cjdnzl
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Posts posted by cjdnzl
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Batch resize and convert to Jpeg (one pass) in IrfanView will do that for you with just a handful of clicks - and its free!
That is correct, and you can save the sized images into another folder ready for PTE to access and use as the exclusive folder for that show
This is how I do it, and I once again air my belief that PTE should not try to emulate existing programs that already do the job.
Colin
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HI Tom,
I've been thinking about that! I have some ideas but haven't yet decided the best way to implement them - LOL..
On the Icosahedron, I haven't filled it completely as you might notice on the lower corners of each triangle. I did do one with 3720 video screens (as opposed to the 3460 in the presentation) which had all the "corners" filled with video. But that one was on the ragged edge of my hardware limitations and not completely smooth. I think I will do another and completely fill the confines of the icosahedron but with a few hundred less video screens and higher quality on each.
UPDATE: I created a successful one with 3620 + images which runs smooth as silk... I updated with two new links on the original post... One for Mac and one for Windows...
I'm searching for just the "right" fireplace for a Christmas tree and fireplace animation with rotating icosahedron and cube ornaments. I'm thinking rotating tiny cubes within each face of the main cube ornament and flashing sides for the icosahedron - LOL
Best regards,
Lin
Hello Lin,
Well, I am feeling very pleased with my 7-year-old Dell laptop. With its nVidia 8600M-GT gpu it ran your show as smooth as. What a hell of a lot of work that show must have been,
Regards,
Colin
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Hello Colin et al,
I have no trouble opening your files, I use a file manager - like Windows Explorer but infinitely better, called Directory Opus, an Australian-authored program which does everything, including a file viewer.
However, I do have one small niggle with your shows, more so with part 1, but still present in several frames of Part 2, which is a tendency for your images to have tilted horizons and sloping verticals, by a few degrees. They are always tilted to the left, which may indicate a tendency to have the camera rolled to the right when taking the shots. Please take this post, not as negative criticism but as a critique meant to help. Otherwise, I do enjoy seeing high quality images of England, as like most New Zealanders I have grandparents who hail from England, Ireland, and Scotland, but I have never been there ( and probably won't now at my age)
Regards,
Colin
New Zealand
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Hi Tom & Colin
I didn't get a chance to test any shows, as soon as I found I couldn't get the internet I rang their "helpline", 2.5 hours later after I found I had to fit an outside aerial to the Asus motherboard, which there was no mention of in the start up blurb, then finding the loose aerial connections on the MB which meant removing the caseing to get at the back of them. Then finding the asaus drivers for the wireless section of the MB weren't installed, Then the mb wireless wouldn't accept my wireless hubs signal I threw the towel in. When I think back on what the "help" was getting me to do, such as delving inside the live casing, I could have been killed. After the "help" gave up I was instructed to ring BT to resolve the wireless problem, after a further 45 minutes with them, they decided the wireless drivers in the hub were too old for the the asus driver to recognise & are sending a new hub & it will be Monday before it arrives :(/>/>
In the meantime I think I will reconnect the "new" PC to the monitor via the HDMI hub I bought so I could use one monitor on the old & "new" PC's & give it a go with a couple of shows, don't want to do too much in case it has to be RTB. I'm back on the LT & monitor so I can use the 'net. It's a nightmare, our retro GPlan desk is littered with PC parts, there's steam coming out of my ears, Margaret has hidden in a corner :ph34r:/>/> , not what I expected after shelling out best part of £1k. More later. :(/>/>
Regards Eric
Yachtsman1.
Strewth Eric, that's pretty p*** poor service, I don't blame your wife for hiding in the corner, best to make oneself scarce, and she knows it.
Nothing doing here either, courier didn't call today, so it'll be Monday here too before I can do anything.
One thing from a long-time tech, you can't get killed from a PC motherboard, the maximum accessible voltage is only 12 volts, in fact you're more likely to kill the board than yourself - that's unless you open up the power supply, where lurks a huge capacitor charged up to 325 volts, the peak voltage from the 230-volt RMS mains voltage.
