Lin Evans

Hi guys, Even more reasons why the future of PTE depends on the combination of event photographers and young people who are very interested in special effects. In the world there are those who "do" and those who "watch." The watchers out number the doers by a huge percentage. Products like PicturesToExe have to be oriented toward those who do. Event photographers create presentations for various audience. They create video and still images for clients (wedding photographers, etc.) and for audiences. For example - many years ago I was the official photographer for the 10th Annual UFO Congress in Laughlin, Nevada, a week-long event attended by hundreds. My job was not only to photograph the speakers but also to create candid photos of the crowd in attendance which were displayed in a continuous running format on a large projection display. My show was made with a very early version of PicturesToExe and the running show was stopped just long enough for me to add additional images, compile the executable and start it back up. I created CD's for the show producers to market to those in attendance and it was well received. Older people who make up the bulk of camera clubs, in general are not particularly astute when it comes to computer literacy. Things must be kept simple or they simply will not bother with it. For the most part, they are not the future for this product. Younger people grew up with computers, cell phones with cameras, video games, fairly complex software and no fear of swimming in these waters. These young people are highly enamored with video, animation and even effects. They will become tomorrow's user of presentation products, but the simple show which tells a meaningful story with images and audio which we who use PTE for AV purposes love, is not going to impress them. The event photographer must capture the attention of his/her audience and must do it fairly quickly. Time is money for them so transition effects and "styles" are paramount. A competitive product must then be able to allow them to quickly create a fairly flashy show to sell to their client. This is why the competition has been so successful. As mentioned many times before, the competition's income stream is probably as great from their sales of styles as from their main products. To survive and compete, PTE must offer these features and must actively market to the younger generation. To become THE product in the minds of tomorrow's market, the product must become embedded in their vocabulary today. There will probably always be a small market consisting of the true audio/visual enthusiast derived from camera clubs and competitions, but this will not sustain growth for the company. Exploring new markets is paramount and I can't stress enough the importance of video in this equation. No, PTE should not become a "video only" oriented product, but video and special effects and even more importantly, features giving the user the ability to incorporate their artistic creations in their presentations must constitute a significant part of the product. Teaching people to use the product can also become a viable profit center. The competition hires professional wedding photographers to attend electronic shows and demonstrate their product. They were at nearly every COMDEX show I've attended and have seminars across the country. Of course there are no more COMDEX shows, but PMA, Photokina and other such photography related events must have representatives for PTE in attendance and having a small booth with demonstrations would go a very long way toward promoting this product and making it one of the first in the minds of professionals who are the first-line market prospects. These type marketing efforts have made the names of the competition's products an everyday household word among event photographers in the US. That must happen with PTE if it is to become a successful competitor in this country. Best regards, Lin

We're all just dreaming Igor - nobody really expects to have all the desired "features" quickly. It's lots of work and you and the crew have done an incredible job already of giving everyone the best tool available for presentation shows! We truly appreciate it and love what is now already possible with PicturesToExe!! Best regards, Lin

Wouldn't it be nice if all this could just be done in your text editor, copied and pasted directly into PTE complete with formatting, fonts, etc., without having to do the conversions then if a mistake is found, rework it all? I think that feature would be very useful, especially if there is a great deal of text. Best regards, Lin

Hi JT, Perhaps both. Proportional to the amount of new business users vis desired growth, and exponentially regarding the present user base size. Best regards, Lin

Hi Tom, Because of your recommendation long ago, I use Atlantis myself and find it to be not only a genuine value, but a truly good editor. But when I carefully craft text to be copied and pasted into PTE, with the exception of spell correction it's all for naught. Just a single long string of text is entered and then the painstaking job of putting in line breaks and such begins. One little mistake and you start all over. To be a viable tool for business, where text is at least as important as images, PTE really needs the ability to word wrap, accept at least the fundamentals such as the editor on the forum. Then it would, in my opinion, open up an entirely new market as a competitor for PowerPoint. With only a small portion of this worldwide market, PTE would increase sales logarithmically. Best regards, Lin

Hi Dieter, In the User Guide here: http://docs.picturestoexe.com/en/techniques/addvid2 Scroll down and see: "Playing a video over multiple slides" Best regards, Lin

