Lin Evans

Hi Karl, Let me try to answer some of your questions. You can do this without putting the stop at the end of the slides but rather by using the Navigation Bar. The "Pause" (a set of parallel vertical lines) control when pressed, changes to an Arrow pointing to the right. Once this state is achieved, you can press the forward arrow, back arrow, etc., and the show will remain paused on each slide until the user decides to either go to another slide using the forward or back button or again press the "Pause" at which time whatever the preset time for the slides will take over and the show becomes automatic again. If you set the navigation bar to appear for a preset time then fade out, you can then navigate with the PgUp PgDn and Space Bar or use one of the Remote Controls designed for PowerPoint. So the Navigation Bar can remain hidden until the mouse is moved the re-appear showing that the "Pause" is in the "locked" position to remind the viewer that it's set up on full manual. When the Pause shows the parallel bars it's on auto-advance, when showing the arrow it's on manual. The only intervention needed to visually determine the state would be for the user to move the mouse as long as they use the PgUp, PgDn and Spacebar. Best regards, Lin

Mario, Do you mean copy and paste "keypoints" ? If so, the answer is no. You can't apply the keypoints from one slide to another directly. The reason is fairly complex, but remember you are dealing with not only the animations between keypoints but also the timing of the entire slide. Each slide can have a custom time so to be able to copy keypoints and apply the exact timings and animations to a different slide would also require having the identical time set for the display. BUT: I assume by "timed points" you are referring to "keypoints?" If so, there is no direct way to do this, but there is a rather obtuse way of accomplishing the same thing, however it's a little wasteful of resources. What you do is set up the first slide and all the keypoints and animations. Then copy and paste this original as many times in the main slide list as you intend to have slides in the slideshow. Next go to objects and animations and go to slide two. Highlight slide two to select it then right click and "add" the second slide for your slideshow as a "child" of slide two. Remember slide two has exactly the same performance as slide one as do all other original copies. Repeat this for all remaining slides - that is go to slide three and make the "real" slide three a child of the copied slide three which is identical to slide one, etc. When you are finished, the slides which are children will inherit all the identical properties of the original so will have the identical performance and timings. It's not straight-forward, but this will accomplish what you wish "if" I have understood your original intent. Note: I just read Jeff's suggestion and that will be another way of accomplishing the same.... Best regards, Lin

You might try this. Go to the View drop down (fourth from the left between help and slide on the main menu). The third choice from the drop down is language. Try a couple different languages and see if you still have the problem. Since some of the characters are showing it does appear to be a font issue of some type so perhaps changing language might help ferret out the culprit. Best regards, Lin

Hi Craig, The completed user guide is now available - see link above or in Tutorials section. Yes, you can automatically have the file name on each image. Click on Project Options from main or objects and animations screen, next from that menu click on the "Comments" tab. Look at the bottom and find "set comments for new slides". Click on the small icon at the far right and from the drop-down list choose "Picture name" or "Picture name with extension" then click on "Set for Existing slides"... Lin

Hi Folks, Jeff and I have finally completed the first revision of the PTE User Guide in PDF format and you will find the link below as well as on the Tutorial section - Moderatiors, could one of you please "Pin" this link so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle. It's been a long grind, but a labor of love for Jeff and I. The completed document is over 100 pages of as detailed description and such as we were able to accomplish. Hopefully it will be useful for helping to understand the operation of PTE. We will be revising and adding to it as time passes. Perhaps when Igor returns after the 18th he will be able to post it on the Wnsoft site, but for now here's a link to it on my site... http://www.lin-evans.net/pteuserguide/pteguide81707pdf.zip Thanks to all for your patience in waiting for this... Lin & Jeff

Brian is right but we must keep in mind that there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of worns, trojans, viruses, etc., and no matter how good your firewall or software protection, it's always possible for some to slip through. Right now I have one which none of these programs can detect or remove. It's a browser hijack and disable infection. I have ParetoLogic, Adaware, NOD32, Spyware Doctor, Uniblue Spy Eraser, Uniblue Registry Booster, Bug Doctor and Registry Mechanic. Of these only Registry Mechanic can find the "result" of the infection and "fix" it, but the infection immediately returns after clicking on Internet Explorer. What it does is hijack the browser and instead of going where you wish, redirects to what appears to be a number of different commercial sites such as on-line gambling. If the user then decides to add that unwanted URL to IE's security risk section, the virus then acts like an angry child and disables IE. IE will be running in the Task manager, but it's impossible to know without looking because after clicking on the IE icon, nothing appears to happen. Typically one will click several times and in doing so actually be opening several instances of IE but be totally unaware. None of the above programs finds any problems except Registry Mechanic which always reports this: As seen above, the problem appears to be in the IE caches. When Registry Mechanic removes it, then the next time one clicks on the IE icon it opens normally, but as soon as it's closed or someone opens an email and clicks on an internet link, the pesky virus again infects the cache and disables IE. I would love to find the zit-faced adolescent who programmed this and drop a cup-full of fire ants down his pants and watch him squirm for a couple hours! I had to install Firefox to use the internet again and I have over 40 hours chasing this problem which is still not resolved. The bottom line is that most computers are not free of infections no matter how good the removal or protection tools. It's like treating a human with the cold virus. It's more a matter of staying ahead of the germs and virus than removing them completely and killing the ones which are the most dangerous - LOL Best regards, Lin

