Lin Evans

I like that idea too. It may be difficult to achieve, but if anyone can do it this team will be able to. You do know that it is possible to "distort" an image with the parent/child/grandchild relationship? It's not, of course the same as what you are suggesting but it does give you the ability to rotate on the Z axis for specialized effects. It really isn't too amenable to doing exactly what you have in mind because to do what you want requires precision calculations but is helpful for doing things such as TomUK wanted to do with his helicopter, i.e., make the rotor blade rotate in a horizontal position rather in the vertical position as would happen if you didn't have the ability to distort shapes. You may have seen one of my samples of this earlier, but in case you didn't here's a new quick little example of manipulating an image to give the appearance of XY and Z rotation. http://www.lin-evans.net/pte/distort.zip Best regards, Lin

Hi Colin, The reason is that keypoints must be separated in "pairs" to use non-linear zoom, pan, or rotate. I made a little tutorial about how to first do your animation with linear then easily change it to smooth, or one of the other non-linear functions. The best way to quickly see how non-linear works is to use only the initial keypoint then add only one keypoint and set "all three" (pan, zoom, rotate) to one of the non-linear motion effects such as smooth. With only two keypoints, you don't have a need to "separate" keypoints. The reason for my suggestion to change pan, zoom and rotate is that when using a bounded rectangle to effect the change in zoom, for example, it's very common to also move the pan numbers a bit and sometimes if one isn't careful, they also move rotate a bit. So since there is no "penalty" for having all three set to a non-linear motion, my suggestion is first to set all three. If you ask for a non-linear zoom and the pan has been slightly changed from the start keypoint values, then unexpected consequences happen including precisely the one you just described. Download the AVI from this link and maybe it will make it more clear and show you how to quickly set the proper attributes by separating the keypoints in the setup menu found at the top of each pan, zoom, rotate block. http://www.lin-evans.net/tutorial/nonlinearavi.zip Best regards, Lin

Hi John, Yes, I'm pretty familiar with Vegas Video, I've owned and used it (the entire suite) since it was owned by Sound Forge long before Sony bought it, I also use all of Photodex's products, Memories on TV Pro, several Cyberlink products including Media @Show, My Slideshow, Canopus Imaginate, Pictures Slideshow Maker, Several Adobe Suite top-end products and about a dozen other lesser known video editing software packages. I am quite familiar with sophisticated sound editing capabilities. My point is that it takes time to develop both specialized video and specialized audio editing features. Let's give Igor, Sergay, Pavel, etc., time to first take care of giving us the complete feature set we had in version 4 before we ask too much too quickly. Personally, I'm willing to wait until they have time to investigate the best way to incorporate sound editing features. Their plate is more than full right now and though I fully appreciate suggestions for improvement and have made several myself, to suggest that the sound is "poor" (not your comment) is simply not correct. Perhaps it was a language issue and if so I apologize. To say that one would like more sophisticated sound handling is more reasonable I think. As a former software developer myself, I fully appreciate the difficulties in providing certain features, especially when totally immersed in trying to get the initial new version release to market. Only the developers know the issues involved in making the necessary changes to their product to offer more flexibility and I realize that you know this. I have full confidence that in time we will have most, if not all the features we want, but right now we have, in my opinion, the finest overall product available for producing superior presentation slideshows. As I said, I can live with doing my sound editing as well as my image editing in other software until such time as these features may be added as a part of PTE. I've see what trying to add too many features too fast has done in competitive products and I don't want to see anything like that happen to this product. As an example, I paid over $1200 for my Vegas Video suite and I expect to see rather sophisticated capabilities in terms of sound editing. When I compare that to the investment in PTE I then realize what a true gem we have here. Best regards, Lin

