Lin Evans

Hi Robert, It's the 3ms, 5ms, etc., the term for time between excitations of pixels on a CRT. For example, crt's have phosphor dots or "stripes" depending on the type of individual CRT. There are "triads" of red blue and green phosphor dots or in the case of Sony Triniton technology "stripes" which have a "decay" rate when they are excited by electrons. The more frequently they are energized (excited) by an electron, the less "flicker" from the horizontal sweep frequency is apparent to the eye which greatly eases eye strain. However, this very feature which reduces "flicker" and eyestrain also reveals very quick changes in the states of brightness or contrast such as aliasing produced by rapid changes in size or position of closely positioned detail features such as adjacent horizontal or vertical lines, etc. In LCD displays the technology is quite different but the end result is that with a slow refresh rate you simply don't see all the "glitter" or "pulsing" because much of it happens faster than the monitor can respond. Typically, LCD monitors are exceedingly sharp and produce stellar images but many (most actually) can't reproduce certain fast movements which can be seen on CRT's. So even though some aliasing flicker is seen with very sharp images, much of it simply lost in between refresh cycles. The end result is that the annoying "glitter" or "flicker" seen on high resolution, fast refresh CRT's just isn't noticed on slower refresh LCD's. It's this same issue which allows you to see a "trace" when you move a cursor very quickly with the mouse. On CRT's you don't see the trace but on LCD's, often you do. The effective "decay" rate is so slow that where the mouse cursor "was" the image or "ghost" remains for a time after the actual image has moved on. Perhaps "refresh rate" is less accurate than "decay" time, but the effect nonetheless is that the videos look better on most LCD monitors than on a CRT with fast refresh and quick decay or "persistence" phosphors. Best regards, Lin "As for your Southwest Art post in HD on Vimeo - I guess my LCD monitor qualifies as slow because your Vimeo version really looks quite fine - until I expand it to full-screen view. At full screen, all the motion-triggered trouble appears. On my setup it really deteriorates when full screen. When you speak of monitor refresh rate does that mean the 60 - 75 mhz, etc. or is it the response time listed as 3 ms, or 5ms, etc.?"

I created an MP4 export to Vimeo to test the quality of the Flash conversion. The original MP4 used the extremely good mipmapping to absolutely minimize "glitter" or "sparkle" on sharp detail objects. The MP4 which was created by 5.6 was excellent. There was a little jerky movement in pans, zooms, etc., but all-in-all it was excellent. Vimeo's Flash conversion, however, is a totally different and unsatisfactory solution for a PTE show which has pans, zooms or motion and even remotely sharp images. I purposely used a show with very sharp images to test this so your mileage may vary. Apparently most videos submitted to Vimeo are "very" soft because they apparently use extreme sharpening. What was a very smooth original ended up with excessive glitter, sparkle and edge artifacts such as stairstep aliasing. How bad this will appear depends a great deal on the type monitor you use. If you use an LCD display with a slow refresh rate (fast mouse movement leaves a "trail") then it won't look so bad. On the other hand if you use a high resolution CRT with a fast refresh rate it just won't look right. My suggestion for those who submit their MP4's to Vimeo is not to use fast motion at all or use gaussian blur, blur AND mipmapping on every image which is remotely sharp. Look for yourself - link below. The original MP4 has almost zero aliasing but the Vimeo conversion is terrible for some monitors. I've looked at it on both very sharp LCD monitors but with a slow refresh rate as well as with my high resolution CRT with a very fast refresh. If the refresh rate is fast it simply will not look good. If the refresh rate is quite slow, the "sparkle" will be much more bearable. Here's the link: http://vimeo.com/1979714 Best regards, Lin

Later - I did the same show over and the second time it completed and uploaded to Vimeo. The sound seems less than optimal, but the video was created. Some "jitter" in pans and zooms but not bad. I did find the mp4 image after the completion of the slideshow this time so perhaps the first time (see below) was simply an error of some sort. I did notice, however, that the sound seems to be an issue on one of my systems. It's very strange because the sound on the executable and on the preview is perfect on all my systems. The sound on one of my systems is very poor on the MP4 and on the Vimeo conversion, but on two other systems it's fine. It's as if something can be detected by one of my systems which the other two can't reproduce. This "could" be my sound system on the one which appears to have issues. I may change my sound card to try to chase this issues which "may" be unique to one of my own computers. Hi Igor, I created an HD video with 5.6 beta 1 to be output to Vimeo. The entire process for this took nearly an hour which is normal for the size video. It was completed successfully according to the check mark at the end of the process but it was never uploaded. When it got to the "Uploading" it just didn't go any further. Could it be a time-out at Vimeo? Does the program attempt to hold Vimeo open after log on until after the competition of the encoding? If so, it would be much better to close the loop at Vimeo then re-open after completion of encoding because encoding could take a long time depending on the size of the slideshow. The suggestion is to have the video saved to the hard disk just as one you create with "custom". I found a reference to it in the Windows trash can (filename.mp4) but was not able to extract it so it's lost. It definitely was created but the upload to Vimeo never actually happened. If the video were saved on the hard disk instead of being trashed it could then be uploaded manually. Apparently something happened on the first try because on the subsequent video creation everything worked normally so this report "may" be simply the result of some internal issue on my own system and may have nothing to do with PTE 5.6 beta 1. Best regards, Lin

