cjdnzl
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Posts posted by cjdnzl
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A few images taken last year during a few days walking in the Yorkshire Dales - an area of scenic beauty in the North of England.
Much of the landscape here is limestone country with lush green valleys (know locally as 'dales' from the Nordic word 'dal'). Throughout the dales, fields and pastures are bounded by distinctive white drystone walls which criss-cross the hillsides in elaborate patterns.
There are many such dales in Yorkshire - this slideshow visits just a few of them.
On www.beechbrook.com/pte for PC and MAC with grateful thanks to Bill Hines as always.
Maureen
Hello Maureen,
Greetings from the other end of the planet - New Zealand.
My wife and I are always entranced by the beauty of the English countryside, the history of ages that we do not have in this young, raw country of NZ. We do have natural scenery, but the hand of man has not wrought anything like your farms, villages, bridges, and historical ruins here. Ours is functional, utilitarian, do the job without much thought given to aesthetics or intrinsic beauty of form.
Thank you for your show, giving a cameo of your English heritage. How I would like to be able to travel there with my Canon!
Just one little ask; could you extend the time of your last image with the credits a little longer? It went past too fast to be able to read it all and appreciate the final image.
Regards,
Colin
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The attached scree grabs show the colour balance shift. The lighter grab is the correct one.
Snapcam
Make sure your images are signed as sRGB. Unsigned or aRGB images can do funny things.
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Colin,
Thanks for the info.
I have been going around to the computer stores and trying out my PTE shows on various laptops just to see what happens. I have been surprised that many times the video clip portions of the slideshows will not play smoothly on many, but play very well on others. I can't tell what might be causing this but the salemen say it must be the video card. Though the worst was when I played a show on a Sony with 2 gb on the memory card. The show actually stopped playing during a video clip. So it pays to test PTE shows on the laptop before you buy it.
But something else has me wondering. When I play PTE shows from a memory stick on my desktop PC, it starts practically immediately. When I play the same PTE shows on laptops, there is a very long pause before the show starts. It seems to happen on every laptop I have tested. Can you explain what is going on?
Gary
I tried running a 58 megabyte PTE show direct from a folder on my Dell laptop, it opened and ran within 2 seconds or so. Then I ran another show about the same size from a memory stick, which took about 4 seconds to open and run.
I put the small difference down to the stick being slower than the hard drive, but not by much at all. I can't think why your laptop experience of shows having a very long pause would be, unless you are using a USB 1.1 stick, or perhaps the lappys you tried all had slow graphics. A lot of laptops use a fairly basic graphics chip on the main board which shares ram memory with programs and other data, as opposed to having a dedicated graphics board with its own memory and a much more powerful chip. So-called business machines often have only basic on-board graphics which will handle relatively static output, like word processors and spreadsheets, and DVD videos which run at just under 30 frames/sec, but choke on PTE shows which run at 60 frames/sec.
Perhaps somebody else may have a better idea. This laptop I use has a dedicated graphics board with its own unshared 512 megabytes memory.
Regards,
Colin
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This has been an interesting and educational event. It looks like they put a high-powered engine with a govenor on the throttle in the laptops. The TN and 6-bit screens are OK for gamers but not for working with images. I understand now why they don't want to publish these specs. :(/>/>
Thanks.
Gary
Hello again Gary,
I forgot to explain why the choices are 16-bit or 32-bit in your video driver. In actual fact images with 8-bit depth are actually 8 bits per primary colour, so the total for 3 colours is 24 bits, or three bytes. But because Windows works in 32-bit which is four bytes at a time, it uses a dummy byte so it can work with 3-byte variables, a sort of padding to suit the 32-bit environment. The image is still only 3 bytes or 24 bits, the extra byte is just ignored.
In 16-bit mode, the colour depth is reduced to 4 bits per colour, 12 bits of information, and the remaining 4 bits are padded to make 2 bytes.
The same happens in your camera. My Canon uses 14 bits of data in RAW mode, but is padded out to 16 bits for the cpu, and again the last 2 bits are ignored.
That's my 2 bit's worth.
