Lin Evans

Ken, Brian, Thanks for checking! Brian, Yes, too large files but unfortunately I know of no way to make them smaller without a total re-do of the entire show specifically for Youtube. Hopefully, in the new version 5.6 of PTE the Youtube formula will do some of the steps which are manual right now. The major problem with size is the rather huge "rain" png files. Igor has had some suggestions which I will try later on but the problem is to get sufficient speed of movement over a long enough time period to make a realistic animation. To do that requires an extremely "long" (in the vertical plane) file size. Of course it would be quite easy to cut a great deal off the width for a Youtube size AVI and also possible to resize the originals down to the native size which "may" or may not help because the AVI creation already resamples things down proportionally. I'll have to experiment and see whether having the original in smaller frame will help. Unfortunately doing a "crop" won't work correctly because that leaves me with rain drops of a proper size for a 1200 pixel width diaplay in a 400 pixel width file. This leaves me with a resample which is, I think, essentially what Youtube is doing along with sound track compression and conversion to mono sound, etc. It's just tough to get decent looking fine detail animations in such a small video format. Add to this the fact that many don't know you have a choice of high quality or "regular" (read poor quality) video on youtube so looking at tiny snow-flakes or rain-drops on poor quality avi is somewhat dissapointing - LOL. A friend who lives close by does a good bit of video on Youtube and his video conversions from his video camera look better than what I get but then he has larger subject matter (closer) than these small detail animations so that may prove to be the relevant difference. Hopefully the bandwidth for Youtube will eventually be increased to allow 640x480 size video which is probably the "breakpoint" for half-way decent images. Best regards, Lin

Hi Howard, Thanks for checking! No cloud movement, the jet airliner passes behind and out of clouds but no real time to simulate cloud movement in short video. Best regards, Lin

Can you see the rain animation here or do I need to overemphasize the rain for the small avi? Suggestion - watch in "High Quality".... Will be up with link in 10 minutes from 7:44 pm mountain time 1/13/08 Up and operational now: Link to exe for comparison: http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/firestarter.zip Youtube Snowglobe animation link: Lin

Important information for those using PNG objects which overlay background images and who are converting or saving their files to AVI, DVD or MPEG.... http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8524 Lin

Hi Gilbert, What software did you use to create the sequence? If you used PTE and if you have preserved the files then you can still load the original images assuming they are still available with the latest versions of PTE. If all you have left are the executable files then the best way is definitely "not" to photograph the images on the screen but rather use any of a number of available screen capture tools to capture the images and save them as files to be used in your new sequence. Best regards, Lin

Hi John, The way it worked best for me was to temporarily place the image you are trying to match on the objects list for the previous slide. Set the opacity to about 50 percent on each temporarily and match the zoom at the end of image one to the zoom (and position) of image two for its start in a perfect overlay. Then copy the pan, zoom, rotate numbers and go to slide two and match them for the perfect overlay on slide one. Next go back to slide one and delete the temporary slide two object and set the opacity back to 100 percent. Continue this process for each subsequent image and you should get a very close match to give you the infinite zoom. The things you must watch out for are to be sure that you take sufficient image increments so that you don't have to have black borders, etc. Best regards, Lin

Hi John, Just use your first image as the hidden parent rather than create something else. Do the animations on the first image, set the opacity to zero at all keyframes for it then copy it. Set the opacity back to normal and paste the copied first image as many times as you wish as separate slides and attach child object images to each. By doing it this way you will decrease the memory requirements a bit for the video card and not need to have a foreign image as the parent. Best regards, Lin

Hi Barry, I quit teaching at the university primarily because of a preponderance of this type "research". Something which could be done by an "average" student in a few hours or for we slower and older folks a day (it took me about five hours including the initial photography) takes weeks or months and exhausts grant money which could be spent for much more useful purposes, but hey that's what makes it so "interesting." Good luck with that "science of Fluid Dynamics and liquids in free-fall state" course - maybe you'll get a ride into space to test the real "free fall" condition! HA! LOL.... Best regards, Lin

