cjdnzl
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Posts posted by cjdnzl
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I don't have a problem with reading the forum once I am in, but I cannot get the automatic login to work. I tick the 'remember me' box, but it doesn't remember, and I have to click the 'Login' button two or three times before I get the login screen. My system is XP SP3 and I use Opera 10.4 - the latest version. Overall, I don't think I like this version of the forum software as I did earlier versions. Just a thought - I am in New Zealand, and my access times are generally when Europe and the Americas are asleep, so I don't see any signs of overloading that some mention.
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Barry
Just found this one and I think you are spot-on with your good explanation of exposure and have provided a very tempting introduction to your disks on the subject. For many years I have carried a 18% gray card in my camera bag and it can be quite helpful with exposure and very enlightening.
It is just not possible to get it right in the camera most of the time with the current digital camera technology, the dynamic range of the sensor is nowhere near that of the human eye. Maybe some-time in the future, probably a long time in the future.
Just to be a bit pedantic here, I have often heard and seen remarks about the dynamic range of the human eye versus digital sensors. Actually, the eye does not have a huge dynamic range at all. When one looks at a bright area, the iris closes down, and when one looks at a darker area the iris opens up. So you have 'exposure compensation' built-in which works automatically below your conscious level. If you can, look at a bright area in the scene, say the sky, and then, without moving your eye, take note of how the darker areas look. Then, look at the darker areas and note how bright the light areas look, again without moving your eye. Fact is, the dynamic range of a good sensor is about 10 or 12 stops, that's a range of 1:2^12, or 1:4000, far greater than your eye can handle without iris control.
Colin
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Dan wrote:
"The laptop is a VAIO VGN-N31Z/W, with a Core 2 T5500 processor, 2 Go RAM. The video card is an Intel GMA 950 with 224 Mo RAM... That should be enough ?"
Dan,
The Intel GMA 950 video processor is not actually a video card as such, it is a video chip on the computer main board, suitable for ordinary graphics tasks, but not up to the mark for graphics-intensive applications like PTE. Business and general-purpose laptops mostly use the Intel chip, but high-end laptops, particularly those made for gaming purposes have a separate dedicated graphics card with much greater capability than the Intel 950.
So, I think your problem is right there. The graphics chip is not up to the task, end of story.
Commiserations,
Colin
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Thanks for your message !
Yes, of course, I reduced my pictures to HD dimensions, except for the panoramic views, of course.
Furthermore, in the web version of my shows, I used a compression factor of 60% to reduce the weight of the images.
It seems to me that the video card of the laptop is not sufficient...
Thanks again !
Dan
Dan,
Compression of the images will affect the size of the PTE .exe file, but when loaded into memory the images expand to their actual size, taking more memory than the program size would indicate.
But, I agree that the laptop graphics is probably your problem. Most laptops, specially 'business' machines, have rather elementary on-board graphics, much less powerful than a separate graphics card.
Colin
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Its one of the reasons I don't like laptops, screens too small, over priced, underpowered, awkward to use
Err, Barry,
Modern high-end laptops with dual-core processors, advanced graphics cards and 3 or 4 GB of memory are just as capable as desktop machines, and have the advantage of being portable so you are not in the position of using someone else's computer (of unknown capability) to present your shows on - or lugging your desktop machine, keyboard and monitor along.
Older laptops with smaller memory, slow hard drives, and single processors are less able to handle PTE shows, but PTE users would probably not attempt to use such machines anyway.
Colin
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Excuse my english.
I think there's a lot of lazy that want to use PicturesToExe for all things , and that the program must solve all his problems. For example, there are many specific programs for get a good solution to the sound problems raised here. Just only, it is search the Net.
In few days Igor will be asked to prepare a couple of pizzas with PicturesToExe
I hope that nobody feels alluded.
Moritz.
Here's one person that agrees with you, Moritz. I have been concerned for some time that requests for this and that feature to be added to PTE come up frequently, and generally they want additions that are not, shall we say, central or 'core' to the function of PTE. Sound editing is the prime example; despite several very good sound editor programs being available - Audacity; or Audition, its big brother; Goldwave, and others, Igor is being pressured to re-invent the wheel by including sound editing capability. What will that achieve that sound editors can't? What it does achieve is ever increasing complexity, making PTE more complicated than necessary. What also distresses me is the comparison sometimes made with high-end programs like Pinnacle or Wings which have sound processing - but at about ten times or more the price of PTE. This is like buying a corporate jet aircraft and then wanting it to be an Airbus 380.