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Colin,
Thanks for the info. But I can not get any more specs on this laptop from anyone. Still trying but it just can not be found...yet. All I can find is that it is "1920x1080, FHD TruBrite TFT LED Backlit Display, 16:9, Supports 1080p content".
When I look at my Nvidia info of my Samsung monitor, it shows that the Color Depth is 32-bit. Take a look at the attach screenshot. Are we talking about the same thing?
Gary
Aha. Yes, your nVidia driver software can deliver 32-bit colour depth, but that is not your monitor depth. I just looked at this laptop with its 6-bit screen, and the nVidia driver is set to 32-bit (this lappy has a dedicated nVidia Geforce 8600M-GT graphics chip, which is why I bought it). According to the relevant literature, the screen dithers the colours it cannot directly produce. I guess the marketers do not want to admit limitations in their product, so they hide things like TN and 6-bit screens, which puts you in the 'awkward customer' category, wanting to know these things. I guess it's only those who deal with graphics who worry about it, others are just happy with a coloured screen
Regards,
Colin
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I have been trying to find more specs for the screen for the Toshiba Qosmio X70 laptop. It seems to be top secret information!! I have called Sales, Customer Service, Tech Support and Repair (though they would not even answer the phone).
My desktop's Samsung monitor is 'True Color 32-bit'. Is this a comparable spec to what you are talking about? I put a question on a Toshiba Forum site so I will report back if I get any answer from them.
This Toshiba laptop has "built-in HDMI® output feature to view your 4K Ultra HD digital content on the latest TVs". And it has "Resoluton+" that is supposed to improve the viewing of DVDs and videos from camcorders. So there is hope that it has a better laptop screen but without the detailed specs, there is no way to really know.
But, this doesn't mean that the laptop's screen will show any more than 6 or 8 bit color depth (?).
Gary
There are a couple of ways to find the bit-depth your monitor has. The response speed is one, screens that boast a 2 millisecond response are almost certain to be 6-bit, most 8-bit screens are 5 msec. The other way is the quoted number of colours it wll display. This is calculated by multiplying out the bit depth for the each of the three primary colours. A 6-bit depth can display 2^6 different shades between darkest and lightest colour, and an 8-bit screen can display 2^8 shades.
2^6 is 64 steps, therefore 64 steps for each primary colour is 64*64*64, equals 262,144 displayable colours. A lot of laptop screens claim this number.
An 8-bit screen can display 2^8 or 256 steps from darkest to lightest, so its displayable colours is 256*256*256, equals 16,277,216, usually rounded to 17 million colours. (note that .jpg images are always 8-bit images.)
A top-of-the-line monitor like the Eizo range can display 2^10 steps darkest to lightest, which gives 1024 steps, and a huge total range of over a billion colours.
Two more comments. I would be very surprised if your Samsung has 32-bit colour. That sounds like marketing hype to me. Also, resolution has nothing to do with bit depth and everything to do with pixel count. 1920x1080 seems to be the current standard for desktop monitors and a few 17-inch lappys. My 15-inch laptop is 1680x1050 and isnt too bad for a 6-bit device.
Sorry for the novel,
Colin
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Are you aware that most, if not all laptops have 6-bit screens, not 8-bit as your desktop will have. They look ok, but 6-bit screens are useless for accurate colour work, even if calibrated.
I have a Dell laptop with a 1650 x 1080 6-bit screen, not bad to look at, but I do not do any photoshop type work on it. It's ok to put shows together with images from my desktop, but I wouldn't use it for working on an image.
The computer itself works in any image bit depth, 8 or 16-bit as required, but the screen will only display 6-bit images. An 8-bit external monitor will show 8 bits, just not the laptop screen.