Yes, true - but since you mentioned Proshow, let's look at what happens when you have too many features and not enough testing. Over 300 "fixes" to the "release" version 3.0 including many, many audio complaints within the first two months after release and still not right (I have it and Gold). Jerky pans and zooms, low quality executables, sound sync issues, Flash issues, DVD burning issue, MP3 issues, etc., in fact for many users not much does work right. PTE is, by contrast, a very stable beta. Features are added a few at a time and thoroughly tested before being included so when the release is made, users can depend on a much higher quality product. Yes, it takes time to introduce features and we all have things we would like to see. Many of these features will eventually be included but again, it takes time to test, debug and identify issues. Some time in the future I'm certain there will be more audio editing capabilities in PTE, but until then I feel it's still by "far" the best presentation slideshow software tool available, and available at a fraction of what the competition gets for buggy beta software marketed and sold as a release product. Yes, no volume control or fade or precise positioning for second audio track (per slide) but still it is a second track and serves the intended purpose for allowing voice comments on each slide. Perhaps in a future version there will be more control over audio. Best regards, Lin

I would agree that it would be nice to be able to do some audio manipulation within the program, but you are wrong about audio tracks. There are two audio tracks. You have background audio or music and the ability to add audio on individual slides which plays concurrently with background music. Also the audio is not "very poor" but very good quality - as good as audio in any presentation slideshow program available today. Perhaps it is "a big waste of time" for you but not for everyone. Apparently sound is more important to you than to some others who find the sound capabilities as they are now quite nice. Of course they could always be improved, but this isn't a deal killer for most of us. Many of us believe it "is" the best slideshow program available for the Windows environment, and that includes many of us who have most if not all the competitive products to compare it with. Animated Gifs are low quality images with only 256 colors and rarely of any value to those preparing serious slideshow presentation programs. Video would be nice but only if high resolution well beyond DVD quality unless you want to degrade the entire presentation to low resolution DVD. If you place current video quality along side high quality hardware rendered images the there is an immediate impression of the quality of the show being diminished to the least common denominator. There are a number of presentation slideshow products which allow drop-in video and they all have software rendered relatively low quality image production suitable for web or DVD at standard NTSC or PAL resolutions. Perhaps in the future PTE will allow video clip drop-in, but then when it's used there will be a significant drop in image quality between the video and high quality still image unless the video is rendered at 1080p resolution. Right now there are no video capture devices (cameras) which are up to the standards of PTE's high resolution hardware rendered images. Maybe in the future there will be, but then most present systems including the majority of home DVD players and screens are a few years away from being able to play such video quality. Lin

Actually, After Effects and other video oriented programs software render at DVD resolutions then interpolate to get to display resolutions above about 800x600 so that the actual images are quite different than PTE images which are hardware rendered at the input resolution. I use After Effects and Vegas Video also to create animation and it will run smoothly but with much lower true resolution and much less image quality. There is something in your system itself which is likely causing this issue. If you are having problems running at 1024 x 768 and especially if with other shows which have already been tested on multiple systems then it's not an issue of too large files sizes, etc., but rather something unique to your own system. To test this, first eliminate the sound card by doing as suggested earlier. If that makes no difference the enable it again and kill all virus protection for a test and try again. If this doesn't help, then see if you have the latest video drivers and the latest Direct X implementation. The probability is quite high that your customers will have no problems. I have around a hundred clients who have run my slideshows created with the PTE betas. Their systems run from quite ordinary to extremely high end and so far I've only had one which had issues. As it turned out they had an on-board Intel based graphics and a change to a dedicated medium quality graphics card solved the problem. The vast majority of users in the U.S. get butter smooth results with pan, zoom and rotate in PTE but there are a few who have difficulties caused by a variety of issues which can be as simple as a anti-virus program running in the background. Some, in Europe and especially France have older graphics cards such as 32 meg or 64 meg cards, but the majority in the U.S. and Canada have sufficient graphics power to run these PTE beta created files smoothly. I have a couple test files which will tell us something about your environment. I'll provide links below. Both are a simple puzzle which uses 32 objects on 32 layers. They look very similar and are almost identical in file size but in reality are very, very different. The first (PuzzleamallRAM) has tiny PNG files which run smoothly on even 32 meg video cards. If this one doesn't run smoothly on your system, then we can pretty much rule out the video card as the culprit and look for drivers or conflicting software, etc., The second (puzzle.zip) is tough on even the most powerful graphics cards. It has large PNG files and uses at least 128 meg of video ram. People who can run this one smoothly can run about any PTE created show, even those which push the envelope or video RAM or file size. Both these use a midi sound track and if you don't have midi enabled you won't hear sound. Press ESC to end either of these shows... The large RAM version (puzzle.zip) has a normal delay of about seven seconds before starting. The small RAM version (puzzlesmallRAM.zip) starts the sound nearly immediately. Finally I'm linking to a show which has "medium" intense video. There are four "snow" animations, each with different types and consistency of "snow-fall" Systems which hesitate on the smoothness of the snowfall usually have video cards which are "marginal". Even some of the new Vista cards are not fully optimized for running some intensive graphics which is why I recommend people buying a new laptop with Vista take the two puzzle slideshows along on a USB flash card. If the system runs both smoothly it will run about any 2D or 3D program satisfactorily. Here are the links: http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/puzzlesmallRAM.zip http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/puzzle.zip http://www.lin-evans.net/pte/rockymtnspringmenu.zip Lin