Igor has taken a little well earned vacation trip through the 18th of this month. He has always wanted to see the mountains and sea and has followed his doctors advice to get a little rest. As far as I know he will be back shortly. Lin

By security I'm assuming you mean the security of the images within the slideshow. Essentially there is no way to absolutely be certain that images won't be stolen when you give customers access to them. A show delivered in DVD format is lower in resolution so even if your customers decompile them (and there are plenty of tools on the web for that purpose) they will not have high resolution images amenable to making quality prints larger than about 4x6. An executable file is the safest in terms of requiring more computer skills to extract but any savy customer can use any readily available screen capture tool to capture the slides at display resolution. So once again, if you keep the resolution down to about 800x600 then they won't be getting much. The ideal way to protect your investment is to embed a visible watermark copyright which you can do with PTE. If you place it in a conspicuous place where it is difficult to use a clone tool such as Photoshop, then it offers some security as would the word copyright splashed across the center of the image. But the issue is to decide which is the less invasive. You don't want to turn off your customers by them not being able to see the beauty of your images. PTE allows you to make executable files which cease to operate after so many viewings, so many days, weeks, etc., but when you place a file like this on a CD or DVD there is no way for this security to work because it requires that the program make changes to the executable code and that means it must write to the media. On write-once media that's not possibl. The bottom line is PTE has as much security as any software producing images for viewing. It's not a perfect world and some trust must be between you and your clients. Best regards, Lin

Hi Don, The math for the timings is very precise, so when timings do not work as expected it is nearly always a resource issue. The case is usually that there are images too large for the video card to process in the time period selected. If you could try your show temporarily with only about five images and reduce them in file size for the test to no larger than 1200x1600 I think you will find that the timings between slides and the display times are quite accurate. If you test this, please get back an let us know the result. Also could you say which video card, processor and operating system you are using. Best regards, Lin

Hi Ron, I don't, "always" - sometimes I answer in the same post when it makes sense, as in one of my above posts. Other times I repeat because it's difficult to answer all the questions from memory and I really don't have time to scroll back and forth to be sure I haven't missed anything of importance. I suspect in the great scheme of things it's not of major importance. Best regards, Lin

Yes, we are very close. Jeff is waiting for me to finish the glossary which I hope to do tonight or tomorrow and then it will just be a matter of proofing and we will be ready to post it. As time goes on there will be more added to it in the way of tutorials and such but the basics are finished and hopefully we have covered the major things which most new users will find helpful. Best regards, Lin

Hi Beth, What you are describing is the "icon" which you click on to run the executable file Icons can look many different ways but are not the file itself, just a "link" that can be clicked on to run the file. If you click with the left mouse button when the cursor rests over that box, does the slideshow then run? If so, then it will also run from a CD, but to run without someone having to click on it, it requires another file called "autorun.inf" which tells Windows to "executed" the file named in the autorun.inf command. If you will tell me the name of your file I will make an autorun.inf file for you which you can then copy and edit to substitute the name of any slideshow you make. It's a very simple little file which looks like this: [autorun] OPEN=myfilename.exe ICON=myfilename.exe,0 The name of the file above must be "autorun.inf" where the "myfilename.ext would be the name of your executable. This file goes on the CD along with the executable file itself. When Windows sees an "autorun" file it automatically looks for the file named in the autorun.inf and executes that files commands. In this case it would run the slideshow. Please click on the icon produced by PTE and tell me if it runs the show on your computer. Best regards, Lin

From either the main screen or objects & animations screen click on the "Project options" button then the Comments tag then "Set text comments for new slides" the click the Icon at the far right then choose "Picture name with extension" and then click on "Set for existing slides". Lin

Hi Beth, I need a bit more information. I understand correctly you want to place an executable file on a CD for your customer. There is only one "exe" file, I'm not certain what you mean by "two different types of .exe's". All you need is to place the executable file on the CD along with the necessary autorun.inf file. If you can fill me in on exactly what you want to achieve, maybe I can walk you through it. Best regards, Lin

