that anything works well these days. I personally believe that the PTE development crew does an incredibly good job of swatting bugs before releasing new versions and I think that most users will agree. Many of us have been using this software since its introduction, and some of us were testing it even before it became available many years ago. We believe that it represents the very finest software of its type and that the developers have been dedicated toward keeping is so. Best regards, Lin Evans

Hi Igor, Youtube playback is apparently highly variable. The first time I played the video (after allowing the entire show to completely load first), the transitions were jerky and pans were quite jerky. However, once the show had completely played, I played it back again and it was butter smooth. I have noticed this before and wonder whether there might not be caching on the local computer which allows playback from the cache upon the second play rather than from the internet? I have seen similar playback on my own shows on Youtube where initially the playback was quite jerky then upon subsequent plays it was quite smooth. The system I played it back on has a medium high-end video card (nVIdia, 8800 GT) and a fairly powerful core 2 duo Intel processor with plenty of RAM. Best regards, Lin

Hi Lennart, Create the text on the Objects and Animations screen as an Object of your slide and set the opacity to zero at the beginning of the timeline for this text. Clone this keyframe for the text and position it at the 25 second position on the timeline with opacity still set to zero. Create a new keyframe for the text beyond 25 seconds and set the opacity to 100%. The time between the second and third keyframes will determine how quickly the text fades in. The greater the time between zero opacity and 100% opacity, the slower the fade in. Best regards, Lin

Hi Folks, I regret that I will have to take a break from my forum activities to attend to some serious family health issues. I don't know how long it will be before I will again be able to participate. It's been a real pleasure helping where I could and I will miss my time spent here but my first responsibility is to my wife who needs me now. My site - Learn to Make Slideshows - will also be down after this weekend until I have time again to devote to it. Thanks, Lin

Mask Container, Properties Tab, Additional Mask Gif image must be suitable for a mask - black & white...... Lin

Hopefully, this is what you are trying to achieve..... You really don't need five or six photos, only two. The first one should be blurred as you like for the start and the second one should be very sharp for contrast. Place the first slide into the slide list and set a very short display time such as two seconds with a one second fade-in, fade-out transition. Duplicate this slide as the second slide with a much longer display time such as seven seconds with perhaps a six second fade-in, fade-out. Place the second slide on the slide list (the sharp one) with the display time you wish and set the transition to fade-in, fade out. Here are two zipped files. The first is a zipped executable to demo the process, the second is the PTE and image zipped so you can see this in PTE and get a feel for the set-up. You can adjust the timings to suit but the essence is that you are fading out the blurred file while fading in the sharp one. http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/blur.zip http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/blurdemo.zip Best regards, Lin

Hi Brian, Thanks much for the updated information. It seems as if the industry is at odds with itself. As you correctly assert, Youtube and Vimeo are primarily video sites, and video is definitely the direction of the future. The problem for we photographers and presentation slideshow fans is that most current video development runs counter to our interests in terms of both pixel shape (rectangular versus square) and aspect ratio. With the literally billions of photographs in the world which are either large, medium or small format (35mm), the photographer essentially needs either a "square" (large and many medium formats) or a 3:2 (35mm film and most dSLR) or 4:3 (most digicams) aspect ratio. Without such a format readily available on these video sites, it forces the photographer to either choose among the minority of his existing frames which are amenable to cropping to 16:9 and ignore the majority of existing negative or captures or change his entire style of shooting and shoot everything very wide to make all new photos amenable to cropping to this 16:9 aspect ratio. Neither is a really satisfactory solution. Fortunately, Youtube does convert a 4:3 properly in HD at 1600x1200 but then the difficulty of playing back this relatively huge file over the web poses its own set of unique problems for the hardware used by the masses. On the bright side, in a few years this will all be water under the bridge because newer systems are being built to run the resource hog OS, "Vista". If it has done nothing else, it has forced manufacturers to build systems with higher hardware and video card standards which will ultimately be able to play back these large video files smoothly. For that I'm thankful because eventually we will want to have full 3D and video capabilities in our presentation slideshow software and that will tax the system even more. Meanwhile, we will probably continue to struggle with compromise. MP4 seems to offer hope in that the image quality possible is superior if only we can solve the issues of smooth pans at higher resolutions. This may have to wait for even more hardware resources because even the middle top video cards like my nVidia 8800 GT are stressed to render smooth horizontal pans with a large MP4 playback locally. Had I the means, I would test the very top-end video cards and system hardware and perhaps learn whether the issues are resource specific or whether the problems lie in the MP4 code itself, but I'm having problems avoiding foreclosure on my home right now and have no funds to devote to experiments so will have to continue to plod along by trial and error and hopefully discover a way to achieve a compromise between image size/quality and smooth performance over the web. Best regards, Lin