It's most likely related to either a driver, a sound card conflict with video or the video card itself. One of the very great things about version 5 is the absolutely butter smooth pan, zoom, scroll and rotate. I'm sure Igor will be able to help sort it out for you. The new graphical engine uses almost entirely the video power as opposed to computer processing power for video animation. In some cases, as strange as it may seem there have been a very few conflicts with sound cards causing some jitter in video movement. My own computer had this issue but it has been resolved perfectly in Beta 11A. A very easy way to eliminate the sound card as a possible factor is to go into the Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager and temporarily disable the sound card. Try again and if you still have the same problem you can eliminate the sound card as a factor. Best regards, Lin

Hi Peter, Just a little information about reading the jpg. If you look on top of the jpg you will find a little text block to click on which make the reduced size into full sized. Most who post don't use this but rather make a tiny thumbnail to click on which actually makes more sense than the way I did it, but if you click on the text block the jpg capture of Barry's site will expand to full size so it can be read. Best regards, Lin

I just tested 5 beta 11A and if you add the wav or mp3 from the sound block below the text comments it plays right over the background music beautifully as in two separate sound tracks. If you add a comment via the Customize Slide Music Tab, it stops the background music and that doesn't resume. My guess is that Igor designed it so it would be easy to stop a music selection and start a different one for all or any slides and that for adding voice-over you would use the sound block below the text comments. Best regards, Lin

Limey is absolutely right, if fact you "can" do exactly what you want by adding the sound at this point. You "don't" want to go into Customize Slide because if you add the sound there it kills the background music and if you add it below the comments in the sound block it "does not" kill the background sound. I just tested it and learned something new about PTE today - thank's Limey!! Lin

Right now you can't have individual slide captions without it killing the background music unless you use an audio mixer to include the captions on the same track. That, of course, isn't very helpful because you may want to change the timing on an individual slide which would then require a total remake of the sound track. The above is incorrect. As Limey points out you absolutely "can" add comments for each slide and it will play right over the background music selected without interrupting it in any way. You can go to Customize Slide and add individual sound for each slide which will either continue on at the end of the slide or stop when the slide changes depending on whether or not you have checked in the Project Options Music Tab "don't interrupt sound comment when next slide appears". If you add sound on the Music Tab of the Customize Slide feature, it will stop background music and not resume. Thanks Limey for the correct explanation... Best regards, Lin

Hi Peter, Are you registered on Barry's site and logged in? The reason I ask is that I get a "Forum" link when I go there and I'm guessing that you may need to be logged in to see it. Here's the screen I see, including a pop-up banner which advertises PicturesToExe as well as other products.... Lin

