Lin Evans

Hi Patrick, Thank you so much for the feedback. One picture is worth many words and helped me immediately identify the problem. This is a great lesson for me in why one should rasterize text to png. The font I used on the text wasn't found on your computer so Windows substituted a font which is in its native size a good bit larger. I used Viner Hand and didn't rasterize to a PNG. I have corrected that now so it should now display properly. I think the circle transition is a bit too much for the graphics environment already nearly at capacity with the size of the image plus zooms and pans. I swapped it for a "gates" open from center which I "think" uses less horsepower. Thanks again, Lin

Hi, This is a single slide slideshow. Well, actually three if you count the title and ending slides but the main slide is 10 megabytes and about 6,000 by 1500 pixels in dimensions. I was wondering how smoothly it plays on different levels of video cards, etc., so would appreciate some feedback on this. http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/cliffpalace.zip Best regards, Lin

Hi Peter, Right now that's not an option with PTE. Perhaps in the future. It is possible, however to use the "product" of an AVI or SWF file by using a decompiler (inexpensive) to break down the AVI or Flash movie into it's individual frames then run them as individual files rapidly sequenced. Of course you can't apply zooms or other animations to these stills as a group but the effect is that they can be run in such a way as to be indistinguishable from an AVI or Flash show but they can't occupy only a window of a frame or run as a portion of a slide. You can also run external code with PTE so it's quite possible to use a slide to call a program loaded with an AVI or SWF file. Years ago I used to use IrfanView to run movies via PTE. You wil have to look at the individual software being used to play the movie to see how this is accomplished with a single "call". Usually it's done via a command line "switch". Best regards, Lin

Hey Ken, The horse is munching contentedly and the AVI is up and linked - time for coffee - LOL Lin

Hi Ron, The AVI is up and linked on the Tutorials forum now. If there is any interest on the starfield background, I'll do a brief one on that later. Lin

Hi Ken, I have some time so I'll do one today. Lin

All you old-timers can skip this - you've seen it all before in one way or another, but for the new people who are not familiar with PicturesToExe and some of the rather unique capabilities, this is a little demo of a couple of the features not found in other presentation software. Two of the very nice features in PTE's animation tool kit are off-center rotation and the parent/child relationship. Let's start with off-center rotation. Normally when an object or picture is rotated, it's done from the approximate center mass of the image or object. In PicturesToExe you have the option of moving this center of rotation anywhere you wish. What does this mean then? It means that you can not only spin an object on it's center mass axis, but you can also, by simply holding down the shift key on your keyboard and left click and hold the mouse button on the tiny center green box in the center of the green bounding rectangle of a selected object, drag the "center" anywhere you wish. Then imagine that a rope was tied to the center of the picture but anchored somewhere in space and the image could be rotated or swing around like you would swing a rock in a sling. So if you do this with an image or object, the object turns upside down and rotates from an upright to upside down back to upright position as it revolves around the imaginary rope swing. But what if you wanted the object to stay in the same upright position throughout its rotation? Then you take advantage of the parent/child relationship. You duplicate the object as a child of the original, set the original to rotate say 360 degrees but make it invisible by using the opacity control. Then you place the child over the same starting point coordinates as the parent and set its rotation to negative 360 degrees with 100% opacity. This way the object that you see stays in proper orientation throughout the rotation. Neat trick! Of course you can also describe bezier curves or do elliptical curves, etc., in much the same way. The possibilities are endless. The following little demo uses a number of PNG objects. Note that the four objects in the outer perimeter rotate and maintain their upright orientation throughout. This is done as previously described. The four objects in the inner perimeter rotate in the opposite direction. Two of them maintain their upright orientation while two others do not. The center object rotates clockwise the reverses its rotation. Finally, the background consists of twinkling stars. This was done via a dark blue PNG file with tiny "holes" which are simply transparent. A blue/black jpg was copied, then pasted over a transparent background then various sized tiny round eraser brushes were used to poke tiny "holes" of transparency. Behind the blue/black starfield a jpg file created in Photoshop has multi-white and dark patterns with splotches of red and yellow rotates slowly creating the "twinkle" in the stars. Later I will create an AVI tutorial to demonstrate how this is all done for anyone who is interested. Here's a link - about five megabytes zipped executable: http://www.lin-evans.net/pte/dothis.zip Best regards, Lin

I can understand - it seems sometimes that lots of work goes unappreciated. Perhaps the interest level will change a great deal when high definition systems become more common. I look forward to your updated documentary. Best regards, Lin

The autorun feature has probably been disabled in the Registry. Go here for instructions: http://www.soniacoleman.com/FAQs/FAQ00158.htm Lin

If you are scanning prints (I assume that's the case), there is no reason to shoot for any higher resolution than will give you an image size suitable for your slideshow. For 4x6 that would be no more than 300 dpi which will give you an 1800x1200 pixel image. Prints can differ tremendously in quality and you will very likely need to sharpen the images after the scan. Best regards, Lin

Hi Patrick, Beautiful photos and presentation - next best thing to actually being there! I think you should have ended it with the sundown photo - reverse the last two... Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, What would be nice would be a macro calling a formatted EXIF text containing the more common EXIF data fields. Fields such as Camera, date, time, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length, exposure, etc. so that it wouldn't be necessary to use a third party program to output a separate text file containing the EXIF information for each photo. We could ask for user input to decide which fields would be ideal. There is generally no need to output "all" EXIF fields because some are quite esoteric and only important in some cases and these can always be done on an individual basis, but having a convenient way to quickly add the major information to a slide would be a very big and important feature for photographers. Here's a quick link to a single image file using an EXIF text file exported from Panda PowerExif and imported into PTE showing how it might be used. Of course this one has all the relevant EXIF information and much more than generally needed. http://www.lin-evans.net/pte/testmenu.zip Lin

