Lin Evans

Hi Craig - thanks and looking forward to seeing some shows from you soon!! Hey Dom - great to see you back and your incredible creations available again!! It's just going to get better and better with the pending release of 9.0 !! Best regards, Lin

Absolutely delightful!! Thanks to the professor and her assistant!!! Looking forward to the investigation of jelly beans!! Best regards, Lin

Thanks for the comments folks. Perhaps what I didn't say and should have is that each of the effects presented are explained in the series of free tutorials which are available on the Tutorials and Articles section of the forum. When I create or demo something which can be done with PTE, I almost alway also create a video tutorial demonstrating how it is done so that anyone who is truly interested can learn how to do the same thing. Presently there are over 60 of these free tutorials available there for download (52 individual videos and a set of 12) under the title (PTE Made Easy), These Tutorials have 65,886 views so hopefully, people who are interested have been learning those effect which they have an interest in. Link Below: It is a difficult thing to show people the various things possible with this software without scaring them. On the other hand, if we do not show the unique things possible with PicturesToExe and only demonstrate the ordinary, how then will the potential buyer differentiate PTE from the rest? The main competition in the US goes out of their way to create a host of flashy shows demonstrating just about everything possible with their software. Primarily these demonstrations consist of moving images about in various transparency and color and using masking to mix the effects. They make great use of audio for an impression. I suggest turning off the audio when watching one of their shows to see just how much they actually rely on the audio to impress the viewer. One may be surprised. So it remains a question. What is the best way to present PTE so that new potential buyers will understand why it is better than the competition and why it is consistently the choice of the vast majority of people who show in audio/visual competitions? Almost all currently sold presentation slideshow products go after a particular segment of the market. The majority today are heavily dependent on "themes" and have minimal flexibility outside those themes. PTE and the main competition have "styles" which allow the new and unexperienced user to quickly create pleasing and professional looking shows without having to spend much time learning to use the intricacies of the software. This is a major selling point for busy professional photographers such as the wedding photographer. I believe it is an area which needs to be better exploited by Wnsoft and there are currently several users who are doing just that. Slideshow Club is one place where there is a broad range of shows created with PTE and potential users can see the various types of presentations possible. Also the shows linked from the Wnsoft web site give the potential buyer a good idea. I believe that the strongest selling point for PTE is the flexibility. PTE has flexibility which absolutely none of the competition can match. It's been said that the only limitation is in the mind of the user and for all practical purposes I believe this is true. Perhaps that the reason I tend to create demonstrations of what PTE can do which the other products can't do. Best regards, Lin

Hi Folks - Often I'm asked what can be done with PicturesToExe besides the things which can be done with any other presentation slideshow software. In other words, why spend the extra money when I could just use something like Lightroom to make my slideshow? I explain about the quality and features such as the ability to use a totally manual mode for educational presentations, popup identification of subjects, and so on but it's difficult to put into a few words the incredible versatility of this product. So I create fantasy demonstrations of things most will never probably even want to do, but which can easily be done with PTE. This is one of those type shows. Later I'll put links to executable versions for Mac and Windows PC, but I just uploaded the show to YouTube and thought I would link it here. I titled it "What Can I Do With PicturesToExe?" Here's the YouTube Link - demo runs for about eight minutes: Lin

Looks great Leon - keep at it! Masking will make more sense as you play with it more frequently. You'll also discover innovative ways to make masks using Photoshop. One way I like to do it is to copy the image I want to create a mask for then use the copy in Photoshop to paint in black and white and sometime even add some areas of transparency so you have an exact and position independent PNG format mask to use in PTE. Best regards, Lin

George, if you have any problems adjusting a 3:2 aspect ratio style in Objects and Animations, just put it on the minimum number of slides required, zip up the file with the PTE "backup to zip" feature and post a link and I'll make you a little video tutorial to show you how to adjust it. Best regards, Lin

Hi George, It depends on the type of style. A number of styles are essentially independent of aspect ratio and even those which are not, by manually adjusting the components in Objects and Animations, most can be made suitable for other aspect ratios. For example, if a style consists of some object(s) surrounded by transparency, then it may be for the most part, independent of aspect ratio. An example of this is my rain and lightning style. Instructions are included to allow the user to position the components to their individual image. When a style includes a border or frame and background, etc., you can manually adjust these components in Objects and Animations to fit a different aspect ratio. Some images are actually not in any of the commonly used aspect ratios so fine tuning is necessary to get everything absolutely correct. My suggestion would be to pick an aspect ratio closest to the one you use (such as 3:2) then apply it and see how well it conforms to your image. Just do some trials and see which components you need to adjust. Usually you will be able to fit everything properly with very little work. Best regards, Lin