I'm sort of the opinion that we don't really need a "spell checker" - what we need is programable line wrap and the ability to have multiple fonts in the same text object. . The really difficult thing about entering anything other than a few words in PTE is that when it's copied from Microsoft Word or other text editor, everything ends up in a single gigantic string. The the user has to first decide which font they want, even though they have carefully chosen the font underlines, bold, italic, etc., in their word processing software. Then how large they want the text to appear, choose a font and then begin the terribly slow and manual process of manually entering line breaks. When text is numerous, it adds literally HOURS of work to get it all correct. The spell checking can be done with the very powerful tools in the text editor, but to get it to look right in PTE is a monumental undertaking. I think having text line wrap and the ability to use the fonts already chosen along with subscript, superscript, italics, bold, underline strike through, etc., derived from the document copied and pasted would make PTE a much more viable tool to the business environment. It's just way too difficult to deal with text in PTE. To put a single word in bold or italics or underlined, for example, one has to create a second or multiple text objects and insert it (them) in the proper place within the first. Best regards, Lin

Hi Gary, It was a 22 year old girl who was jumping when the bungee cord broke - she ended up in the river, but wasn't badly injured. Actually, the operators of the jump have invited her back for another free jump and she may do it from the last I heard of the situation. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/01/woman-survives-plunge-after-bungee-line-snaps-video/ No, the cords are not the same length for all jumps. The last jumpers at the Royal Gorge had an 800 foot fall. The actual height of the bridge floor to the Arkansas River at normal flow height is 1053 feet according to the most accurate measurements but has been variously quoted at 955 feet and 1053 feet so even assuming the lesser of the heights, the 800 foot fall had 155 feet to spare. I've been to the Royal Gorge Bridge literally a hundred or more times. The Bungee jump isn't a public available thing like it was at Victoria. Only a few jumpers have been licensed to jump there. Last year a terrible fire destroyed a lot of the surrounding structures and took out over 30 of the wooden planks which make up the bridge floor. When I first began going to the Bridge back in the 50's anyone could drive across it in their own vehicles which we did several times. Later they only allowed foot traffic and now they have "tour" vehicles which take people across. The structures are being repaired, and everything "should" be back in opperation by the middle of this month or at least by early October. There is great zip line at the canyon - that's a real treat - one of them is over 1700 feet long and there are a total of 20 zip lines. Here's a link for more info: http://www.royalgorgerafting.net/colorado-rafting-trips.php#ZL?_oskwdid=13272474&_engineadid=37085544096 Best regards, Lin

Hi Guys, Today, the retrieval process doesn't usually involve a second person being lowered down. There are several methods. If the waters are amenable, a boat on the river allows the jumper to be gently lowered into it and the crew removes the bungee and it's hoisted back up. The harness and such is returned later via the crew. If the river is not amenable to this, the person is simply winched back up and when they reach the jump point are pulled in and turned upright by the jump crew. In some cases they right themselves depending on the equipment so that they can return to the jump point in the upright position. Here in Colorado we have one of the highest bungee jumps in the world at the Royal Gorge Bridge.http://10mosttoday.com/10-highest-bungee-jumps-in-the-world/ Best regards. :om

Actually, I don't believe it would "hurt" PTE at all to have this feature. The competition has a plethora of "input formats" of which many (most?) are absolutely obsolete or never used by anyone and it's just more marketing fodder for them. Having additional output formats including BluRay would be a big plus for PTE advertising and having a viable "player" would actually be a very useful one. Best regards, Lin

YouTube "converts" all videos uploaded to their own formats but doesn't convert all video sizes correctly. If you stick with wide format HD sizes such as 1280x720 or 1920x1080 or if you use 1024x768 or 640x480 you will usually get a video which gives you the correct image without clipping off the top or bottom. Unfortunately when you go to other aspect ratios it sometimes isn't compatible with their conversion process. I tend to use 1280x720 myself because I use a significant amount of animation which generally doesn't do well on YouTube at full 1080P. If I have a show which I want to fit the 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio display, I generally use 1024x768 in my own mp4 to upload. Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, Suggestion in your email.... Best regards, Lin

Hi Claudio, That's great! We all learn new things about PTE every day I think.... Best regards, Lin

Hi Claudio, I don't see that behavior on my systems. Do you have "Scale Keyframes in Objects (on time change)" checked under slide options? If you have a slide with this checked and change the slide time, all objects associated keyframes will change relative to the new slide time. For example, if the keyframe for an object on a slide duration of seven seconds is set to a position near the end of the slide display time and you double the slide time to fourteen seconds, that keyframe will be repositioned near the end of the fourteen second slide. If this feature is not checked and the slide time is changed, the keyframe will remain at the precise time it was in relative to the beginning or zero time for this particular slide. If you could provide a sample PTE file where this happens perhaps we can sort it out. Best regards, Lin