This is a first rough tutorial on masking with PTE 5.6. It will be re-done when I understand all the ramifications of masking and all the different approaches - but this will get you started. It's in the Tutorials section as the last entry on PTE Made Easy - PTE for Smarties: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....st=0#entry49109 Best regards, Lin

Hi Mary, See my demo here: download the PTE file to see how to set it up: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8906 Best regards, Lin

See the block below which says (size/position in pixels). You can put original size in at this point. Best regards, Lin

O.K., here's a demo of some of the things you can do with masks. I'll have a limited PDF Tutorial ready later today. First link is to original made with early beta before multiple masks available in single container. Some had issues with certain laptops. The second link should play on "any" Windows system. http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/maskdemo.zip http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sampl...demorevised.zip Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor and team, Looks fantastic! Masking is really exciting and HD output is amazing! I've been busy making masks in anticipation of the release - am working on a demo now.... Thanks! Lin

Hi Umberto, The way I would approach this is to end the menu with execution of each show called then call the menu back at the last slide of each menu choice executable. One of your choices on the Advanced Tab of Project Options is to "run application after last slide". So call the menu executable back with this feature. This way your sound will stop and begin once again each time the menu is exited and re-opened. Best regards, Lin

Hi Jan, It's a "logical" error. Putting a slide on the slide list doesn't "duplicate" the original, it simply tells the program that you want to display this slide more than once for some duration of time. If you "rename" the original (that's what's happening when you rename) then the remaining slides having the old name are no longer valid so the program can't find them. The answer is not to rename files, just remove the excess from the slide list. You can do this by just clicking and dragging or by highlighting, right click then choose "remove slide from slide list". Best regards, Lin

Hi Umberto, If I understand you correctly, what you want to achieve is a continuous zoom effect from perhaps a wide angle to extreme closeup or "macro". Quite a while ago we experimented with this "endless" zoom concept and found that the easiest way to achieve this was by placing the images on separate slides then precisely matching the ending of frame one with the beginning of frame two, the ending of frame two with the beginning of frame three. There were several discussions on the forum about the best way to achieve this and some good suggestions were offered by several forum members. I found that the easiest way for me to do this was to temporarily place frame two as an object on slide one - set the opacity of slide one AND object 2 to about 50% - overlay the images perfectly visually (use the grid if necessary) then copy and paste the pan, zoom and rotate figures for object 2 to slide 2 then delete object 2 from slide 1. Repeat for each successive slide. I made a couple demo shows which I will link to below. Because I didn't perfectly sequence the original photos with small enough increments in focal length you will see some obvious breaks in the zoom smoothness, but it's close enough to get the idea. On the original slides never exceed 100% zoom (don't zoom beyond 1:1 on any single slide). Match lighting, hue, saturation, levels, etc., in Photoshop for each slide. This can be done to achieve an "endless zoom" effect. http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/demos/kachinazoom.zip (about 23 meg zipped exe) Also read this thread and look and Andrew's sample: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....20zoom&st=0 This may help you with some ideas.... Best regards, Lin