Hi Folks, Just a reminder that if you are a Facebook user, we have an active Facebook Group which we would love to have you join. Just follow the link below and request group membership and we will get you in to join the happy crowd there. PicturesToExe also has a Facebook Page and welcomes people to stop by and comment, etc., I'll post a link to both below: https://www.facebook.com/groups/picturestoexefans/ PicturesToExe Group https://www.facebook.com/picturestoexe/ PicturesToExe Page Since this is just a reminder, it will only stay up about 30 days and I will delete it since there is already a permanent reminder below... Lin

Hi Dom, I think having commercial packs of styles available for a reasonable price is an excellent idea. New users of PicturesToExe often want to create interesting shows but had not yet acquired sufficient levels of understanding to achieve the results they would like. Styles, templates and even themes (a pack of styles with a thematic direction) are excellent ways for them to achieve their goals. Also busy professionals such as wedding photographers would love this idea. Time is money for them and after shooting a wedding and post processing hundreds and sometimes more than a thousand images, being able to create an exciting and professional show for their client without re-inventing the wheel each time is money in the bank for them. As you say, it takes time, skill and dedication to create professional styles and people are more than willing to pay for the help. Having such helps not only the person who dedicates the time, skill and effort to producing the styles but also benefits the company who produces the presentation slideshow software because it make that software more useful to a broader audience. Best regards, Lin

O.K. here's a quick and dirty example, but I think you will be able to see how it works. Click the link below and download the zipped PTE file. Extract the elements into a folder and load the PTE file into PicturesToExe. In essence, I took your green and turned to to white and painted the rest of that black to make the mask. Then I took the same image and overlaid it on a transparency and made the part which was green, transparent. Then that goes under the mask and mask rectangle and the image you want to appear behind the road goes inside the mask... http://www.lin-evans.org/sample/maskexample.zip Another way to accomplish the same thing without using a mask at all would be just to make the part which was green transparent and put in on the layer above the image you want to appear in the background - no real need for creating the complexity of the mask. There are multiple ways to do things usually... Try just taking the image with the transparency above the road and using it with your choice of background... should work perfectly... Let me know if you have questions. By the way - here's a bunch of Youtube tutorials on using Gimp to make a transparent background, etc. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=make+background+transparent+gimp Best regards, Lin

Sure, that's an easy one. Give me a few minutes and I'll send an example for you... L

Hi Craig, You can, but it won't do what you expect. Masks in all software have two main possibilities, transparency to objects outside the mask which is obtained by black and white of which white is transparent to the object within the mask and let's it show through while black is transparent to what is outside the mask. You can also use a PNG file for a mask where you use transparency to see things outside the mask. PTE has chroma key extraction for greenscreen video, but doesn't use chromakey for still images. If you can explain what you want to see where the green is and what will be going on where the road is, I'll help you sort it out quickly. After re-reading what you said above, I suspect it's just a misunderstanding of how to set up your mask... If you will tell me what precisely you are trying to achieve I'll show you how to do it... Best regards, Lin

Cool - reminds me of many years ago when we were playing with similar things. Dom and I created some animations with magnifying glasses using reflections and various magnifications, etc. Styles makes it lots more fun and lots easier for the novice user for sure! Nice one! Best regards, Lin

Yes, it seems to me that by creating a silent mp3 for the audio clip on the slide if there was no change in the audio volume of the background, it would be highly unlikely that PTE was responsible. I can't detect any change in volume on either of my two systems "Win XP and Win 8.1" with different sound systems so I would guess it's something endemic to Jeff's system. It's difficult to suss out all the permutations and possibilities, but I agree - I think we can rule out PTE as the cause. L

Dominique stops by now and then - he's been busy with trail running for some time now but with the new and truly exciting features of PTE 9.0 soon to be released into beta testing and available to all registered PTE users (the beta test versions) he will be back shortly. Dom had his site hacked so many times that he finally threw in the towel and took it down. It's absolutely insane that people could be so cruel as to continue to hack his site which was truly a great resource for PTE users. I would like to find out who did it and string them up by their privates for about two weeks! Seriously!!! Yes, you could gain some great insight by studying the way Dom created his template and animations by carefully observing what is happening in the Objects and Animations screen. I think if there is sufficient interest, I could create a couple video tutorials to help users get some understanding of how to animate the waving fan. I'll work on that this coming week. Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, I think the situation Denis refers to has to do with a specific sound card brand if I read the forum correctly. If you have a different audio card, you probably won't see the same switch. The reason I suggested Jeff create a "silent" audio clip insert was to see if it was the file or perhaps something in the audio itself which was causing the problem. The fact that a silent mp3 results in no drop in background audio levels pretty much rules out PTE as the source of the problem I think. Best regards, Lin

