Lin Evans

Hi Ken, I don't know who owns these two places, but the herds browse all around this part of the country. It takes lots of trees, shrubs and grass to support our large herds, especially in winter. They stay up high in the summer, spring and fall - frequently see them above 13,000 feet, but in winter they come down to the lower elevations. It's about 8,000 feet here. There are about 3,000 head in this area and in Rocky Mountain National Park. In town they usually settle down on the golf course and golfers have to work around them - LOL. Lin

Not as clear as yesterday - this just before sunrise this morning. I almost ran over a cougar getting here (about 35 miles from home). Dang cat jumped over the hood of my truck and I missed getting her in the windshield by about two feet! About 200 head of elk milling around on the road and had to wait until they crossed before setting up. Just a quick 360 degree pano - light wasn't great so.... http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/sigmapano.zip (about 5.6 meg) Lin

Hi Tony, Because masks are so specific to what you wish to accomplish, the user must create their own. Fortunately, the concept of a mask is incredibly straight-forward. You have black and you have white. White is opaque to the main image and transparent to the layer underneath. Black is opaque to the layer underneath and transparent to the main image. Since the properties of white and black are very specific, various shades of grey will have limited opacity and limited transparency for their respective counterparts. For example, if you create a gradient running from black on the top to white on the bottom, then you place something inside the mask container between the container and the mask, this object will be variously opaque to transparent depending on its position. Let me give you a concrete example. Load an image into PTE. Create a gradient mask as described above in Photoshop or make one in PTE as a background and screen copy and save it as a jpg or png file. Next create some text an put this text inside a mask container with the gradient mask having the text on top of the mask. That is, mask on the bottom, text sandwiched between the Mask Container and mask. Main image goes beneath on the Objects list. If you created your gradient with black on top and white on the bottom, it will work as follows. If you reversed it, just rotate the gradient mask so that black is up with white down. Place the text string under the image and over time scroll it upward. The text will be visable in the white area of the mask, become translucent in the grey area and dissapear as it crosses into the black. By adjusting the "position" of the mask vertically, you can control where the text disappears, etc. The position of the mask can be altered not only by "moving" the mask but by changing the vertical perspective. That is you can hold down the shift key and with the mouse "squeeze" or "stretch" the mask to make it longer or shorter, etc. Once you fully understand this relationship, the sky is the limit for mask creation. you can use Photoshop, Elements, PixBuilder, etc., to create hundreds of custom masks to use as you need. You can also download hundreds if not thousands of masks via the web and use them in innovative ways. Best regards, Lin

Hi Mary, The Transparent Player plays the MP4 h.264 directly - you need no other software. The beauty of this player is that it not only streams Flash FLV, it streams MP4 h.264 and .mov file formats. You don't want to convert the MP4 to Flash, that would downgrade it appreciably, just create the MP4 HD h.264 with PTE, put it and the Transparent Player on your website as instructed by the company and your visitors will be able to see streamed MP4 which they click on your link or embedded image, etc. Best regards, Lin

JPD's (Jean Pierre's) really innovative 360 panorama using masks reminded me that back in the days prior to 5.0 there was lots of interest in panorama presentations with attempts to create them with "push" transitions and multiple photos, etc. JPD's presentation just prompted me to remind users that it's quite easy to make an excellent 360 degree panorama with zero distortion - unlike the type created with 360 pano software and presented in QTVR (QuickTime) or Flash or Java script. With these, you have true "spherical" capabilities, but it takes a "LOT" of work to capture your originals and carefully stitch them and manually insert the Zenith and Nadir to get the top and bottom so that users can manually scroll them up, down, in every direction. Most of us just like to get a really great "circular" panorama without the inherent distortions in spherical panos and PTE is just the ticket. Below is a link to a very quick - low resolution (640x480 captures) stitch presented with PTE and it only takes 2.6 megabytes. These were grab shots today when the lighting was poor so tomorrow I will try to get some decent higher resolution frames and create a decent one. This one only to remind users that this is quite easy to do. All you need is decent stitching software and about a 20/30 percent overlap with you camera on a tripod and absolutely level. Here's the link: http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/pano2.zip Best regards, Lin