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Colin
I don't think it can be that Lightroom has issues with other software running. If it did, some enterprising techie would have sussed it and you would find that solution listed everywhere in relation to Lightroom slow down. You don't and the solution offered don't do a thing. Adobe are coming up to Version 5 and that is much the same. If that was an issue surely it would have been addressed by now
One would think so, Barry, but some problems are really difficult to resolve. One needs programmer-level understanding of what is going on when software hiccups, and often the actual problem is never found. Sometimes a rewrite of parts of the software, to work around a conflict is easier than trying to pin down the lesion, and it all depends on the willingness of the software purveyors how much effort they are prepared to put into solving it. Sometimes I think they are waiting for some savvy persons to find the problem for them rather than expend time and money themselves.
It reminds me of the Ford Pinto vehicle sold in the States. There were a number of rear-ended crashes where the Pinto would burst into flames, possibly incinerating the rear seat passengers.
It was rumoured that Ford did an analysis of the problem and concluded that it would be cheaper to pay damages for each accident than to recall and fix however many thousands of these vehicles that were on the road.
I don't think Lightroom will kill anybody, but maybe the same principle operates?
Regards,
Colin
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Hi Barry
just bought an all singing all dancing pc at the beginning of the year, expecting this problem to go away, but it didn't.
I have been in touch with Adobe and am still in touch with one of their head men in the UK.
This is just a quick reply if you want to know more details let me know.
What is the spec of your machine by the way, just for comparisons sake, please?
This is the answer(below) I got from Adobe, not very helpful, that's why I am still in touch with the guy from Adobe UK, he is still trying to sort the problem.
'The larger the monitor you use (and the higher resolution), the more work Lightroom does to calculate previews and update pixels when you make adjustments. If you experience performance slowdowns with large monitors, try reducing resolution of the display using the Display Control Panel (Windows) or Displays System Preferences (Mac OS).
The same is documented over here : http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html#main_Keep_standard_size_previews_as_small_as_possible'
They also said if you reduce the size of your image on screen to 1:2 or 1:3 I think, I know I tried this or it may have been 1:4, but when I had reduced the size of the image on screen it worked, but it made a nonsense of having just bought a larger screen to see the image I was working on larger {It's the old eyes you know:-) )
I know you are a Canon user, but I have more trouble with my Nikon files than I do with my Sony and Canon Raw files.
Don't know if this is any use to you.
Kind regards
Paul
I think that either the Lightroom guy is confused or insufficiently knowledgeable to have suggested large monitors might be the cause. An image displayed on a 1920 x 1080 monitor takes a whisker over 2 megabytes to fill the screen, and 2 MB is peanuts to a reasonable computer. The time for a graphics card to generate that size image is in milliseconds - bear in mind that the PicturesToExe 60Hz refresh rate fills the screen 60 times per second without a problem. If your computer can handle that, then Lightroom displaying a single image should have no problem. My take on the problem is Lightroom has issues with other software running, maybe anti-virus, firewall, or some component of Windows.
I used to use a program called PowerDesk, a superset of Windows Explorer, and it was deadly slow when listing the contents of a folder. The reason appeared to be that it opened and checked every single file in the folder for malware I finally ditched it and bought Directory Opus, a similar program, which opens folders immediately.
I'm sorry I don't have 'the' answer as although I have Lightroom 3.6, I don't really like it, and I stick with DxOptics and Photoshop, a great combination.
Regards,
Colin
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It did the same when we tried to run it from the USB key in fact it disappeared from the USB drive. My theory is that the filename 'first aid.exe' was seen by the anti-virus software as a threat as other AV's where uploaded from USB keys to the same computer and ran without a problem. Just wondering if others have come up against this problem?
Some anti-virus software takes it on itself to delete anything it doesn't like. There have been stories on this board of losing multiple PTE .exe files because of overly aggressive software. If any AV software did that to me it would be uninstalled immediately and the purveyors of such software would hear about it. MS Essentials is fine, some others aren't.
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Hello,
Several members wrote me that they observe a significant delay when they install PicturesToExe. It happened when they run "picturestoexe-setup.exe" file.
Probably this problem related with antivirus software.
If you experience this problem, please let me know:
1. Did you have this problem with any version/update of 7.5?
2. Download these two files:
http://www.wnsoft.com/files/test/picturestoexe-setup_signed.exe
http://www.wnsoft.com/files/test/picturestoexe-setup_unsigned.exe
Then open a folder with downloaded files in Windows Explorer and try to run first file, then another file.