Hi Neil, First, no question is "stupid" - some answers may be, but never feel bad about asking a question. Linear zoom simply means that if you were to divide time between the start and end of a zoom into equal divisions, exactly the same amount or percentage of zoom would happen between each increment. So, for example, if you had a zoom set to enlarge an image to double its original size and you wanted this to happen over 20 seconds, at 10 seconds the image would be 1.5 times or one and one half its original size. Non-linear zoom means that things happen in different proportions at different times. For example, in a smooth non-linear zoom the zoom first begins very slowly, then speeds up and maintains a constant proportion of change then just before it ends it slows down again. As you know, when a DVD is being rendered, usually for each second of time 30 new images are generated, each new image showing a slightly different movement of the subject. For a linear zoom each image in a one second period would represent 1/30 th of difference from the previous image to the image at one second having passed. For a "smooth" non-linear the first images might be only 1/50th difference, etc., then gradually they would acceleate to 1/30th and nearing the end of the period of change they might again be only 1/50th different. So the effect is that at the beginning and end of the movement, the motion would slow down and rather than an abrupt or "jerky" start and ending the start and ending would look very smooth. I used smooth non-linear as an example, but other non-linear movements could be to start movement slowly then speed up throughout or to start fast then slow down near the end. So non-linear simply means that things happen at different speeds at different times while linear means they happen at the same speed over time. For now, I would suggest that you test this by using on the begining and one keypoint. Set your time for a slide to 10 seconds using the Main tab from "custom" function from Objects and Animations screen, Put a keypoint at about 9 seconds then drag the bounding rectangle to make an image get larger by about 50 percent. Set the zoom to linear and watch. Now set the zoom to smooth and watch. Finally, watch the tutorial on how to change from linear to non-linear because when you have more than two keypoints, you must not only click on one of the non-linear functions but also "separate" keypoints via the "setup" for each slide. Here is a link to an AVI file I created explaining this: http://www.lin-evans.net/tutorial/nonlinearavi.zip Best regards, Lin

Some old timer's here may remember the old days of DOS when we had to type in the name of the file we wanted to run to get the executable going. You remember, for things like Wordstar, dBase II, Visicalc, etc. Several companies produced menu programs which made it very easy to simply choose the programs you wanted to use from a simple menu. It involved each user setting the path to the files to run the executable, then the program popped up a nice little menu run from an autoexec.bat file so when we turned on our computers we had an instant menu of the programs we used most commonly. Today, Windows creates shortcut icons and soon our screens become a jumbled mess. We often move some of the least used icons off to other folders then we can go into these folders when we need the programs and have only a few on our desktop. The problem is we have to remember what we called the folders and sometimes, when you get old like me - LOL, or distracted, you forget and have to search about for the folder (I have many thousand folders on over a terrabyte of storage) for the proper one. And so I tend to clutter my desktop and keep probably too many icons which also takes me a good deal of time to sort through and find the one I am looking for to open the progam I want. The thought occurred to me that we now have a great program which lets us build our own menus just like the old "EZ Munu" of DOS days. So why not just use PTE to build yourself a simple menu which uses the most commonly called programs with which you work everyday? It's easier than sorting through hundreds of icons and works great! Here's a jpg image of what I am developing. It only has a few programs now, but gives an idea of a new way perhaps to use PTE's amazing features. Lin

Hi Peter, I've just tried this on my system. I created a menu called "menutest2.exe" and on it I put a button linked by path to open Powerpoint. Then I placed a text block called "Powerpoint" and linked it by path to the powerpoint executable. The program opened both instantly - I couldn't even actuate my stopwatch. So something is different and we need to get particulars to sort this out. Best regards, Lin+