Hi Ralph, You may want to read my reply to Mary above. I have not found anything else which streams h.264 MP4's so the bottom line is that if you want MP4 quality to be available for your viewers, the only alternative is the Transparent Player. The conversions from MP4 to Flash on Youtube and Vimeo degrade transitions and induce "pulsing" into the which are in some type of animation. For still images only, the Youtube and Vimeo Flash conversions of HD quality, especially 1080p and 1600x1200 (almost identical in resolution but different in aspect ratio) are great. Once you introduce animations and especially horizontal pans, you can't go above 1024x768 on Youtube and you simply can't get smooth animations and pans on Vimeo at all in HD. Youtube quality is not nearliy as good at 1024x768 HD as it is at 1600x1200 so you are left with either compromise in image quality or you must avoid animations. With MP4 h.264 at 60fps you get excellent horizontal pans at 640x480 and excellent image quality as well. You get "almost" perfectly smooth horizontal pans at 1024x768 with MP4 h.264. So for the absolute "best" posible, having the Transparent Player on your own site offers presently the highest quality possible via the web in my opinion. Best regards, Lin

Hi Mary, I really don't think the player has any effect on the load times, etc. Josh gets the extremely fast load times and smoothness via small Flash code. If you were to play an MP4 via the Transparent Player it will not run any smoother or load any faster than it does without the player. The only significant difference would be that it has preload and streaming so it's not necessary to wait until the entire file has downloaded before playback begins. The samples on Josh's site are all Flash as far as I know. They are quite small in terms of load size and with this comes the speed and smoothness. As MP4 files get larger, the amount jerkiness increases. You may want to play the samples on Youtube which I have posted links to in order to get an idea of the possible in MP4 conversions to Flash. MP4 h.264 is "cleaner" than Flash as Flash is implemented on Youtube and Vimeo, but there is no appreciable difference in the smoothness of pans. By "cleaner" I mean image quality for motion is better and there is no "pulsing" such as you see with Flash on Youtube and Vimeo. I suspect much of the "pulsing" comes from the amount of compression used on these sites. They do this to greatly lower the file sizes. For example, I just made a 360 degree circular pano which in executable form takes 2.6 megabytes at full resolution of about 768 vertical by pano width. When converted to an MP4 at 640x480 the file size is 159 megabytes. The pano runs for 190 seconds. This means 11,400 images of 640x480 are stored to furnish the 3 minutes 10 seconds at 60fps for the MP4. Only the one file is stored in the executable and the rest are created on the fly by PTE via the GPU. My point is that MP4 at h.264 can support this while Flash reduces the fps to ~30fps (29.97fps to be exact). So somewhat more "jerky" movement for certain types of animation are unavoidable and when you really compress the Flash files you get much worse quality with fades and other transitions as well. Low resolution, small size videos can look great with these constraints, but when the file and image size increases things don't do as well with either Flash or MP4. I believe that MP4 at 1024x768 is still very smooth. Image quality is superb. It's "MUCH" better than 1024x768 in Flash conversion on Youtube. It's absolutely "excellent" in terms of smoothness at 640x480 and image quality is very good. Much better than Flash in my opinion when you consider transitions, animation "and" simple image quality. So the advantage of having Josh's Transparent Player as I see it, is to be able to stream MP4's of medium size when you have animations and to stream HD at up to 1600x1200 in amazing image quality when you have no animations but just want to display a slideshow of stills with incredible image quality and very good transitions from your own website. Best regards, Lin

Hi Daniel, I don't understand - is there a question? PTE, Pinnacle, Vegas, Magix, and other software support AVCHD but these are not and do not contain web "players". You can't use these above programs to stream video from your website. Transparent Player streams Flash and MP4 h.264 among other formats. Transparent Player doesn't allow you to "create" content. These are different processes. Lin

Hi Jean Pierre, Brilliant! Best regards, Lin

Perhaps an associated problem. Igor, I just tried this with the latest release. I created a simple menu by deleting the single slide in the objects list and adding text which calls another slideshow saved with the same latest version of PTE. I used "Run Slideshow with Return." When I tried it in the Preview, I received this error message after the called slideshow had finished running or when I pressed "ESC" to exit the called slideshow: I went ahead and created the executable menu and it did not give me the error message when the called slideshow had finished or when I pressed "ESC" but returned to the calling menu slide. Only in the "Preview" do I see this message. Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, Thank you very much! This will make photographers "extremely" happy not to be forced to crop their slideshows to wide angle for display in HD on Youtube. It's too bad Vimeo doesn't support HD yet at other than 16:9. This is a big plus I think for Youtube to support other aspect ratios in HD. Best regards, Lin