Do you have a delay with launching of these files?
3. Version of Windows, 32-bit or 64-bit, antivirus software.
4. Web browser.
Hello Igor,
I tried your two test programs, and found no difference at all in loading from the setup file, each taking 14 seconds (timed)to install up to the 'finish' screen. Launching from the finish screen was less than 1 second. Repeating the install in case MSE 'learned'the program
gave the same times.
Computer is a Dell 1520 laptop, Intel Centrino Duo-core cpu at 1.8 MHz, 3 GB of ram, running XP SP3 32-bit with MSE active and up to date.
Regards,
Colin
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I tend to use 16:10 because it is the nearest to the 3:2 dimensions of my Canon dslr. I find that 16:9 is just a wee bit too long and narrow for my liking.
However, it's a momentary thing to select the aspect ratio when commencing a new show, so the default setting really doesn't matter to me.
Fit to slide seems to be the general choice, but again, it's so easy to change that I consider it unimportant.
I could make a case for having no default at all, so users would be required to always make a choice when starting a show. At least the trap of starting a show without checking what the format is would be avoided.
:rolleyes: Colin
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I cannot agree with the underlying message in the previous post (#16). An entrant in a competition should be able to submit work that performs properly on their own equipment and have every expectation that it will perform just the same on the equipment used by the competition organisers. The onus is on the competition organisers to provide equipment of sufficient capability to handle whatever is thrown at it.
PGA
No, it isn't. The onus on the organizers is to ensure their equipment will run shows that comply with their rules. If a 1920*1080 show fails to run it is not their fault, since such a show does not comply with their rules. I prefer to make my shows with specs complying with the required rules, which means if the competition calls for 1024*768 then that is what a show should deliver. If the organizers specify those dimensions, why should they have to guarantee to run a 1920*1080 show? If such a show stutters or shows poorly, who is at fault? The organizers or the author? I would say the author.
Additionally, the aim of entering a competition is for your show to compete with other shows, and possibly be a winner. Why reduce your chances by deliberately entering a non-spec show that might cause a problem?
Regards,
Colin
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I wonder sometimes why we bother with these old outdated rules on size. Its no wonder people get confused especially as you say the requirement is 1280*800, but the clubs web page still says 1024*768?
Don't get me started on that! The club website is hopelessly out of date in some areas, and this is an example. I will make some waves about it next club night. Our webmaster is very busy in his business life, and the site gets neglected, sometimes for 2 or 3 months at a time. The club ran the Central Regional Convention here in Palmerston North in November, and as at February this year the old information was still on the site.
Having said that, the position of webmaster is nothing short of onerous and time-consuming, and few members are clued up enough to handle the job.
Apologies to forum members for drifting off-topic - a hazard plaguing all forums, I guess!
Regards,
Colin
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Colin
My appologies for taking this a little away from the original topic, but can I ask you Colin how your members get their images to your club at the new size of 1280*800? Bring them on a stick on the evening, send them in advance via the Internet?
Hello Barry,
Thanks for asking, the club has a website, www.manawatucamera.net.nz, which has upload channels to send entries to the competitions, which are then picked up by the competition secretary. The sec. then compiles all the entries on a stick to be shown on the club computer. Works well.
Regards,
Colin
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Colin
That statement isn't correct, if the projector is positioned correctly & the screen set at 4-3 format, you don't see black lines. The problem with black borders happens when multi sized shows are projected & the screen set to the largest format. As an example, next week I am presenting a show with a widescreen (Cinemascope movie 2.20-1)and a 16-9 home produced trailer. If I set the screen/projecter to fill the 2.20-1 screen, it will miss off some of the 16-9 trailer. This is one of the reasons competition organisers specify a specific size of show.
Regards Eric
Yachtsman1.
Hello Eric,
I have bolded part of your response, as what you say will be the case when the OP's show is projected. The projector will be set so that a 4:3 show will fill the screen (as that size is specified), so obviously a 3:2 show will have the black lines visible (can black be visible?)