Hi Umberto, Opacity is one attribute where a parent/child relation doesn't apply so the answer is no, there is no way to control the opacity of related objects other than to duplicate the opacity settings for the related objects. This was done to give maximum flexibility to PTE because many types of animations require individual control over the opacity of parent and child objects. Perhaps sometime in future versions there may be a optional "switch" to allow linking opacity among various related objects but right now that's not an option. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, Think of a frame as a rectangle with no opacity. A frame is simply a "convenience" to allow you to have a parent object which can be used to manipulate child objects in unison. You could use any object in place of a frame but then to hide the object you would have to set the opacity to zero. So the primary purpose of a frame is to allow you to control multiple object movement simultaneously without having to set and synchronize the pan, zoom or rotate independently for each one. It's quite probable that you "are" selecting the rectangle but simply not aware of it because you can't see the border. This is often the case when you are looking at the screen with the view set to 100% and the rectangle is larger than the visible screen. Sometimes it helps to set the view to 25% or even smaller to see the green bounding rectangle outlining the invisible frame. You might try substituting a rectangle for a frame to give it visibility. You can always just make the opacity for the rectangle zero after you are finished with the animation, etc. The proper order is to add the frame before adding child objects but in the event that you add the objects first and then wish to add a parent frame you can select and copy the objects, then delete them as a group, add the frame, select the frame and paste the copied objects with the frame selected. This will then place the objects as children of the frame. Remember, no object will be selected unless a keyframe is highlighted first. So when you want to select a frame or any object for that matter, you must first click on a keyframe to highlight it, then click on the frame in the objects list or inside the green bounding rectangle. Sometimes I personally use rectangles rather than frames because I find it easier to keep track of them visually while I'm setting up animations where they are useful. After everything is sorted out and working properly I then select each rectangle and set the opacity to zero. It's just easier for me to do it that way, but using a frame rather than a rectangle saves the step of changing opacity. The disadvantage of using the rectangle is that you must change the opacity at each keyframe to zero to hide them. By using the frame these multiple steps are avoided. Best regards, Lin

Hi Linda, The initial answer is quite simple. Do "not" copy Pete's PTE file (what you are calling the Project) to your computer. When an automatic zip file is created with PTE it "includes" all files including the PTE file (Project). Just unzip all file in a folder, navigate to that folder with PTE and you will find the PTE file. When you open it all pointers will be correct and point toward the images, songs, etc., all zipped neatly and now all residing in a single folder. Having said this, do your edits in a "serial" manner. That is you can make changes then send the zipped file to Pete. He then opens the zipped files and uses your PTE file and makes changes and sends it back to you. There is no way to "combine" the changes - PTE is not a networking program and I don't believe there are any presentation slideshow softwares which are. Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, I downloaded and installed it and it is a very nice combo. As you correctly discern, documentation is essentially non-existent other than the most vague references so not simple to initially understand. It's a real shame that with all the work which has gone into this that no one has written a user guide because the less technically inclined will simply delete it and buy something which is actually less powerful but ultimately easier to understand. I'm always surprised when I see something like this which has obviously taken a lot of work by a very dedicated and "savy" video person but which has almost no documentation. Such a product demands at least a rudimentary user guide. I suppose when someone is so intimately familiar with not only the product but the process they forget that the majority who will be using it haven't a clue how to proceed. I've always felt that the best way to proceed with such a product would be to take a simple example and go step-by-step with loading a video and converting it to another format. Do it for something simple such as input an AVI and output Flash. Reasonably savy people can always extrapolate how to proceed with other formats when they see it done with one. Of course this product is much more than a video "converter" so perhaps that may be why there has been a dearth of documentation. I'm still trying to sort out whether it outputs any embedding HTML syntax. If not, I suppose the user could modify code from Youtube or Vimeo to embed or use some commercial web software to design a custom page to drop in FLV code. Also I could find no way of setting up a preload which would be highly desirable for the end user who wants to embed the FLV on his/her website. Still, it's an intriguing free converter which appears to work quite well. Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, The results look very good. Do you know which iteration of Flash is being used (5, 7, 8, 9, etc.) and what language the screens are in (English, German, etc.,)? Best regards, Lin

Hi Peter, In practice, not a lot different from what has been available at 1080p for some time with videocams. The larger sensor and replaceable lenses primarily gives additional control of depth of field previously limited to very expensive professional video equipment and some advantages in low light. The actual image quality aside from depth of field considerations is not much different from that available with ordinary HD handycams and is still only about two megapixel resolution. On the other hand, the Red One video camera can do 11.4 megapixel frames at 60 FPS so that's really where the true video innovation is at present. Remember, neither the 5D Mark II nor the D90 have built-in body image stabilization so to really make any serious quality video it would be necessary for the user to purchase Canon, Nikon or Sigma stabilized lenses or be limited to tripod based photography. Both the Nikon D90 and new Canon 5D Mark II produce very nice video but to include more than a tiny amount of video at these resolutions would overwhelm the 2 gigabyte limitation of a PTE slideshow. I'm not certain how this capability with the 1080p video in the 5D Mark II will impact presentation slideshows. It certainly takes a tremendous amount of resources and other than enhancing certain animations it's really more a product for presentation video than for presentation slideshows. There are a number of very good video programs which also can do stills so perhaps the impact might be greater there than in PTE. As for extracting frames, yes that's a possibility but the problems of file size inflation remain. Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, I primarily use On2 Technologies' Flix Pro (Flash 8) and set the FPS to 29.97 with a preload of 15% with 640x480 on average as appropriate for average consumer broadband bandwidth. Here's a link you can test which pretty well pushes the envelope as far as FLV size, etc., goes. This one is a 27 minute slideshow and you can expect anywhere from 45 seconds to three minutes of wait time for the 15% download. The percentage is displayed as a countdown: http://www.lin-evans.net/ctml/ctml.html Though I use Flix Pro, which is a fairly expensive product, Flix Standard is quite acceptable. It doesn't have two pass encoding and has fewer features but is plenty good for most purposes. Sorenson Squeeze, and Wildforms Flair are other great products. Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, Great news! Thanks for all the hard work and dedication from the PTE team!! Best regards, Lin