It's a pity I don't live closer, we could drown our problems at the local watering-hole.
PS: I hope you use a grounding strap around your wrist when working on your computer, with the other end properly earthed.
Commiserations,
Colin
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Well it arrived, it didn't work & after 2 hours with PCS help line finding uninstalled drivers & loose connections, it is lying in bits on my desk. :angry:/>/> More later.
Yachtsman1.
Geez Eric, what a let-down for you. There'd be some flowery language around here if that happens with my build, which I am doing myself. I hope you get it sorted asap.
Regards,
Colin
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Colin,
You may want to investigate if your old/current 400W powersupply is compatible for use on Haswell systems. Ive read alot of these systems have had issues when not using Haswell Approved ATX12V2 power supplies. Check the boards manufacture site for a list ... it could save you from alot of future headaches and troubleshooting down the road.
* Usually a printed notification of this power supply requirement is within the boards packaging ... which many users have ignored to read or overlooked.
* Some power suppy models claim to be Haswell Ready ... but in some cases these units are not fully Haswell Approved. It can be a cat and mouse game to verify.
Ok, thanks for the heads-up on that, my power supply is about 7 years old anyway, so will investigate. Seasonic seems a good brand.
Colin
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News Flash, it's on its way :P/>/>/>/>/> :P/>/>/>/>/> :P/>/>/>/>/> :P/>/>/>/>/> :P/>/>/>/>/> :P/>/>/>/>/>
Yachtsman1.
Hello Eric,
Well, your upgrade enthusiasm got to me, I am now upgrading my desktop from an Asus P4-800E motherboard and P4 Pentium 3.00ghz with 4 GB memory to this:
1 x Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H Intel Z87 ATX Haswell LGA1150.
1 x Intel Haswell Core i5 4670 3.40GHz 6MB LGA1150.
1 x Kingston HyperX Predator 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3-1866 CL9 (KHX18C9T2K2/8X).
1 x Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit (Full Version)
The bits are due any day now, and will be built over the weekend, using my current case, 500GB WD Black HDD and 400-watt power supply, and two 1TB outboard drives.
I haven't ordered a graphics card as the on-board graphics are supposed to be adequate, but time will tell on that. I don't know at this stage whether the onboard graphics will allow a monitor profile from my Spyder2Pro calibrator - if not, then a graphics card will be needed, as I need a calibrated monitor
Cheers,
Colin
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Further to the macbook/projector problem, I have just perused Google, and found the answer.
macbooks employ a feature called 'mirroring' which allows an unmirrored computer to show a different image on the computer from that on the projector, and for the lappy and projector to show the same image the computer has to be in mirror mode.
The macbook owner clearly didn't know that, and neither did anybody else in the meeting. I would have thought that being mirrored would be the default setting, but apparently not.
Well, that's the answer, and it may be a useful capability in some situations, like having notes etc showing on the laptop, but the show presented on the projector.
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There is no external video port software. if you plug in a second display, whether its a projector or a monitor, you can show stuff on it. its just another screen.
the only issue is that macs have DVI or displayport and many projectors are stuck in the last century with vga, so you need an adapter, but Im sure he knew this and had the adapter.
Sorry, but that doesn't make sense to me. A projector should show just what is on the mac laptop screen, but that was not the case. The lappy screen showed the Powerpoint starting screen, while the projector - which was connected via a DVI/VGA adapter - showed a totally unrelated image. We went looking for this image and found it in a separate folder.
It was even queerer, because the laptop showed the powerpoint image in what Windows calls 'normal' mode, i.e. not maximised, with the desktop background visible behind. But the projector showed the PP start screen with this unrelated background behind, so it appears that video pages were crossed up somewhere. When the PP show started, it disappeared from the projector, but ran on the lappy.
My conclusion was that the video external port was being fed different pages than was the laptop.
I've never seen that happen with a PC, only with his late model mac - I think with a retina screen but not positive about that.