Abdol, Release "Candidate" is not the same as "Release." Lin

Link fixed, going back to bed - LOL... Lin

Hi Ken, I just gave up for a couple hours to get some sleep and didn't read your reply until now. There's good news and bad. The good news is that 1024x768 is pretty smooth on the horizontal pans. The bad news is that the conversion to Flash by Vimeo takes its toll on high frequency details over the MP4 at the same resolution. This slide was carefully chosen for the test because it has lots of small detail. The MP4 created at 1024x768 is almost identical in detail to the executable. But converting to Flash softens it noticeably. Flash also introduces the "pulsing" effect which is evident on the Youtube playback. For those interested - here are links to the executable (about 6 meg) and to the 1024x768 Youtube version. Link to executable http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JylVumcoBM0 and a link to 1600x1200 version at Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7O65lUSRw8 The bottom line is that at full screen, the difference between 1600x1200 and 1024x768 is quite obvious. To see this, look at the sample of the chipmunk I posted on Youtube. 1600x1200 is virtually identical to the executable for detail even with the softening effects of the Flash conversion. On the other hand, you simply can't pan horizontally without jerky movement at over 1024x768 in the MP4 or in the Flash conversion. The playback at HD quality "without" going to full screen on Youtube at 1024x768 is quite decent. This leads me to suggest that if you want to see your images at incredible resolution on Youtube, make your shows with Video Builder and output at 1600x1200 and the Youtube Flash conversion will be superb. Just don't pan horizontally and all will be extremely good. If you want to pan horizontally, output at 1024x768 and tell your viewers that for best results view at HD without going to full screen on Youtube. My recommendations based on this trial: To get the ultimate quality at 1024x768 you need to upload your MP4 to your own website because there is essentially no serious differences between it and the executable for normal horizontal pans. This apparently means purchasing a player like the Transparent Player to get cross-platform compatibility. Other wise just output your shows for Youtube in HD at 1600x1200 for best results and forget horizontal panning. Best regards, Lin

More on the above.... I'm discovering that videos created in sizes greater than 1024x768 in MP4, AVI, etc., will not pan smoothly in the horizontal aspect. Why this is so is a mystery, but it not my system because I belong to a slideshow group on Vimeo and everyone has the same problem and not with just PTE but with "any" slideshow software. If we create a 1280x720 or 1920x1080 or 1200x1600 MP4 or AVI, horizontal pans are jerky. If we drop to 1024x768 HD at 60 fps they appear to be quite satisfactory. I've tried this with multiple systems with the best graphics cards with up to 1 gigabyte of video RAM and it doesn't seem to make any difference. Go larger than 1024x768 and you can expect jerky horizontal pans. Vertical pans are much better. There is still some lack of smoothness, but not nearly as bad as with horizontal pans. Of course when Vimeo or Youtube convert our MP4 uploads to Flash, this jerky movement in horizontal pans is still evident. Right now, I'm uploading a 1024x768 panorama with complete horizontal pan along with zooms. It works very well on my system so we shall see how it fares on Youtube. I will post a link when it's done to get feedback from others. Best regards, Lin

Hi Jose, First, save your slideshow under another PTE name so you have a backup. Next save each bmp as a jpg with your desired level of compression but do not delete the original bmp or change the folder where they reside. It would be better to first copy them to another folder and work from there. Use Irfanview or other batch conversion tool to copy all files to jpgs then open your duplicate slideshow (the one you saved under another PTE file name). Go to the main slide list and look above the mini-player and find between "comment" and "add sound" a tab which says "Change ima...." This allows you to substitute any image selected in the slide list with any other image while preserving all timings, keyframes, etc. Do this for each image. Best regards, Lin

Very nice job Jose! The only improvement I see which you might consider would be to click on Anti Shimmering (mipmapping) in Objects and Animations under Properties tag for a couple of the slides which have shimmer as they are zooming. Otherwise perfect! Yes, this is very near the release version. The essence is that there are betas until the developer believes that the product is ready, then perhaps a couple release candidates then the release. Best regards, Lin