Hi Jim, I'm not clear on what it is that you have lost. Do you have separate PTE files for the two segments? Have you made executable slideshows for each segment yet? If so do you have those executable files? I'm unclear on what you mean by "image holding files". Just so we are on the same page; PicturesToExe creates a file with the extension .pte which consists of instructions and "pointers" to allow the program to create an executable slideshow or play back and/or modify a slideshow. The PTE file doesn't contain the images themselves but rather the "instructions" for the computer to find the images on your hard disk or other media and manipulate these images with the PicturesToExe code. So have you lost the PTE file for one of your segments or have you lost an executable file or have you lost or overwritten data? Once I clearly understand what's going on I think it will be possible to provide a solution or at least a definitive answer. Best regards, Lin

Let's take these one at a time and try to be more specific. "sometimes" means that you probably are having issue with your operating system or environment (other programs running, etc.). If the problem isn't repeatable, the probability is high that it's not an application software issue (PTE) but an operating system or "environment" issue. Please be specific about the scaling issue. If you could provide a zipped PTE where this is happening perhaps we could get to the bottom of the problem. Also, provide a PTE file example to show the "same effect" for each new show and we can have several people look at it and see where the error lies. The probability is that you have not properly set the program in "Project Options" "Effects Tab" to give the desired transitions, assuming you are talking about transitions between images. If, on the other hand, you mean you have programmed some "animation" such as pan, zoom, rotate, etc., and are getting something different than expected, having the PTE file to analyze will help sort it out. Best regards, Lin

Hi Jean-Claude, I suspect you need to put a "preload" on your FLV output. Even with a very fast broadband it starts and stops frequently. About 15% should allow the average broadband enough headstart to keep up. Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, Welcome Home! The Highlands, a beautiful place to visit indeed! Best regards, Lin

Hi Peter, Essentially, yes. The problem is that to have "both" the foreground mask and the "copyright" stamp a user must be comfortable enough with Photoshop. etc., to achieve two goals. First the masks must all contain the copyright manually placed somewhere within the transparency window, and then for those images for which the mask may be inappropriate, an individual PNG copyright file must be placed on individual images. Then there is still the issue of "mixed" aspect ratio or mixed orientation slides which would still have to be handled manually by using a different size or different mask mask as an object. Like all work-arounds, there are pitfalls. Admittedly, this may not be an issue for everyone, but does raise the level of complexity for the casual user. The "proper" way to achieve this woud be a separate feature which automatically sensed the orientation of the image as well as the dimensions and adjusted the foreground mask accordingly. As you surmise, this would requre a good bit more code. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, It's "very" easy to make the initial mask in Photoshop. Open Photoshop and choose "file" "new". Set background to transparent and set the size to whatever you want to cover as the maximum size scree resolution. For the purpose of instruction let me use 1024x768. Use 72 dpi. Next you will see a checkerboard which is the indication that this is a transparent layer. This checkerboard will be 1024 by 768. Next decide the exact dimensions you want the "hole" to be so you can have you image displayed inside the 1024x768 frame. Next choose the paint bucket and solid black color. Click in the transparency and it will paint the whole thing black. You now have two layers. The under layer is transparent and the upper layer is black. Next choose "file" "new" and background color. Choose white and make the dimensions the size you decide for your "hole" such as 1000x744. This would mean that the white rectangle is 24 pixels smaller in dimensions on each of the four sides. Next do "select" "all" and "edit" "copy" on the white rectangle. Now select the black larger rectangle and do "edit" "paste" This will put your white rectangle exactly in the center of the larger black rectangle. Next do "select color range" and click on the white rectangle with the slider all the way to the right. This will put a selection rectangle exactly around the white rectangle. Next hit the "Delete" key and the white rectangle will be deleted leaving a selection of the exact size you want for your "hole" in the black. Next click on "layer" "merge" visible and then hit the delete key. This will punch a perfect rectangle hole in the black border. Save the result and you have your mask. If you will just give me the dimensions you want I can do this for you in seconds, but you should do it for practice. Best regards, Lin