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they do and it should work, but Powerpoint is awful no matter what the platform.
Keynote is worlds better. Ask anyone who has used both.
But, that is all missing the point. The mac would not show its programs properly on the projector, though it was ok on the mac's own screen. Clearly that's a problem with its external video port software.
Mac users dont rant that they have a superior product. Thats a figment of your imagination.
Not in my experience, which is similar to Barry's. The mac people I know make no secret about looking down on PC's. (and I'm not above enjoying the moment when their beloved mac gives them trouble!)
Nothing is perfect and there will be glitches no matter what you get.
Those who want to find fault with anything will always find fault.
Look at what it will do, not what it wont do.
What it won't do becomes the problem when they want it to do it.
Easy. Nikon, Toyota, Vulcans.
(and its spelled Klingon)
Nah ... for me it's Canon, Nissan, and Klingons. :)/>
Regards, Colin.
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Barry,
Windows 8 upgrade = $120
Apple Mavericks upgrade = $0
Tom
Sounds about right for relative value
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I cannot now recreate it, but originally it happened for a few days.
I created a Template with my favourite settings and then tried to set that as a default for all new shows, but it just would accept it. It showed the new template when selected, but every time I hit file new I got a basic standard PTE opening page and settings. Some time later and for reasons I cannot explain it just started working.
Now when I try to create the same issues I can't. We have moved on a couple of betas, but the fact that others are not reporting this I would assume its some weird thing on my own computer. I will try it again over the next few days from time to time and let you know if it happens again.
PS. Just cleared all templates and did the same thing that caused me issues before and its all fine now
Barry,
Try creating another template ans seeing if that one keeps reverting to basic. It sounds like a path problem which might reveal itself with another new template.
Regards,
Colin
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I know just what you mean!
I was once of those PC diehards and still like to use it on my laptop. However, I never regretted getting an iMac because of its stability and quality (it just works)
PTE installs and runs easily on Windows 8 and I now create all my slide shows on the MAC.
Hello Ron,
In defence of my PC I have to say that it, too, 'just works'. Windows on both of my machines is rock stable, and quality in terms of the display is more than adequate - but they are both hardware calibrated.
Last night at our camera club a member was set to show a Powerpoint presentation with his Macbook through our Dell DLP projector. The mac insisted on pulling an image out from some folder and showing that on the screen, while the mac's screen showed the Powerpoint start screen. Several mac owners tried to help, to no avail. End result, his Powerpoint show was abandoned.
What really rubbed the salt in for the poor bloke was that the next item was some competition images shown from the club's Dell PC laptop. Plugged the projector into the Dell lappy's vid port, turned on, picture came up, perfect.
Seriously, There are a number of club members with mac laptops, and more than once there have been problems with connecting to the projector, giving rise to somewhat veiled comments about the projector not being right. Of course it can't be the projector, it just shows what it is given. It is a problem for the mac users to solve.
Regards,
Colin
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Hi CJDNZL
Had a look at your suggestion, from what I can see running that programme leads you onto eventually changing components to check out what it finds, which I don't have the facilities or skill to do. I've up-graded laptop memories but the machine in question is a non standard format, a hybrid in a way. Thanks for the suggestion, if I do go down the repair route I'll pass that on to whoever I get to do it.
Regards Eric
Yachtsman1.
Eric,
That's right if you find that memory errors are the problem. But to do a yes/no check as to whether memory IS the problem, an overnight run will either exonerate or prove the memory. If it finds a memory error, then of course you have to take further steps, like shuffling the memory cards around to isolate the problem one.
The reason I offered that program was simply to prove or exonerate the memory. After that, what you do is up to you.
Regards,
Colin
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You guys never cease to amaze me!
I am demonstrating a principle and not how close to perfection I was able to make it.
OK, your third party software is blilliant and does a far better job, but having done that job will it then do this?:
BTW, once again this is quick and dirty - perfection takes a little longer.
DG
haha, no - touché !