HI Folks, As many of you probably know, Wnsoft has an official FaceBook page and we also have a FaceBook Group which as of right now is a Closed group. There are three types of groups, Secret, Closed and Public. The differences are seen below: We are in the process of deciding whether to make the group Public. The advantage is wider publicity, the disadvantage is that spammers and posters who push pornography have become a problem with some of the PTE's competition's public groups and it becomes a task for the administrators to keep up. Hopefully this wouldn't happen to a PTE group, but it has happened to several of our competition's FB groups so it is a consideration. If we have a sufficient number of administrators to keep up with policing the posts, deleting offending posts and banning those who abuse the privilege of posting to an open group. One person can't really keep up with it so if we go Public with the first group, then we will need to add volunteer administrators from different time zones to keep things tidy. The purposes of having groups are multiple. First, we can discuss things about PTE and other software, post links to our shows as well as links to the official FB page and to Wnsoft and the more people who join the group, the wider the publicity for PicturesToExe. We want to invite all users of FaceBook to please join the present group and when you do, please add your entire complement of FB Friends as group members. Even if they are not PTE users, if you add them they will become aware of PTE and perhaps get excited about using it. If they choose not to want to be in the PTE group, it's very easy for them to opt out and leave. There is no reason why we can't also have regional FaceBook groups. We could have a group for the UK, a group for the USA, a group for Europe or specific countries, a group for Russia, for China, for South America, etc. We might want to have a PTE Animation group, a PTE Style and transition Creation group and so on. The more groups we create, within reason, the wider the publicity for PicturesToExe and the better for Wnsoft which needs to grow the user base to continue to provide new upgrades and new features. There are many, many thousands of users in groups for the competition, so let's get going on this and see if we can give PTE a big boost!!! Here's a link to out current Closed group, just request to be a member and I will immediately approve it as soon as I see the request. https://www.facebook.com/groups/picturestoexefans/ Best regards,Lin

Hi Bert, And here is the original when she was just a child herself.... Best regards, Lin

I'd bring her an apple any day! L

Hey Ken, That's a likely excuse - you were checking out the babe instead of reading the words and listening to the song - LOL.. Best regards, Lin

Welcome Home was written and performed by Janice Ian for the Nebula Awards Ceremony honoring science fiction writers ... The music was from At Seventeen and a continuation of the theme... I thought it fitting to create a little bucholic scene from a Buddhist retreat looking at Jade Mountain on Saint Lucia - just for fun folks... http://www.lin-evans.org/pte/welcomehome.zip (about 18 meg Windows exe) http://www.lin-evans.org/pte/welcomehomemac.zip (about 18 meg native Mac exe) Best regards, Lin

Yes - actually all you do is open the file with 8.0 Just open the pte file with the latest version. As long as all the images and such are still available where they can be found by the PTE data file, everything will work just as it did with 7.0. PTE is backward compatible with all prior versions. Keep in mind that once you save the PTE file with the latest version, then you can no longer edit it with earlier versions. Best regards, Lin

Hi Michael, I just tested the audio transfer, and each audio must be linked for the copy to work as expected. Just link all audio temporarily to slide 1 then do the copy and paste. If there are multiple tracks, link them all to the first slide and everything including sound will copy. Best regards, Lin

Hi Peter, As far as I know, it's only audio which is linked. It would be fairly easy to test it, but it's also easy to just link everything quickly to the first slide for the purpose of copy and then just don't save... Best regards, Lin

Actually, there is a way to get the audio to transfer as well by doing it the way Peter suggests. Link the audio to a slide and it will be copied as well as the images. Best regards, Lin

Hi Mur, Sorry about the extra files and possible threat - I changed the original link to the Photoscape site itself, hope it's clean. I haven't downloaded it in over a year myself so didn't know about the junk... Best regards, Lin

Hi Judy, By archive I'm assuming you mean in addition to your original 16 mp captures... 4K in the real sense (not the strict sense) is about 8 megapixel resolution. Right now there are only a very few diplays made for this resolution and systems must have some pretty powerful video cards to run them with animation at 60 fps. I think it's fair to guess that it will be several years before seeing these. I use a 30" 2560x1600 display myself and HD at 1920 by 1080 looks great on it. I've made a few shows at four megapixel resolution just to test the display and video card and they do very well because I have a top-end video card with 3 gig video RAM and a 32 gig 8 core i7 system running it, but I wouldn't create my high resolution shows for normal distribution because they would totally overwhelm most systems. Today the "average" system sold is sold with a 1980x1020 HD display and generally not larger than a 23 inch display. I think you would be quite happy to archive at four megapixel which would give you plenty of range for deep zooms on normal shows and not take up excessive storage. Keep all your original sixteen megapixel RAW's but as far as the output size for your shows, four megapixel size is more than sufficient. I would not crop them myself, just do all cropping by the position on screen I'm assuming that you shot the originals in 3:2 aspect ration with a dSLR. The 4K stuff will be a long time coming and should you need to make a show for 4K just output from your RAW's for that particular show. That's my $.02 Best regards, Lin