Some of Microsoft's "brainiac" mathematicians decided to investigate simulation of real rain in a photo. After reading this PDF with page after page of advanced formulae and looking at their results I had to laugh. Not to make light of their very interesting study, but they "could" have just purchased PTE and photographed some rain drops and created it (png files to make rain) the way I did which to me is much more realistic than their simulations which again, to me, look like a few random lines created in Photoshop. Here's the link for anyone interested. I suspect this mirrors much of our "scientific" approach to issues which are better done by experimentation..... I think they got off-track on their initial assumptions. They analyzed "videos" of rain. Video cameras do not mirror the human eye in the way rain is perceived because they generally use only about 30 fps and don't have the ability to "stop" action so the video rain appears as elongated lines where actual human observation sees actual drops falling. Bottom line is all the math and science in the world applied to a false premise leads to not a realistic simulation of rain falling but rather a duplication of what can be done with a video camera. http://research.microsoft.com/~zhoulin/RealTimeRain_MSTR.pdf Best regards, Lin

Hi, It's like comparing cabbage and oranges - totally different programs for totally different purposes. PTE is designed primarily for display of the still photo in ultimate quallity. It allows animations of still photos with pan, zoom, rotate, precise synchronization with music down to the thousandth of a second and output equal to input resolution for a Windows executable slideshow. PTE also allows creation of AVI, MPEG or DVD shows which degrade image quality to the necessary resolution of the display device but It doesn't deal with video or web shows unless you convert to Flash or such. Slideshow Pro is primarily a video display software which also allows still images to be displayed. The emphasis is on web use and resolutions and image quality are significantly degraded accordingly. You must decide whether or not being able to display video over the web is important. If so, then look at Proshow Gold, Proshow Producer, Memories on TV Pro, Slideshow Pro or a host of other software which are essentially software rendered and produce primarily video. Even though some of these programs "can" produce executable code, the image quality isn't close to the hardware rendered executable shows of PFT which display the completed shows with the same quality as the images used to create these shows. They are simply different products for different purposes. Best regards, LIn

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126449 http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/e...8dc5661033.mspx Lin

These jpg files contain all keyboard shortcuts for Vista and XP http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sampl...dshortcuts.jpg; http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sampl...dshortcuts.jpg; Lin

I added a little something to keep you out of the boat - same link .. LOL Lin

http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/firestarter.zip Best regards, Lin

Hi Barry, That's a result of a combination of your internet download speed (your own connection, the condition of the internet traffic at the time and the size of the slideshow). Typically it takes about 40 seconds to download 15 percent of this Flash file and begin the show. The slideshow itself is 27 minutes long. At the download speed you must have been experiencing at the time it would take considerably longer to download the executable of some 150 meg size than to preload the Flash so there are advantages to Flash FLV. Unfortunately quality is not among them. Best regards, Lin

Hi Peter, Yes, you are way exceeding your available resources. First, there is no need to have five megabyte slides except in the rare case when you are doing a deep zoom on a slide and will need to zoom to 1:1 on it. For optimal shows, there is no need for the slides to exceed the display resolution of the device you will be displaying slides on. If your monitor is a 4 megapixel model, then having a slide larger than four megapixel is wasting resources. If the monitor or display device is two megapixels then you don't need anything larger than a two megapixel image, again, unless you are doing a deep zoom on a few images. Second - 900 images in a single show is way beyond the limits of propriety. If you allotted only six seconds each your slideshow would be 90 minutes long! It would be prudent to break it down into shows with no more than a maximum of a couple hundred slides per show. PTE will give you wonderful results but you are pushing your hardware way beyond the limits. When a show gets above two gigabytes its unruly and very few computers will load a single file larger than two gigabytes so you would have to limit distribution to only those with resources capable of playing such a gigantic show. An executable slideshow does not create a multitude of images like a DVD show. It instructs the computer to create the individual images on the fly from the available images. So though it may seem "logical" that if a low resource computer can play a 4.7 gigabyte DVD then it should surely be able to play a 4 gigabyte executable file but it's not the same thing at all. With a DVD of this size it may take hours to render and create all the necessary images at 29.97 frames per second display which play back in slightly over an hour. But with an executable file you are asking the computer to create up to 60 or more frames per second and in your case that's 60 or more frames each second of images five megabytes in size. Do the math and you have asked your system to create 300 megabytes or more of data each second. Even with a super PC having eight gigabytes of RAM, a super fast processor and something like an nVIDIA 8800 GTX card this would not be feasible. Remember, when you are editing, PTE must keep huge amounts of data in memory to allow "undo" and "redo" operations. So with these huge files you quickly exhaust whatever memory is available after Vista takes its pretty significant share. Best regards, Lin