We have a similar problem at our camera club. We have purchased a Dell DLP projector which uses a 1280 x 800 format. Although the club members have been told this, they still produce work at 1024 x 768, which leaves - in this case - black lines on all four sides of the image.
An alternative that I would consider would be to use a border at 1024 x 768 and fit the 3:2 image within the border, so at least the aspect ratio could be seen to be complied with.
Regards,
Colin.
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My finished slideshow is 60mb using image size of 5616x3744 as taken by the camera. It runs perfectly fine on my computer and would prefer not to reduce the file size for reasons of image quality. However, keeping in mind that the show will need to be played on a multi media projector capable of e.g. 1920x1080 is it necessary to make the file size the same for the projector to show the images correctly?? My experience in the past I am fairly certain is that the multi media projector will take an .exe file and play it correctly regardless of individual image size. If that is the case then the reason for downsizing resolution would only be to keep the total MB size of the show smaller and possibly enable smoother running if that is a problem.
AS others have said, downsizing your images to the required 1024 x 768 will not impair the definition - actually it could be better as you will have control of the downsizing algorithm by the software you use to do the job, whereas the projector's downsizing quality is an unknown, specially if it is an older machine.
Also, you might want to crop your images to the 4:3 format instead of your native 3:2 from the camera - otherwise your images shown on a 4:3 format projector will have black lines top and bottom on the screen, not a good look.
Finally, you are asking a lot of the hardware - computer and projector - to handle unnecessarily large images. If the machines at the venue can't handle it, your show will be ruined. I would want everything in my favour in a competitive situation!
Colin
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Just regarding the show quality of DVDs, I have recently done a DVD of a family occasion, an Mpeg2 compilation in PTE.
On a 52-inch LG TV the quality was spectacular, far better that I had expected, so I think that Mpeg2 compilations from PTE are top of the tree.
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Ok, back from having another stent inserted into my diagonal (branches off the Left Anterior Descending artery) very successful, so pleased about that.
I've been cogitating on CPU speeds etc, and have come to the conclusion that the once-fast P4 pentium chip is no longer so. These i7 and Xeon chips are so blindingly fast it's beyond belief.
I tried Dave's Standard Test compilation on my laptop, sporting a 1.8 GHz Core2 Duo cpu, and it's much faster than the P4, so there's my problem, which isn't really a problem at all as it turns out.
My thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread. I have been dragged into the current state of computing, shaken out of my complacency, and am considering depleting the nest egg for a new machine.
Regards to all,
Colin.
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Colin
These things are annoying arn't they. I am far from a technical wizard, but something to try. A long shot perhaps. In the Project options of VideoBuilder, look at the program settings and try a DVD with Temp folder set to another location other than whats attached. I don't do many DVD's but in the past when ever I had a hic up it always seemed to be in this location
Thanks Barry, I'll give it a shot on the weekend. I'm off tomorrow for another stent in my coronary artery, pretty routine now, a day job these days.
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"about 700 MB." is that the exe, the folder with all the project elements, or the projected completed DVD. The two screen shots show my largest show to date, the exe was 178MB, but the DVD 3.7GB, it just fitted on a standard 4.7 GB DVD. if your exe is 700 MB you are well over the limit for a 4.7GB DVD disc..
Regards Eric
Yachtsman1.
Sorry Eric, my exe is only about 61 MB, and the video disc is 700 MB.
However, I ran Dave's standard template, and it projected the time to be 8 hours for a video DVD, but it was much quicker for an AVI file, about 50 minutes - which is still slow I reckon.
Maybe the old girl is slower than I realised. Might have to look at an upgrade after all. Money, money, ...
Regards,
Colin
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Hi Colin,
Further to the above, I have created a Standard Template which anyone can try and get a comparative set of timings for creating an ISO File and Burning the ISO File to DVD.
The details are as follows:
Project Size - 1920x1080 (16:9)
128 Slides - 2 Images (2112x1405) repeated with Pan, Zoom, Rotate and 3D Turnover. That's 8 Slides - repeated 16 times to make the 128 slides.