Thanks Ralph, Hopefully when Igor wakes up this morning (it's very late at night in Russia now) will see the HD video version on Youtube and think about supporting 1600x1200 for Youtube in addition to the 1280x720 version - it makes more sense for the photographer versus the videographer. Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, Looks great, but you need one change before release. Support 1600x1200 HD resolution on Youtube. We have the chance to be the first presentation slideshow software which does this. Youtube only recommends 1280x720 "because" they are a "VIDEO" site. Many new video cameras shoot at 16:9. Almost all PTE users with photos have to crop their photos either in PTE by choosing 16:9 or by using Photoshop, PixBuilder, etc., to crop. This destroys many photos. Youtube, unlike Vimeo, will display an HD at whatever aspect ratio you send it. 1600x1200 is far more useful to us than 1280x720. I have uploaded samples to Youtube to show you. Just choose Watch in HD and then switch to full screen and you have a full PTE show in HD at 1600x1200. I was able to do this by manually entering 1200 as the height when using the "HD Video for PC and Mac" and using 1600 as the width. I think it would be a mistake not to include this aspect ratio and resolution as an option for auto-upload to Youtube in 5.6 release. Best regards, Lin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URo8OJld840 (1280x720) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBV_oRHT9fI (1600x1200) Judge for yourself. Why support only 1280x720 for auto upload to Youtube??? Switch to "Watch in HD" on both and switch to full screen. Here are specs from Youtube. Recommendations for 1280x720 h.264 BUT this doesn't mean that we can't upload higher resolutions - read carefully: "in general, the higher the resolution the better" Youtube recommends 1280x720 "because" they are a video site. This resolution doesn't work well for us as presentation slideshow users. Yes, we "can" make shows in this aspect ratio but it's a nuisance to have to crop our photos and with Youtube it is NOT necessary to have this aspect ratio to get HD. I was able to get 1600x1200 by using "Custom" and overwriting the maximum of 1080 for the vertical pixel dimensions. After creation, the 1600x1200 MP4 was uploaded to Youtube. Results in link above..... Let's also support higher resolution auto uploads to Youtube in the Upload to Youtube - It's more awkward to have to do it like I did and other aspects ratios are more useful to the majority. Lin

Personally, I have little need for 16:9 aspect ratio for the majority of my slideshows and I suspect that is true of "most" who use their photographs to create slideshows. To get 16:9 for most of us, it becomes necessary to crop our images to that wide screen ratio and this is awkward in many cases because we loose valuable portions of the screen. Youtube supports HD in other than 1280x720. I just uploaded a 1600x1200 in HD to Youtube and it looks great as does the original created with PTE. Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzmfXwJCFnE Watch it in HD. If you have a monitor which supports 1600x1200 set it to that resolution and watch full screen. Why not support this resolution along with the 1280x720 - it's more useful to more people I think?? Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, You're making far too many assumptions. First you assume that the person is using XP, then that they know how to create a "zipped folder" in Explore. How much easier can it be than clicking on "File" then "Create Backup in Zip?" Best regards, Lin

Yes, "if" you open the folder, add the files inside to a zip archive then zip it. The advantage of doing it via the "zip" menu feature is that it's all done for you without the user needing to know how to add all files using zip. It doesn't even require the user to have zip resident on their computer (some don't even today). As seen by the thread, the OP didn't realize that it was necessary to open the file and zip up the individual components rather than try to work with the folder. Using the PTE zip feature minimizes the possibility for confusion and mistakes. Best regards, Lin

Hi Jose, Yes, no mixture - separate installations each with its own icon and executable APR code. Yes, your project can run on 5.6 beta 20 and all you need to do to make it work is install 5.6 beta 20, click on the 5.6 icon to open PTE 5.6 beta 20, then navigate to your PTE file and open it. I have about 12 different versions of PTE all existing side by side on my system. All earlier PTE shows created in earlier versions can be opened with 5.6. You can then use the new features of 5.6. Obviously, when you make changes using features not found in earlier PTE versions these features won't work if you later open the PTE file with 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 5.5, etc. You discovered this when you opened my example with 5.2. You could see the image of the chipmunk but you couldn't see the text effect because it was created with code not found in 5.2. But if you then open the PTE file in 5.6 you can see the effect as in the executable file I posted. Best regards, Lin

Hi Mike, The essence is that to be able to load and play your show, your friend needs not only the PTE file but also all associated images. The PTE zip file gathers "everything" needed tor PTE to load and run the show into a single compressed file. Best regards. Lin