Regards,
Colin
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Hi guys,
I don't think Dave was looking for software, he just wanted to demonstrate that PTE had some capabilities not yet tapped "JUST FOR FUN - I just wanted to see if PTE would do the job"
There are myriad software solutions to perspective correction, but I really don't think that was his point????
Best regards,
Lin
Hi Lin,
Actually I was trying to be tactful by way of example that Dave's image, while having reasonable verticality has considerable distortion still, particularly in the left side tower, and is not really acceptable as an image of the building.
Perhaps I'm too particular, but I have to say I would not find his image acceptable. As an experiment with PTE it is interesting, but I can't say that "it did the job", that's all.
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JUST FOR FUN I decided to see if PTE could save me from having to purchase that expensive Pespective Control Lens :rolleyes:/>/>.
Results below:
DG
Hello Dave,
I use a program called DxO Viewpoint for perspective correction, it's a companion program to DxO Optics, IMO both are excellent programs for photographers.
I ran your original image through Viewpoint, with the result shown below. What do you think?
Regards,
Colin
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Download and run Memtest86. It cycles through memory with all possibilities of bit settings for each byte of memory. Leave it running overnight to verify - or otherwise - your memory.
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Colin
Yes, I agree it all works fine in Photoshop, but not in PTE. Well, not quite as well. You would expect to be able to click the eye dropper in PTE and then move about the image as you have demonstrated in Photoshop, which was my point. However, as soon as you move off the colour picker in PTE the eye dropper is lost. With Slide Styles now about to be launched and with the opportunity to add edge effects in almost any colour we want, being able to select colour from an image should be easy in my view and it's what I am suggesting.
I don't use a mouse so I am assuming that if you tried the same thing in the Objects and Animation screen, you would NOT get the same result as you have with Photoshop. Please try it just in case my assumption is wrong.
As I click on the eye dropper in the Objects and Animation screen it appears to select it, but it doesn't. Move off the window to the image and it's lost. Click and hold the left mouse and it does, but how many would think of doing that?
Apart from me
Aaahh Barry,
Nowhere in your original post did you mention that you were working in PTE, and the term Color Picker led me to think you were talking about Photoshop.
So my post was irrelevant, apologies for getting that wrong.
In hindsight, I ahould have guessed your knowledge of PS was better than I surmised, but I thought that maybe CS6 or the cloud version might work differently.
I'll get back under my rock now,
Regards,
Colin
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Hello Barry,
I just had a play with Photoshop CS2 (being a bit impecunious I haven't afforded a later version!). With an image on the screen of a park in town with a church tower in the background, I select the Type Tool, and on the top line of the screen I get the color patch that the type will use. Clicking on the patch opens the Color Picker window and gives me an eyedropper cursor that I can place anywhere on the screen. I placed the cursor on the church tower to get a brick tone, which immediately changes the gradated color in the picker window and puts a small circle in the window to indicate where the selected tone sits in the gradated area. Now, if I type text, it appears in the selected color, and for good measure I selected an ares on the grass foreground with the marquee tool, and filled the rectangle with the same brick color.
As far as I can see this all works exactly as expected. See images below:
Regards,
Colin
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I am talking about Basics as I think that exact colours and a manually contolled slide show with some audio controls are basic requirements from a user which originates from an oldfashioned slide show on the basis of a slide-projector .
<snip>
- Paul
Hello Paul,
I understand from earlier comments in this forum that PTE expects images with an sRGB color space. If your images are sRGB and properly color-balanced and the show is presented with a computer and (hopefully a DLP) projector also calibrated to sRGB color space the color will be as near 'perfect' as you can get.
I am mildly surprised at your comparison with slides and slide projectors, where there was no opportunity to correct the color at all - the slides are what you get out of the camera and the projector with its incandescent bulb is what it is, take it or leave it. I do not think that old-fashioned slides and projectors have ever produced anything like 'exact color' in any way at all.
Color-balanced images shown through a calibrated set-up are streets ahead of any possible slide/incandescent lamp based presentation. Just speaking from my 60 year's experience in photography.