Hi Beth, Have you tried a show with the Navigation bar? It's actually very simple. You have a "pause" button which looks like two vertical lines. When that button is in that state, the slideshow will automatically advance to the next slide after whichever time you have designated. But you can also manually advance it, manually go backward a slide at a time, jump to the first slide or "exit" if you have added the "exit" as a button from the menu of navigation bar choices. However, if you click on this "Pause" key, it changes to a forward arrow. In that state the slide presently displayed will not advance nor will any other slide you manually advance to or go back to. This is essentially then a fully manual slideshow as long as this button is not clicked on again. It doesn't matter how much time is alloted to each slide as long as this button is not in the default condition. Best regards, Lin

Hi Ron, You may want to look at this: http://www.lin-evans.net/pte/panoswatch4.zip It's a four minute demo which shows one of the ways someone might want to use this action and template. Essentially, you create a new PNG watch with a different face, it can even be a different file name once you have the first (panoswatch.png) one in the PTE file. Put the new slide in the main slide list, set the custom time for the slide to 60 seconds. Then you just select the children (click on the top object under the main slide then hold the shift key and click on the bottom object), right click the mouse and copy the three selected watch hands. Next highlight the new slide on the objects list and "paste" the children. The all you need to do is correct the start and end keypoint times for the minute and hour hand. Same start rotation as end rotation for preceeding slide, plus six degrees for the ending keypoint. Same start as end rotation degree for the hour hand, plus one degree for the end keypoint. You can continue this as long as you wish to extend the time in one minute segments. The sample above runs four minutes. Best regards, Lin

As many of you may already know, Panos Efstathiadis is a veritable genius with Photoshop. Panos creates some of the finest Photoshop actions around. Recently, to celebrate his second year of being in business, he has created a dynamite new Photoshop action for CS, CS2 and CS3 which creates a photo-realistic watch with adjustable hands and an associated action which allows the user to place their own photograph on the face of the watch. This action was just referenced by Scott Kelby in his blog. Scott is the editor and publisher of Photoshop User Magazine, Layers magazine (the how-to magazine for everything Adobe®) and President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). At any rate, this great pair of actions is available free to commemorate Panos' second year anniversary of producing dynamite Photoshop actions. Panos emailed me a couple days ago and inquired about the feasibility of using PicturesToExe to animate the watch. I thought that was a great idea and created a template and tutorial which I will link to directly. The animation uses the unique parent/child object relationship as well as the off-center rotation feature of PTE to animate the watch hands real-time. That is two minutes of animation of the watch is two minutes of real time with the minute hand progressing forward two minutes and the second hand ticking off each second. To make it flexible I made it animate for one minute then designed it to duplicate the original slide for the second minute and as many more minutes as the user desires. To duplicate it one only need copy and paste the original file in the Main slide list then change the rotation of the minute hand six degrees forward and the hour hand one degree forward for each new slide to maintain accuracy. The placement of the hands is such as to allow as much unimpeded access for adding your own image to the face as possible. Of course the tutorial shows how to reposition the hour and minute hand to any time desired. The sweep second hand required 120 keypoints per slide and doesn't need to be altered but will function perfectly as slides are duplicated. Because of the parent/child relationship, it's very easy to resize, zoom, reposition, etc., the watch anywhere on the screen and since all files have been converted to transparent background PNG's it will work with any background, etc. Here's the links. First to Pano's site where you can download the actions. Be sure to get the proper one. There is one for Photoshop CS2 and CS3 and a different one for CS. First a zipped small executable to see the animation and underneath a link to a five minute real sample: http://www.lin-evans.net/pte/panoswatchexe.zip http://www.lin-evans.net/pte/panoswatch4.zip Then link to Panos' site: http://www.panosfx.com/index.php?option=co...view&id=194 Next my template: http://www.lin-evans.net/tutorial/panoswatch.zip Then my PDF tuorial: http://www.lin-evans.net/tutorial/watchtutorial.pdf Finally a 28 meg avi tutorial if you have the bandwidth: http://www.lin-evans.net/tutorial/panoswatch.avi Note: right click on the above link and "save target as" to save the AVI rather than have it try to load real time: Lin