Hi Paul, Yes, that's the way it's designed. By about a one second delay, the momentary return to the desktop releases the exclusivity on the hardware acceleration. Lin

Hi Ron, I think Igor has provided a workable solution to your earlier issue. Go ahead and create your menu program complete with searchlights and animations with hardware acceleration set to "on". But instead of calling your programs with "Run Application", call them with "Run Application and Exit". This effectively kills the Menu.Exe program on exit so the exclusivity of hardware acceleration is released. Then on the programs being called, in the Project Options set "Run application after last slide" option (in Advanced tab of Project options) to return back to menu slide show. This will let you have both animated menus with smooth animations and also smooth animations in the individual slideshows being called. It's a small extra step but will provide a proper work-around. Best regards, Lin

Hi Den, What you might do is download a few slideshows from either here, or beechbrook.com or even my site and see if you get the jerky transitions on them as well. There is a solution to the problem and I rather suspect it may have to do with something other than hardware such as another application running in the background which is interfering with hardware acceleration. In your case, either of the environments should be able to produce smooth transitions on version 5. Thousands of users have no problems so once hardware is generally ruled out that only leaves things such as anti-virus programs which generally don't use hardware acceleration, but also could be other programs. My suggestion would be to temporarily disable all virus protection and any other programs running in background and try again. Then by re-introducing them one at a time you could find out what is causing the problem. Another "possible" issue is not having an upgraded video environment. DirectX issues could possibly cause this type symptom. If you go to the Start, Run then type in "dxdiag" and click O.K., then you can look at the information returned and see if you have a late version of DirectX. This is an issue which "can" be solved. Best regards, Lin

Hi Jeff, Click on "Customize Slide" then on "Main" tab find the section which says "no actions after this slide" then click on the choice arrow. The loop feature simply performs an infinite loop on a given slide until there is a command to "exit" or go to another slide, or perform some other action. So for a menu, you no longer need to set some length time such as 5.000 seconds to prevent the menu from disappearing while another slideshow is running, etc. Lin

Hi Alain, I believe this "may" be possible because the absolute time of the start of a particular slide is being used and it's quite possible that the previous slide may still be playing because the person creating the show decided to overlap slides during the transition by dragging the final keypoint beyond the timeline end point for one slide and starting the next slide before the previous transition had finished. Lin

Hi Paul, That's because without animation, hardware acceleration isn't doing anything of importance in the menu. If you turn off hardware acceleration in the calling menu, you won't have a problem with jerky movement on the programs being called from that menu. But if you have animations in the menu and turn off hardware acceleration, those animations in the menu will be jerky. The "answer" to the issue is to not have hardware acceleraton turned on in the menu calling other executables which do use hardware acceleration. The video environment just can't handle this in the vast majority of systems. Lin

Hi Ron, If this is the case, what prompted your complaint in the first place? When you sent me your three programs (menu and two executables being called) I created a new menu with no animations and with hardware acceleration turned off and it worked properly. With hardware acceleration on in both the menu and the program being called they did not run properly on my development system which has a very high end graphics card and plenty of resources. Few people have hardware capable of running both a menu with hardware acceleration and an executable being called from that menu with hardware acceleration turned on. The simple solution is to turn off animations AND hardware acceleration in the calling menu if you want the combination to work properly on other computers. This is being obfuscated unnecessarily. Igor has explained the issues involved in other posts. Best regards, Lin

Hi Paul, You are not doing anything "wrong". Right now it's not possible to run two executables simultaneously with each using hardware acceleration. The proper way for now is to not use any animation in your menu program and to turn off hardware acceleration in that executable. The the program being called will run smoothly. This is not really a PTE issue but rather an issue with hardware acceleration and video card capabilities. It's simply not feasible to have multiple executable files all using hardware acceleration and running simultaneously. Even though your menu isn't being displayed, it's still "running" in the background. Lin

Go to "Customize Slide" "Main" tab - sets an infinite loop for the slide with this function chosen. Lin

Hi Igor, Thanks, I was just writing that whatever the problem, it affects many fonts because I've noticed that there were no changes between a large number of choices, but didn't connect it to the lengths - LOL Best regards, Lin

Hi Sammy, The problem with any company producing a printed user guide today is that by the time it's printed and mailed to the user the costs drive up the product price so much that it would not be competitive any longer. The program is developed in Russia and there are world-wide users who speak many and varied languages. To produce a printed manual and mail it would cost more than the software itself. Almost all major software vendors have stopped producing printed manuals these days. When is the last time you received a Microsoft Window's manual? Though you may purchase Windows in a "box" all instructions are disc (CD) based and even then not very specific or complete. Part of the reason is costs and the other is that updates, improvements, and other things change so quickly that updates used to be included in the box and the manuals were created in three ring binders with multiple pages which had to replace existing pages. What will happen with PTE is that several of our knowledgeable users will produce very good documentation which will be available for download as PDF files which you can either read directly from your file or print for yourself. The reason this is not yet available is because the product is not yet finished and anything we might produce in the way of formal documentation would not be yet correct. Once the program is released, several of us will combine efforts and produce a User's Guide. Then we will collect and hopefully consolidate the various AVI tutorials and provide links so you can download them as needed. The User's guide will be translated into as many languages as possible to facilitate worldwide distribution. Hopefully we will be able to accomplish this in a reasonably short period of time after the release version becomes available. Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, Very nice! The "Loop this Slide" feature makes it much easier to facilitate a menu.exe slide. Best regards, Lin

You bet Ray, This would be great since it's a relatively unknown area. Best regards, Lin