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2) Image resolution. The subject is so complex that I hesitate to even get into it, seeing as how I’ve become bewildered by the sheer number of explanations on the internet of what-it-is and what-it-isn’t. Suffice to say Photoshop CS2 reports the out-of-camera image specs on my wife’s TZ3 as Pixel Dimensions 20.3M, width 3072 pixels / height 2304 pixels, document size 42.67 inches / height 32 inches, resolution: 72 pixels / inch, and the out of camera image specs of my own TZ25 as Pixel Dimensions 34.3M, pixel width 4000 pixels / height 3000 pixels, document size 22.22 inches / height 16.67 inches, resolution: 180 pixels / inch. There seems to be a massive difference in the output of the two cameras -- or is this just an anomaly caused by the way Photoshop is representing the image information? I’ve no idea. All I can think of is that the greater the wealth of detail in an image, the better it is when zooming. So: is there an “ideal resolution” which other Picturestoexe users employ themselves for slideshows to be output to DVD for screening on home television?
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This is a common cause of confusion with the people at my camera club, to the point that I am producing a show called 'Pixels 101', which I can précis here in case it could clarify some things for you
Using your TZ25 camera specs as an example, you quote the image size as 4000 x 3000 pixels, so fairly obviously that is an image size of 12,000,000 pixels, or 12 megapixels. (I'll ignore the fine point of megapixels being equal to 1,048,576 pixels due to the binary nature of computers where everything is handled in powers of 2. A 20-bit numerical value is 2^20 (2 to the power of 20) which is exactly 1,048,576. Mostly though the round 1,000,000 pixels is used.}
However representing one pixel in a colour image requires three bytes in a jpeg image or an 8-bit TIFF image - one byte per primary colour - so the file size of your image is three times the pixel value, 36 megabytes.
OK, this image is sometimes called 'dimensionless' because there is no parameter which tells us how big the image is, until we specify a pixels-per-inch (ppi) number. Once we say how many pixels there will be in an inch, we can then say how big the image will be if we print it.
The camera will generally put some value of ppi on an image straight out of the camera, in your case 180, in your wife's camera, 72. At that ppi your 4000 x 3000 image will be (4000/180) = 22.22 by (3000/180) = 16.67 inches, which agrees with the figures from CS2.
If, in Photoshop you change the ppi to, say, 300 and untick the Resample-Image box, your image will now be 4000/300 x 3000/300, or 13.3 x 10 inches, and that is the size it will print out at.
If you wanted to size the image to print at, say, 8 by 6 inches, then, again leaving Resample-Image unticked and inputting 8 and 6 into the width and height fields respectively, the ppi will change to 500, and voila! you will have an 8x6 image if you print it. It may not look like 8x6 on the screen, but it will be an 8x6 image nonetheless.
If you crop the image at all, then the pixel dimensions will change, but all the forgoing figures will still apply at the new size.
Finally, Photoshop has a tool called the Crop-Tool that looks like two crossed set squares. If you choose that tool, the top line above the image will show three boxes for width, height, and resolution. (If you turn Rulers on - View/Rulers - you can right-click on a ruler to change the units of measurement.) Plug in the wanted dimensions and the ppi, drag the frame around the image to where you want (you can pull or push the four corners, or move the cursor outside a corner and get a curved cursor that will let you rotate the frame to straighten a tilted image. Then press Enter and it all happens.
AS for 'ideal resolution', you have, unfortunately, no say if you are fitting images to a specified pixel size like 1920 x 1080. You can't fit more pixels in to improve resolution, because the image would then be bigger than 1920 x 1080. If you use a bigger image and let the projector downsize it you're back to square one - and probably worse, depending on how the projector does the downsizing. It's always best to adhere to the dimensions.
Note that the Crop-Tool can be configured to size the image in pixels. Play around with the frame size and position till you like the result, hit Enter, and you have an image cropped to your taste and sized to the correct pixel dimensions all in one go. Love it!