I guess my popularity meter will read a bit lower after this, but it's what I believe.
Regards to all,
Colin
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Err, let me think............No
Ok then. Umm, why, with over 1,100 posts, you are an 'average' member? Did the counting start again when you emigrated?
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Colin
All my images are in Adobe RGB, so thats where I must be going wrong
Perhaps you should convert one of your show's images to sRGB and see what difference there is
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Forgive me for saying this and it is a general statement, but why get bogged down with things like colour space. I say this with all due respect, but there are a 101 other areas that need our collective attention in AV before we get bogged down with this.
Colour space has never been the tiniest thought in my head while making a slide show, has it prevented me from doing that. Not a jot
Here are two of those 101 that are missed over and over again.
Image quality and matching images to music and niether of those will be helped with all the theory in the world about colour space.
Color space is very relevant to slide shows, as has been attested to by posters in these forums. Shows made with aRGB (a=adobe)look flat and lifeless when projected on sRGB equipment. Show makers do need a working knowledge of various color spaces if they want to optimize the show quality. But, it's really very simple. For slide shows, use sRGB.
Regards,
Colin
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Ron,
This is getting into deep territory. As I understand it in simple terms the sRGB colour space "sees and records" a smaller range of colours than your eye. The Adobe colour space sees more than sRGB and Pro Photo sees even more. Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW work in ProPhoto 16 bit. If you are shooting in RAW the colour space profile only gets applied after you save the file as a PSD or TIFF etc. So the camera setting of sRGB or Adobe RGB has no effect on RAW images. If you want to get the best tonal transitions in your images it pays to work in the largest colour space you can when you are doing any editing involving tonal changes. When it comes to presenting your images on screen they need to be in sRGB so they need converting. I once inadvertently loaded a ProPhoto image onto a web site it was awful!
Martin Evening actually says in his Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers that sRGB is an ideal color space for web design but is unsuitable for photography or serious print work! I know that many people will totally reject this and I have seen some great prints made by people who only ever use sRGB all through their processing. Could they have had smoother tonal transitions? Who knows? The theory says they could!
Kind regards
Peter
Hello Peter,
I have for come time been attempting to get my head around this color space theory, but one thing that really surprised me -though it shouldn't have - is that regardless of the color space, all use the same number of bytes to specify individual colors, e.g. a so-called '16-bit' image uses 6 bytes for every pixel (16 bits or two bytes for each primary color). Whether those bytes are used for an sRGB color space with a narrow gamut, or aRGB or ProPhoto with wider gamuts, the color space is still represented by the same number of bytes. How can this be? because, simply put, the steps between shades of colors are bigger with the wider gamuts, so to use a wide gamut, you sacrifice the smoothness of the image. In 16-bit images it probably doesn't matter, but with 8-bit images you can see the difference. You might gain more colors in the far green and red, but you are using bigger steps to get there. If the subject matter is such that there are no extreme colors involved, then there is no point in using wide gamuts. sRGB is the standard color space that monitors and projectors, and also many printers can handle. aRGB and Prophoto are specialized gamuts that in practice do not help the ordinary photographer with day-to-day images, nor do they render well on sRGB-oriented equipment. For these reasons I stick to sRGB.
Best regards,
Colin
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Jose,
You have fallen into one of Windows "Pit-Falls" ~ the problem is that you are using a "Reserved Symbol"
for naming your Files and Folders. You are using \ backslash \ which is an an "illegal" symbol and is
reserved for the Windows System and is not allowed.
Your Example:- E:\PTE\101-Slides JPEG\02xa-Backgound.jpgs (3 backslashes are in this example)
This should be:- Where *E is the Drive-
1)The Folder Name should be: PTE101-Slides
2)The File name should be: 02xa-Background
3)There is no need for the extension .jpg
as the System applies that automatically.
See the attachment below for more Data.
Brian (Conflow)
Hello Brian,
I fear you have made a mistake, rare for you! The examples the OP gave came from the error report, and in fact are the complete paths for the files in question, so the backslashes are in order when specifying a pathname. The actual filenames, e.g. 02xa-background.jpg are legitimate, including the dashes, and do not contain any backslashes.