Hi Peter, When you say "from a menu slide" do you mean that you have an executable menu file calling other executable files or do you refer to a button call from within your slideshow calling an outside executable file? Are you including a path or does the executable file you are calling reside within the same folder as the slideshow? It's difficult to troubleshoot without some specifics. For example what is the load time for the actual executable file being called when not called from your button but rather from the run command or from a shortcut on the desktop? Perhaps we could get to the bottom of this by preparing a simple executable menu which calls some commonly used and widely available program which everyone will have on their computers. Then we could all use the identical code and see if there is a difference among various systems and operating systems in how long it takes. If you create a little "menu.exe" file and use 1.) a button call to open Wordpad and also 2.) a text object call to open same, then if you post your zipped executable we could compare how long it takes on different systems versus your system and each report how long it takes to load from the Windows shortcut, etc.?? Best regards, Lin

I see the difficulty in reading the swf file has been corrected - thanks Ken! For anyone else having problems, though it would be a good idea to get the necessary files and players to enable reading a Flash 8 (will soon become the standard for now) file, I will post a link to an AVI of the same little tutorial here: http://www.lin-evans.net/tutorial/rotorbladeavi.zip Also, you may want to see how this type effect was used with another helicopter sample. I used separate PNG's for the tail rotor and main rotor on this example. The tail rotor is, of course, simply rotated in the conventional way but the main rotor blade was made to rotate in the horizontal fashion as described in the little tutorial above. The effect of the central support rotation was achieved by holding the Y axis steady and manipulating the X axis via the zoom in a pulsating manner with multiple keypoints. http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/helicopter.zip Best regards, Lin

http://www.lin-evans.net/pte/anaglyphfortom.zip Best regards, Lin

Hi Tom, First, it looks fine. As for the animation, the apparent depth map of 3D is variable with different objects depending on the red/cyan distance relationships. I used objects on several depth levels then moved one object (airplane) which was on a different depth via PTE's normal animation for pan and zoom. That is the object itself as a PNG contained both the red and cyan aspects. Let me see if I can find the PTE file - it's been a while - and I'll zip it so you can see how it was done. Best regards, Lin

Hi Ragnar, I haven't tried the perspective correction with any of the non-linear zoom effects, but I suspect it only works with linear zoom. Best regards, Lin

Unfortunately not. If you create a set number, such as five then copy and paste them they initially line up nicely, but as soon as you rename them to something meaningful (not "button") then the buttons themselves become different sizes depending on whether there or single or double digets as their name. For example a button of identical size in terms of numbers (I used eight) will be physically different in actual size because the shape and size changes according to the test. I wish there were a way to keep the button size constant and alter the text in point size to fit, but haven't found that solution. So the bottom line is only by hard work and precise positioning can you approximate something which looks more or less straight. I'm afraid I didn't do too good a job but I got tired of trying to get everything into order - LOL Best regards, Lin

That's a new one. Does the file have a name, or did you just get the below as an attachment? That sounds as if your email server had problems with the attachment and actually removed it. Lin

Hi Johnny, I just thought you might like to see (probably the same camel) what the camel looked like in 1999 on one of my trips to the wall. I suspect it's a regular attraction there for tourists. http://www.lin-evans.net/olympus/c250015.jpg Best regards, Lin

The key is actually a text file, but sometimes your email provider strips the file name and what you get is the actual text. The first thing to do is see if it ends with a double quotation mark. If so, it's probably just fine and you can simply save the text string as a file. Copy it and save as a file name such as myptekey.reg Then simply place it in any folder and when you open PTE go to the help menu and enter the file name where prompted. If the text string doesn't end with double quotation marks the email server has corrupted it and Wnsoft will send you an new one. This happened with my key as well. They are very prompt and are working now on a way to prevent this in the future. If they send you a new one it will likely be in zipped format. The only difference in the regular version and the deluxe version is the presence of the DVD authoring (Video Builder) feature. The Deluxe version is a $20 upgrade. You get version 5.0 (standard) as a free upgrade as well as all future 5.0 versions but if you need or want the "internal" Video Builder you can upgrade to it for $20. The standard version exports an AVI file which you can convert to DVD with many software packages but having it "built-in" is very convenient. As with the standard version future versions of the Deluxe 5.0 are free upgrades. Best regards, Lin