Sorry about the length, I hope it clarifies things for you.
Regards,
Colin
PS: All the foregoing is using the term PPI, NOT DPI.
Dots per inch is purely a printing term. My Canon i9950 printer prints at 9,600 x 4,800 dpi - dots per inch, but it is printing at 600 pixels per inch, which means it is printing a matrix of 16 x 8 dots = 128 dots per pixel. The reason for this is so that multiple dots of colour can be applied to each pixel to produce the required hue.
(Almost all printers have a conversion algorithm built in to the printer driver. Regardless of the image ppi it will be converted to 600 ppi before printing.)
Do not confuse dpi with ppi.
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Some Audio editors, Soundbooth for example, have a feature called "Time Stretch". With it you can alter the length of time a piece of music plays, albeit with the inevitable change in Tempo of the piece.
Example: Using Time Stretch on a short clip of 23.3 seconds it is possible to vary the duration of the clip from 2 seconds to 3 minutes with great accuracy. However, with my 23.3 second clip I would not foresee stretching beyond the 20 - 30 second range.
It is extremely useful for making a piece of music fit a sequence of slides as opposed to the present "Fit Slides to Music" - within certain limitations. Care is needed to maintain the "musicality" of the clip but nevertheless it is a very useful tool.
Would it be possible to include "Time Stretch" in the Audio section of a future version of PTE?
DG
Hello Dave et al,
I use Goldwave, a so-called professional sound editor - which does appear to be professional in its abilities - and it also will stretch or compress running time of music pieces, which it does without altering pitch.
Given programs that do this already, I am not sure that I would want such a feature included in PTE. I am from the school that thinks PTE should do what it does well, without needing or having to provide capability that other programs already have.
My work flow for AV productions includes DxOptics for RAW image processing, DxViewpoint for correcting perspective distortion, Photoshop for image handling, and Goldwave for editing and concatenating music pieces into a single audio file, all before the process of making the AV show starts.
Do we want PTE to be able to do some or all of these things within the one program? Some might think so, to avoid having to purchase a number of programs, but the flipside of that is separate programs can be used where the result is not for an AV show, like compiling a music track for a gathering, or making exhibition prints, or even just holiday snaps. If it's all built into PTE then other uses are inhibited.
I wonder what other forum members think about this?
Regards,
Colin
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My camera, a Canon 40D, does not seem to record subject distance in the exif data. I think it is because with a zoom lens, the lens setting for a given distance varies with the zoom setting, making it difficult for the camera to figure the distance.
My most-used lens is the Canon 17-85 mm lens, and I notice that the infinity mark in the window shifts with zoom setting. The mark is correct for the long end of the lens, but when the wide end is at infinity the focus scale indicates about the 10 metre mark, a linear distance on the scale of about 5 or 6 mm. I just tried focusing on a target about 5 metres away; at the wide end the scale indicated about 3 metres, while the long end indicated more like 5 or 6 metres.
So it appears that the camera cannot derive an accurate distance from the lens, so - no distance in the exif.
A point to consider: there are two types of variable focal length lenses, 'zoom' and 'varifocal'.
A true zoom lens is one in which the focus does not change with zooming. They are very expensive, and used mainly for professional movie cameras where the focus must be maintained while zooming.
Varifocal lenses change focus when zoomed, but for still cameras it isn't really a problem. What we call zoom lenses are in fact varifocal lenses, so the focus does shift when zooming, and I believe that is the reason your exif data doesn't show distance.
I believe that some lenses, like primes, do show distance, but I haven't seen that. I don't own any primes.
Product Key / Validation [SOLVED]
in General Discussion
Posted
Hello all,
I have just - somewhat belatedly - downloaded and installed version 8.
I originally purchased an early version of 5, and subsequently downloaded the versions of 6 and 7, all of which accepted the lifetime license that came with 5.
It appears that 8 does not accept that license key in registry, so my question is, will ver 8 accept my current 'long' license key, or do I need to purchase a new key?
Regards,
Colin