However, I see the problem as partly of his own making, as I, and no doubt Igor, would expect to have all relevant files uniquely named and in one folder. Expecting the zip function to gather files from various folders, with identical filenames in different folders is IMHO a bit much, and dare I say, a rather untidy (if not worse) practice.
Regards,
Colin
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I have just upgraded to version 6 with the video builder option
the image quality of the version 6 straight sequence is superb
BUT when I create a DVD from the same sequence the image quality is
very much degraded in particular there is a complete lack of sharpness.
Has anyone experienced this, and is there a soluttion or perhaps I have my
DVD options set up incorectly.
I am using re-sized image files 1024 by 768 pixel at 100 dpi
My OS is windows 7 but a trila run on an XP system Pc prodiced the same
result....none of the images are truly sharp where as they are in the non-dvd version
of the sequence.
any help or advice will be very welcome
Bob Robertson...Rochdale UK
If you are making a DVD for standard TV then yes, the sharpness will be degraded. A standard (pal) TV picture is about 720 x 576 pixels, and your 1024 x 758 is scaled down when making the DVD. There is no way round this except to go HDTV.
Just by the way, if you specify an image as X by Y pixels, then the dpi (ppi) is irrelevant and does not need to be quoted. Dpi is strictly a printing term, and determines the physical size the image will print at. It has no other relevance.
Colin
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You may have already done this but I have come across persons who do not know about Large Block Addressing, LBA for short. Basically, NTFS, the file system employed by Win 2000 and later uses 28-bit address coding, which can address an absolute maximum of 137 gigabytes. If you have a bigger drive than that, any address beyond 137 GB gets wrapped to the beginning, overwriting data previously recorded.
Windows has the option of using LBA addressing which can address literally terabytes, but paradoxically is by default switched off when installing the operating system.
There are utilities available on the net (google LBA) that will switch LBA on, enabling correct addressing of these 500/1000 GB drives. If your LBA is switched off you are in trouble as soon as your data exceeds 137 GB.
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You guys all seem to take this unwarranted invasion of your files by aggressive anti-malware programs with some equanimity. Me, I would be spitting tacks if it happened to any irreplaceable files of mine - in fact I would threaten to sue the program makers. It is just not good enough to presume that if they think a file is infected that they simply delete it. That is way overstepping the bounds, to delete MY property because THEY think it is infected. This is why I do not run any of their anti-malware crap programs. They actualy cause more grief and anguish than getting an actual virus. A bit like the joke about a chap smacking his friend on the head and knocking him over. The friend picked himself up and said "why did you do that?", to which the first guy said "there was a mosquito on your head.", to which the friend said "well, next time, leave the mosquito, it's less of a problem than you smacking me on the head". I trhink we get smacked around the head by these anti-v programs, almost entirely for no good reason.
But then, I'm a bit of a maverick in my views.
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Well, I might be a maverick here, but I do not run any antivirus software like Norton or McAfeee, or AVG. Overall, they are getting just too clever with fancy programming to be reliable. If they are so wrong as to take out perfectly legit files, what chance is there that they miss baddies? Nobody seems to answer that question, except laboratory tests with viruses that reveal there is no one antivirus tool that is 100% effective - and a lot of them are worryingly poor, only about 60% - 90% effective.
I do run Zonealarm Extreme Security, also do regular scans with Advanced System Care and SpyBot S&D,and my computer is behind a WPA2-protected modem-router sporting a hardware firewall. In 25 years of programming and using computers I have not had a serious infection from any malware.
Anti-malware software is advertised by the makers in lurid terms of what might happen to your computer and your data thereon, reminiscent of Chicken Little who ran around crying that the sky is falling. This is the ragged edge of sales advertising, scaring people into believing unrealistic scenarios of disaster and mayhem if you do not run their program.
ZoneAlarm has two major advantages. One, it will not allow any program that has not had permission from the computer operator to access the internet, so even if you do get hit by a phone-home trojan, it is caught before it can transmit anything, and ZA tells you the name of the program trying it on. Two, it 'stealths' your computer so any fishing attempts, or probes, will not be answered by your computer, keeping your presence on the net secret. In conjunction with a properly set up modem/router with a hardware firewall, about the only way you can catch a virus is if it is piggy-backed in on a legitimate download, and if you are careful what you do download, the chances of that are very small.
Just another point of view.