Hi Zyderco, There are several ways you can do this with PTE 5.0. The first would be to use a Navigation Bar, the second would be to use the spacebar, PgUp, PgDn or even use a remote control such as with PowerPoint slides. Finally, you can use a pop-up menu which will let you jump to any slide. This method requires you to either create your own pop-up or perhaps use one I created and made available. Let's start with the first two methods. From the Main screen click on the "Project Options Button" then click on the "Advanced" tab. Put a check beside "Permit control of show using keyboard". Put a check beside "Show Navigation Bar". Click on "Customize Navigation Bar" and from the menu choose the options you wish to appear on the navigation bar. The options are pretty self-explanatory. Once you have the navigation bar operational you can pause, go forward, go backward, print a slide, etc. If you want the ability to jump to any slide from any other slide and you don't have a tremendous number of slides (25 or less) then you can use my methodl. http://www.lin-evans.net/pte/menu.zip Inside the zipped file you will find a keyboard PTE file. What you do is on each slide you place a button object in the layer underneath your image. Make the button very large, say half the image size an put it perhaps on the upper half. Set the main image in properties to "transparent to click" Set the menu which I linked to as the last slide in your show and give it a reasonably long display time such as 4 minutes. Make each object button which is on the layer behind your main slide call this slide. This slide is programmed to call the slide number represented by the number on the button. So when running the slide show and you want to jump to a particular slide, just left click your mouse on the upper part of the slide and this will call the menu. Click on the menu for the slide of your choice. We will have a complete documentation available for PicturesToExe Version 5.0 in about a week. Right now you may want to download and read the temporary Objects and Animations document which along with the main screen and video builder portions will comprise the major portion of the document. Here's a link to get you started with about 41 pages of PDF documentation including the navigation bar, etc. http://www.lin-evans.net/tutorial/ObjectsAnimation.pdf Let me know if you get in trouble.... Lin

Hi Mario, Could you give some more information - version of PTE being used, hardware, video card, etc. These all impact on image quality and size of image best for your purpose. Lin

Hi Mike, It sounds much like you may have too many keypoints which might split time into uneven intervals and thus affect the rotational speed incrementally. Essentially, PTE uses linear motion as a default so the way you would normally achieve this effect would be as follows: Set one keypoint beyond the start (the defalt start keypoint for the object) at the place on the timeline where you wish both the zoom and rotation to cease. Activate or "select" this keypoint by clicking on it so that it becomes blue rather than grey, zoom the object (image) to the desired dimensions then with the keypoint still selected change the rotation from zero to the desired degree positive or negative depending on the direction and number of rotations you want. This will give you a linear response between the starting keypoint and the ending keypoint. Any intermediary keypoints will just confuse the issue for a simple effect like this. Best regards, Lin

Hi Colin, I'm assuming by "title" you mean the file names? PTE has several ways of allowing you to see the files and/or images. At the top of your opening screen find the menu items "File, Project, Slide, View and Help." Click on "view". You may then choose "classical view" which shows only the file names and folders in a Windows "tree" view, or you may choose Horizontal or Vertical which shows the thumbnails of the images themselves. To the right and under this line of menu items you will see a "slider" which varies the number of images in the view when you choose Horizontal or Vertical view. Beside this slider and to the right as you look there is a large "T". Click on the "T" to either show the slide names or omit them. Best regards, Lin

Hi Paul, I downloaded your image and took a good look at it in Photoshop. The noise is there in the image - it could be being masked by settings in your Nikon software but I believe it's the result of oversharpening in the converter. It actually looks identical in Photoshop, Irfanview and PicturesToExe at full original size. What I would do is check carefully the converter settings and don't apply too much sharpness. The "black pepper" appearance in the light areas can be ameliorated or almost removed with Neat Image or Noise Ninja, but on the flowers themselves, especially in the certer parts the effects of oversharpening are quite apparent. The conversion software is not creating halo effects of sharpening too miuch but what is is doing is creating a very strange artifact pattern. My guess is that the software is filtering this when you look at it, but when you take the original tiff file into Photoshop or Irfanview to view it, it's quite evident. The solution will be to do another conversion from the RAW and check the settings carefully, especially sharpening. It's possible to clean it up in post process, but better not to create the problem in the conversion. You can rest assured, however, that it's not PTE which is creating the problem. Best regards, Lin

Hi Paul, If you would post a link to one of the images which appear very noisy in PTE I will be glad to test it for you and see if there is something unique about the image causing this problem. It's not a problem I've ever seen before and I can not think of any reason why PTE should treat the image any differently than other programs. PowerPoint isn't useful to compare because it resizes the images in terms of file size and definitely softens them which would ameliorate noise but Nikon Capture, IrfanView, PhotoShop, etc., return pretty much what is in the image as does PTE. The quickest way to determine what is going on is to post a link to one of the originals at full original size and some of us can test it quickly and perhaps get to the bottom of your problem. Best regards, Lin