Hi Jeff, I'm assuming you mean a Flash output option from PTE because there is nothing preventing you from using any of a number of Flash converters to create a Flash slideshow from your PTE AVI or MPEG II output. There are many of these available such as On2 Technologies Flix or Riva or Sorensen or others ranging from Free to $300.00 U.S. depending on your needs. As Barry points out, the quality will be diminished to the point where your show will look like any other slideshow and image "quality" is one of the real substantive differences between PTE and other products. If you would like to see what a typical PTE slideshow looks like converted to Flash you can click my link below. This was done with Flash 8 and Flix Pro and is about as good as you can expect. O.K., but rough fade transitions, poor fast movement of any kind, mediocre image quality, etc. There's a 15% "preload" on this so you will have to wait while the percent reaches an indicated 15 before the show begins. This is a Flash FLV or pseudo streaming file. PTE may eventually have Flash output, but truthfully, it hasn't been a very popular feature even with other slideshow software which has Flash output. http://www.lin-evans.net/ctml/ctml.html Best regards, Lin

Well, we don't want to start any fires like Northern California - LOL.. Lin

LOL - not yet, I'm still working out the details - this one is pretty complex. Some of the waterfalls have been greatly improved since the earlier posts. As with the rain I'm still working on the realism aspect which requires a combination of special PNG file creation and application. The "secret" of rain is in the PNG file which has to literally be made from photographs of rain drops to get the proper transparency and shadowing for a realistic appearance. There is a combination of bouncing perspective along with underlying PNG files which simulate the rain striking the pavement plus transparency in the rain effect itself. It will probably take me a week or more to work out details for a tutorial on this one. Best regards, Lin

http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/raintrial1.zip (about 12 meg) Realistic?? Lin

Just export as an MP3 from Audacity Best regards, Lin

Hi, If you use absolutely no pan, zoom or rotate, then PTE works very much as the older 4x versions and "should" be able to be played on nearly any computer without issue. On the other hand, if you use "any" pan zoom or rotate effect then PTE does hardware rendering which means that the slideshow uses the power of the video card to construct the intermediate images which occur at up to and exceeding 60 frames per second. This then means that the video card in the computer the file is being played on must actually "create" on the fly 60 or more image each second. To carry this to the logical conclusion, the size of each image, the speed of change and the video card's performance then become factors. Many of the older systems have 64 meg or even 32 meg video cards. These cards can handle smaller images without complex animations and numerous objects but if you perchance feed it images larger than about 1024x768 the card will struggle and sometimes fail to give the performance you expect. If you are absolutely certain that no one using your show will have an older system then you can use larger images (up to the expected display resolution) but to be safe if you confine the image size to about 1024x768 and limit any fancy animations most will be able to play your shows successfully. In the case you mention, I suspect that file size may play a role. For optimal show performance a newer video card such as an nVIDIA 8600 GT will play about anything you throw at it. Hardware acceleration is really necessary to render smooth animations, but if you have no animations in your show then you can turn it off. Perhaps you can ask her to do the following: go to "Start" "Run" then type in "dxdiag" and click on O.K. Windows will run a diagnostic and you can ask her to click on the "system" and "display" tabs and report back. The solution "could" be as simple as downloading new video card drivers or a new Direct X iteration. Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, That shot looking out from inside the tent of sundown and Trixie says it all! Great time; relaxing while enjoying nature's bounty with good company and man's best friend, it doesn't get much better than that! Best regards, Lin

Hi Guys, I suspect that's a typo and that his files are 2 megabytes instead of 2 gigabytes. I don't think it's possible to create 2 gigabyte files with any present digital camera unless you are stitching a couple hundred full sized images and in such case the limit for PTE and Windows 32 bit for a "total" single file size is 2 gigabytes. I think we can safely assume that it's 2Mb - LOL. Best regards, Lin

Hi Xaver, It appears that this might definitely be a solution. I believe that this masking is planned for a future PTE version so we may soon know! Best regards, Lin