Hi Joe, I think I answered your question on another post. If the file on the CD is a true video file such as an AVI or MPEG II, you can burn this to a DVD using any third party software which supports creating a DVD from a video file. If the file is an executable file, you can't do this because a computer is needed to run an executable file so a commercial DVD player connected to a TV will not work. If you want to create a new slideshow, you can screen capture the images on a computer and use the images to create another show but to create a show exactly like the one on the CD you would need the original PTE files. This means a file with the extension .pte and the PicturesToExe sofware to create a video from this PTE file. The .pte file is a code file telling the PicturesToExe program how to proceed with making either an executable, DVD, MPEG II, AVI or MP4 file. It tells the program how long to display each image, whether to zoom, pan, rotate, which music file to embed, etc. Best regards, Lin

Hi Tony, I just tested it, you're right. Actually, it works for "everything" except a button in 5.1. It works for a rectangle, a frame, an image or text. I'm sure this is an oversight in 5.6. I understand why they don't use it for a button since the button can have attributes assigned for mouseover in terms of color change, etc., Of course it's possible to use a rectangle, an object or frame or even text made invisible by opacity settings so "if" one wanted a hidden "hot spot" then it would be possible to see where it was by mouse-over. I suspect that's the way they intended for it to work. I'll inform Igor.... Best regards, Lin

This may seem elementary, but did you check in the Project Options of Video Builder and make sure there is a check mark beside "Burn DVD Disc" and that your DVD burner appears selected in the list beside "device"? Best regards, Lin

Hi Daniel, I removed the video from Vimeo since it's really not a good representation of what PTE can do there and was only an experiment. I think we can assume that if we don't want to use 16:9 aspect ratio, Vimeo is not a good place for our slideshows. Youtube offers much more in the way of quality for 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio shows. Best regards, Lin

Hi Ian, Understood now - works for all objects "other" than buttons in 5.1. I emailed Igor about this: Lin Hi Ian, Do I understand correctly that you see a mouse-over "hand-icon" with 5.1?? I can't make that work on my 5.1 or any of the 5x series up to and including 5.6. I see it in 4.9 but not in 5.0 and above so I'm wondering what is happening? Do you by chance have a "hand-icon" defaulted as your mouse position indicator? I'm wondering if there is something going on which is different depending on how one's mouse software is set up rather than a PTE issue? Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, Thanks so much - don't spend a lot of time on this because you are absolutely right. I converted the sound track to a wav and it works perfectly and repeatedly. Something is not right with the original MP3. I will write Hilary and explain. Best regards, Lin

There is no good reason to create an MPEG II if you want quality output on the computer. To do that, use the "custom" output and create an MP4 with a decent resolution (at least 1024x768). For viewing on a television connected to a commercial DVD player, then you should skip the MPEG II creation and just create the DVD using the parameter you describe. This "should" produce a very good DVD. The presence of moire depends much more on the subject matter than on the creation process. Moire will almost always be caused by adjacent line patterns in the subject matter and/or the lens to subject distance which creating the photograph. I would suggest turning on the Anti-shimmering (mipmapping) feature in Objects and Animations Property tab to minimize sparkle especially during zooms. This will also help with moire but some may be unavoidable due to the low resolution of the PAL/SECAM playback depending on subject matter. It's difficult to comment without seeing the actual video - perhaps you could post the problematic video with a link so it would be easier to evaluate. Best regards, Lin