Totally time of show - just over 10 Minutes.
A 1 Minute audio file was added in Loop Mode to keep the file size down.
The resulting EXE is 4.39Mb.
The ISO File is 558Mb and took 3m 15s to complete.
Burning the ISO file using PTE Video Builder took 1m 15s.
Burning a HD 1920x1080 MPEG4 for TV using the 1920x1080 Preset at High Quality took 22m and its file size is 1.730Gb.
I am pretty sure that there are many systems out there which are faster than mine.
I have PM'ed you a link to download a "Backup in ZIP" of the STANDARD TEMPLATE.
Anyone else wanting to download it can PM me and I'll do the same.
DG
Gobsmacked I am! I thought my pentium was reasonably fast! I downloaded your template Dave, and it's running on my machine now, has been for about 10 minutes. Your comp compiled it in under 4 minutes - mine is predicting EIGHT HOURS!!! That can't be right, there has to be a problem somewhere, surely?
What are the specs of your computer Dave?
Chagrined regards,
Colin
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Hi Colin
An old chestnut springs to mind. was your anti virus running when you were burning? What operating system are you using? What were the parameters set in video burners Project Options, I know you said you didn't change anything, but depending what you set PO to initially when you compliled the show can affect the default for PO in video burner. On my system W7 64bit PTE 7.07, I would expect a maximum of 30 minutes for a 60MB sized exe. Dawn a new member has been having problems with 7.5 but this could have been narrowed down to her OS, W8, with which support have confirmed a problem with VB. A few screen shots showing how your burn procedure progresses would help.
Regards Eric
Yachtsman1.
Hello Eric,
Thanks for your reply,
Anti-virus was turned off, as always when I burn a DC/DVD. OS is XP SP3. Project Options were all default, except aspect ratio 16:9 and images all sized to that format at 1920 x 1080.
I should point out that it was PTE's compilation that took the time, the disc write was only a couple of minutes, file size about 700 MB.
Paradoxically, publishing to .exe took less than 4 seconds.
Regards,
Colin
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Hi Colin,
It would be exceedingly difficult to "guess" about this. Perhaps the "best" way to compare times would be for several of us to use the identical file and each compile the same way. That "seems" exceedingly long to me, but rather than "guesstimate" why don't we pick a file which is a bit shorter and perhaps post the PTE file and several of us can perform the same operation then we can compare notes. I do know that the "speed" of the DVD and type of media play into the overall compile/burn time so we would need to all agree on a "type" for comparison.
What you might do meanwhile is twofold, first check the write speed of your DVD (so many "X") and then compare to the speed of the media you are using. I suspect that the answer will be perhaps a combination of the actual media speed and the DVD writer speed, but we may not know until we can test with several operators. I know that I have widely different write times depending on whether I'm using one of my internal DVD drives or an external USB drive and also whether it's a "portable" combination burner such as my combo BluRay, DVD, CD writer (very, very slow) or one of my conventional CD/DVD internal writers. If there is a bottleneck, it's more likely to be there than with either your video card or your PC. Both appear more than adequate for optimal speed.
What is the differential between "write time" to the MP4 and "burn time" for the DVD?
If you have a PTE file which is somewhat smaller that you could post, perhaps several of us could burn a DVD and then post both the total time, and differentiate the MP4 write time from the actual burn time.
Best regards,
Lin
Hello Lin,
Thanks for the quick reply there. Perhaps it's a little overkill for several members to burn DVDs as a comparison, I did think that a time versus size ratio might be possible, if a few members gave their times and sizes for their compilations.
I don't think it's my DVD drive, a Liteon of fairly recent vintage, as when I burn copies of the program from the ISO file, it takes only 4 or 5 minutes to write the disk, at the 8x speed limit of the DVD blanks.
A few more replies might prove helpful, my thanks to any who do reply.
Regards,
Colin
ANY APPLE APERTURE USERS OUT THERE?
in General Discussion
Posted
That light you are seeing is coming from the screens of the Windows machines happily running PTE shows
:D