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Hello all,
This is the first show I have put up on the forum. I had a number of images taken in January 2006 in Hong Kong, and decided to put a show of sorts together for my camera club, since Chinese New Year is topical at this time. Apologies for the mix of horizontal and vertical slides, a slide show was not in my mind at the when I shot these images. If all goes well we should be in Hong Kong again for Chinese New Year 2011, and if it comes to pass, I'll have a better show in mind then.
Meanwhile, if you'd like a look, you can download from
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ym1zzngmjti/Chinese Christmas_New Year.exe
It's about an 85 MB file.
Colin
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I found one previous thread in this regards, but it did not help me with my problem.
I have a slide show (turorial) that has several PDF documents associated with the tutorial. I want to have buttons that will automatically open the PDF document. What I've tried is to call and external program like this: "Acroread32 supportingdocs/detail1.pdf". "acroread32" is the acrobat reader. (lets not digress by talking about the fact that certain people may not have acrobat installed). "supportingdocs" is a sub folder under my PTE project. I use the normal syntax for specifying a relative folder. When I click on the menu option, acrobat reader is started but it cannot find the file specified. It tries to find it relative to acroread32.exe.
I dont think I can make use of a full path as I want to burn the slideshow as well as the supporting documents to a CD and I obviously do not know what the user's CD drive letter will be. How do I overcome a problem like this?
What I hope to find in response is that somebody (maybe the developers) will tell me to use the following environment variable which will contain the path to the executable PTE slideshow, and that I can therefore use that to specify the place for my supporting docs. Something like this:
Acroread32 "%PTE_BASE_PATH%/supportingdocs/detail1.pdf"
This will obviously solve the problem as %PTE_BASE_PATH% will then be expanded to whatever the drive letter and folder name is where my slideshow exists!
Thanks in advance
Johann van der Walt
With respect, you are doing it the hard way. You can open a pdf document directly into Photoshop, then immediately save it as a jpg or dng image, which you can then use in PTE directly as a slide. No need to track external documents from within PTE.
When you open a pdf in PS you will get a dialog box which inter alia asks for dpi (ppi), defaulting to 72. Since most pdf's are from a 300 ppi original, I set the PS dpi to 300, which results in an image about 2000*3000 pixels more or less, which you can then resize to your show requirements.
Colin
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Colin,
Let me invite you to read the following topic: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=9424
Regards,
Xaver
Hello Xaver,
I looked at that topic, and I remember reading it when it was 'live'. But, apart from Peter extolling the capability of Wings Platinum to handle complex audio tasks, the thread opinions vary from those wanting audio capability to others claiming that Audacity or Audition was the better route, citing inter alia how cluttered the PTE screen would be if filled with many audio channels as well as picture information.
I remain convinced that a separate audio editor, like a separate image editor, is the way to go. Nobody has yet said that Wings can operate in .wav format, then save the file as a lossless .wav file before converting to MP3 or other desired format for incorporating into the slide show. Audacity/Audition and Goldwave can do that, just as Photoshop can work in and save images as 16-bit tiffs, converting to jpg or dng files for PTE. Also, assembling multi-track sound in PTE does not save the composite audio file, and if something crashes one would have to reassemble the sound from scratch, whereas a track made in Audacity and saved will be available for immediate use if the PTE version crashes. The same argument also applies to images.
Lastly, putting advanced editing facilities into PTE will inevitably increase the price, the program complexity, and the learning curve for new users, a potentially counterproductive step.
Regards,
Colin
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There have been a lot of posts in these forums about sound editing in PTE, and I confess to being puzzled as to why it is thought necessary or desirable to edit sound within PTE.
With software available like Audacity (free) and Goldwave (about $US49) - specialized sound editors which are far ahead of what PTE could be expected to offer, what is the point in wanting PTE to 're-invent the wheel', so to speak?
Personally, I am perfectly happy for PTE to have no sound editing capability at all, just as it does not offer advanced image editing capability, for which there are many programs from Gimp to Photoshop available.
PTE is an outstanding slide-show program for assembling images and sound into breathtaking shows. Preparation of those images and sound tracks is not, and should not be, part of PTE.
The particular problem described in the first post in this thread, reducing the music level while a voice-over is active, is trivial to handle in Goldwave (the sound editor I use). Goldwave, and I presume Audacity, has timelines calibrated down to milliseconds. With both music and voice-over tracks in parallel on screen it is very easy to reduce the music level exactly where you want it, and then combine the tracks into one composite track. Further, you can do all your editing and mixing in the lossless .wav format, and then convert to lossy mp3 as a final step. By saving the .wav file, you can revisit the track at any time for revision without loss.