Welcome to the PicturesToExe forum Surya! We're glad to have you here! Best regards, Lin

Hi Tauratinzwe, It's a good learning experience. When any action creates positional relationships with independent parts it's necessary to have the full sized file including all the empty transparent space to keep the parts properly aligned in space. For example, let's say you had pieces of a puzzle and you wanted to move them about or begin a slide with the pieces scattered randomly then assemble them correctly. By having all the transparent space in the file, each piece is easily moved to its proper assembled location by simply setting the pan, and rotation values to zero and the size to 100%. Every piece is then positioned as it was when the original file was created. You could move each piece of the puzzle in any direction or position or distance and then cause each piece to find its proper assembled location by setting the pan and rotation values to zero. But when each file is trimmed to remove as much empty transparent space as possible, there is no simple reference point of zero to reassemble. Each individual piece would have it's own pan x or pan y value and it greatly complicates proper positioning. The value of trimming, of course, is file size. Removing the seemingly extraneous transparent space greatly reduces the size of each file and for components which are used as totally independent objects, trimming is of significant value. But anytime components must be in precise positional alignment with other components to create a whole, then never use the trim feature of Photoshop on export. By the way - I posted a sample of the waving fan on PanosFX for you with some more information.... Best regards and welcome to the PTE forum!, Lin

Hi Jeff, I can't really tell that the actual sound level of the background has changed because the voice over is much louder and tends to mask the background audio, but what about the audio waveform for the backgoround music - is there any perceptual visual change in that volume level? Are the numbers for the background audio in terms of volume identical before, during and after the voice clip? One way to perhaps better test this would be to add silent audio clips to a couple pictures so all you actually hear is the background audio but the mp3 audio clips for each slide are still being actuated. Then it would be easier to discern whether there were a "real" versus "perceptual" difference in the background sound track? Best regards, Lin

If you have the PTE file (filename.pte) and associated image files and sound files used to create them, then any previously created exe AV file can be output by current versions of PicturesToExe in native Mac exe format as well as in AVI or MP4, etc. Best regards, Lin

Hi Roy, PTE uses Windows to make a native Mac Executable file. Of course it also creates video files which run on a MacIntosh as well as on Window's PC's and various tablet and phone devices. Our users who have MacIntosh run various programs such as bootcamp, VMware Fusion, etc. to run PTE on their machines. In the future, there will be a dedicated MacIntosh version but it will be a while. Until then, it works perfectly using programs which permit Windows programs to run in a Mac environment. You may download a free trial version as well as purchase the product here: http://www.wnsoft.com Best regards, Lin

Hi Barry, I'm not aware of any tutorials on using the Unsharp Mask to oversharpen, but here is how I proceed. There are technically two ways to sharpen images with PicturestoExe. The first way is by going to the Properties Tab on the Objects and Animations screen, left click on the small down arrow, and pulling the "Sharper/Smoother" slider to the left. This process applies a sharpening effect (or if pulled to the right a smoother effect) to the currently selected image.This procedure is fairly subtle and affects the image regardless of the keyframe settings. This is to say that the setting can not be changed from one keyframe to another. The second way, and a more dynamic appearance, is done by clicking on the "Animation" tab and using the "Blur" tool. By sliding it to the left, a much stronger sharpening effect is accomplished. Unlike the Sharper/Smoother tool, this setting is keyframe dependent so that it's possible to totally blur or totally sharpen a selected image at any point along the timeline. If you apply the sharpening at the first keyframe and do not change it, the image will remain sharp for the duration. My suggestion would be to use both of these features to slightly oversharpen each slide before converting to a video which you later plan to upload to social media. This will compensate for the normal degredation of sharpness due to various reasons. The best way is to experiment with some very short videos. Best regards, Li

Very nice Robert - sad that it only lasted three years, but much better for Heather that if it had to end it was after three rather than thirty years... Best regards, Lin

Done... L

Hi Noppes, Did you try Igor's suggestion of creating a folder with a simple name and without using any symbols such as #, etc.? The available codecs on your system will depend a great deal on other software which has been installed. PTE is selecting the best default and if you haven't changed anything since the MP4's were created successfully I doubt that is the problem - actually I believe Igor has the solution. Try creating a simple folder such as C:\myslideshow and put a couple of slides in it. Then open PTE and add these two slides and try to create an MP4 from them saving it to that location and with simple names for the two slides with nothing other than alpha/numeric characters in the file names. No spaces or underlines of ASCII characters other than alpha characters and/or numbers. Let's try that first before looking for anything more complex. I had no problem creating the MP4 from your PTE file but I put the files in a unique and simple folder to work with. I'm betting that's the problem.. Best regards, Lin