I cannot see that we could expect PTE to do anything like this, any more than I would expect PTE to be able to emulate Photoshop for editing images.
Well, that's my two cents (and worth every penny, as some would say
)Colin
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Never got on or liked audacity myself. I've used Goldwave for years and found it great for my needs. Obviously, it's not free like audacity is. I recommend anyone give it a try.
I second that. Goldwave is not that expensive, about $US48 and like PTE it is a lifetime license. I have tried to use Audacity, but I find Goldwave is preferable, at least for me.
Colin
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I did exactly that already, of course. The system has been thoroughly cleaned by a professional (he found a few spywares, but no virus)
But I figure that removing this spyware may have damaged some other things : hence my questions...
Regards,
Dan
Hello Dan,
Go into Start/Settings/Control Panel, double-click Add/Remove Programs, and remove PTE 6.0 from your system, then reinstall. This should guarantee an uncorrupted program, then try your slide show again.
Colin
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From Igor himself:
"PicturesToExe license terms provide two variants if you bought one registration key:
- For one PC only (for any number of users).
- Or only for one user who has two or three PCs (home PC, laptop and PC at his office, for example).
In other cases you have to buy second registration key."
This is as plain as it can be. A single machine can be used by more than one person - but only one at a time. ONE user with two or three machines - with a single user, only one machine can be usefully running the program at any given time.
The central point is that one license can only be used by one person at any one time. If you are on your desktop and your wife is on the laptop, both using PTE at the same time, that violates the license conditions.
HTH,
Colin
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Ed, These are points I never even considered before I put my show up. Perhaps I should have. It's funny you mention the position in the set, 'cause mine was #4 on the list when we handed in, and they didnt show it till #12 of 13. After the interval. I wonder if they like you had thought it out, and perhaps I'm being unkind.
However, as you say shows like mine must still have a place no matter how upsetting. Perhaps tho as you point out not in a competition. It just never occurred to me.
I find it amazing the things I learn here, and I thought at my age I had a good grasp of life and its trials.
Andrew
You're right about that, Andrew. Life is a continuous learning curve, and sometimes goes in directions one would never have thought of.
Ed's experiences, along with mine and yours, makes me think that those who organize AV shows should lay down some guidelines about what subject matter is suitable - not so tight as a 'set subject' as in still photography, but designed to eliminate disconcerting or upsetting subject matter etc.
I am a radio amateur (ham) and there is, or was when I was active, an unwritten law that one could talk about anything except politics and religion, a wise move. Maybe a similar no-go in AV show competitions and displays such as religion, politics, and war could be made part of the entry rules.
This is not to say that such shows have their place, but that place is not in general AV screenings. Maybe shows could be graded as in commercial movies, e.g. General, Parental Guidance, R18 etc (or variations of for AVs). This might give an audience some warning of what is to come, rather than just dumping the show on them.
Regards,
Colin
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Andrew,
Well, commiserations on your show not making the grade. FWIW, the reason IMHO is not to do with the presentation, or the lack of 'bells and whistles' effects. You hit the nail when you said "and displayed the horrors of the place in full colour."
The fact is, a serious show about a tragic situation will lose because of the message, and not because of the presentation, especially when shown together with non-serious shows containing no poignancy or introspective qualities.
I took the liberty of showing Auchwitz to my camera club here (New Zealand) when we were offering help on fine-tuning it and the dead silence, broken only by one member getting up and leaving the room, was disconcerting to say the least. The member who left is an Austrian immigrant to NZ, and he later apologised for leaving, saying the show opened bad memories for him. He was quite upset.
I hope this post doesn't offend you, Andrew, just my take on your loss there.
Regards,
Colin
Big Black Box appears in discussions....? [SOLVED]
in General Discussion
Posted
Does nobody here run Opera? I use Opera almost exclusively, the only exceptions being when a site does not open properly, which is pretty rare these days.
Opera did have troubles that were not of its own making earlier, when its programmers insisted on sticking to the correct implementation of the various languages etc, at a time when Microsoft's own web page software - Frontpage etc - was just plain slack in its language implementation, and IE was equally slack in running the faulty code.
I persevered with Opera through this phase because I believed they were right, and these days it's rare to find a site that is not properly coded - but they still do exist.
Opera is now up to version 10.54, and well worth a trial IMO.
Colin