think(box)

Igor, let me be the second to congratulate you on this great success! The sound and picture sync capabilities give us the control and accuracy we need. And it is SO easy. And thank you for the many small improvements that many of us have requested, now ALL done. Wow. Cheers!

Sorry it has taken a week with no ideas offered. This will help for shows not yet created: 1. Starting with an empty slide list, make a "master slide." Carefully add the button(s) where you want them in the object editor - just once - for this representative slide. Test this slide in preview. 2. Next, copy/paste to duplicate that slide as many times as you want to have slides in the final presentation. 3. Then just change each photo from the duplicated one to the one you want. Select each slide in the slide list and then click on folder graphic button to far right on "Show image" line below image list. Leave the checkbox "Show image" checked. This method preserves master slide button, link, photo object and added text definitions while substituting different slide photos.

Igor, thank you so much. I was thrilled during beta testing to see all that has been added. Now I have installed the 4.30 final release and performed final tests. Feature, function and visual quality are still the very best. The waveform view is great help for slide-to-sound sync. The sound content graphical view below slide timing makes presentation design a breeze. And the light table, slide thumbnail and list thumbnail views - all with variable sizing - what a handy addition. The fast display followed by sharpening on a second pass display update permits the most rapid view to the user - what an excellent idea. It appears that one requested feature did not make it in this round of improvements: The ability to pass parameters to applications in object editor action buttons and links, and in customized slide application calls. An example: For "Run application or open file" the box could contain the following utility application name and parameter argument to set wave sound to 25% volume level. This still does not work, as the parameter is not passed. Please add parameter support to your wish list -- thanks!: SetVol.exe 25 Igor, I don't know how you keep increasing such a rich set of features in both Apr.exe and in the produced slide show application file - with only a handful of additional application file bytes. I email mini .exe file slide presentations frequently, and the file size beyond my photo and sound content is very important. You and all at WnSoft should win awards for this exceptionally good product. It has been our pleasure to add to your pool of improvement ideas. Congratulations!

If you are thinking of pushing the slide limit also consider the 2GB maximum .EXE file size. At that limit and 32,000 images you must keep the average image size at 65-70KB, or less if there is music. Do consider how many hours it might take to watch it though Make it have "Random" image playback and you will almost never see the same image twice. There is no problem with loading time or computer memory and speed for these large slide presentations. You will be quite impressed with the almost instant slideshow start and the lack of penalty for having made a behemoth presentation with complex indices, etc. My record slideshow is 1.08GB (1108MB) and 14,000 slides. Plan on an indexing design to jump to slide sections from home and other slides, or else make the whole presentation in random playback without indices. Very large slideshow presentations may take 10 to 30 minutes to create in PTE, depending upon your development system speed (keep a lot of free disk space available on the drive with Windows or where the swap file is located, if different). A large Windows workload exists only when creating, not when playing slideshow. While DVDs can successfully hold the largest allowable slideshow, if using a CD-R you have to limit the slideshow size and .EXE file to 700 to 702MB to fit on the CD.

On those thoughts Ed, I'll be the first to agree that it is well below the majority of PTE users who know how to do advanced audio editing. I suspect that this is true even in the forum membership. The ultimate vision that I described was one where you add pictures, add sound, press a few buttons about what you want for effects and how you want the music to control the slide transitions, and then listen to a completed first draft production. Then in refinements, one could modify "effect" types by simple choices as we can today. And one could modify the music beat sync using simple user input like make the beat always earlier or later, etc. I left out all other special slideshow customizations like buttons, etc., in that example because my point is that I consumed only a few minutes to be watching a well synchronized slideshow. PTE did all of the work for me. That left more time for my unique creative input to make the slideshow. Assuming that you regularly make slideshows that use custom music sync, if I may ask could you please estimate the time it would take you at your present skill level to get music sync the way you like it for this sample custom-sync slideshow?: 70 slides, 7 minute music track. How long might it take to create it from scratch, up to when you are watching your synchronized slideshow? Suppose you have completed it and you realize that a different 7 minute music track selection would fit the slides much better. What procedure did you use for synchronizing the first music choice and then what procedure would you use for the second music choice? How much wall clock time would you spend on tinkering with the sound sync (honestly)? In the new vision of PTE I would be watching the modified slideshow in less than one minute. While the thrill of being able to do custom sync as it is today may be a pleasure right now, the novelty wears off as I make more slideshows. Then I want to skip the tedium and spend less time making even better productions. Ultimately I would like to see the automatic music beat detection as a mark on the timeline just as with slide transition marks today. The waveform display is a tool that can only semi-automate this process in the near term. Igor may find it easier to jump past this feature and start out with totally automatic beat detection with beat marks on the transition timeline. This is his call.

Ron, thank you. Advanced technical content is useful to PTE developers. I am confident that WnSoft can understand the content. The P2E product features and user interface must embrace the full breadth of individual understanding yet must be pleasurably usable with only a surface understanding by "newbies". And I believe it must instill confidence - and inspire new and existing users. If done well, the product market will respond with increased demand. My proposals and analysis have not stepped outside of these bounds. I started out recognizing the "tilt" to the small sample of responses thus far, and I believe I have correctly stated that all of what we provide is decision-making input for a decision that is not ours, but that is in fact WnSoft's to make. The small sample of replies thus far is not necessarily indicative of the PTE market opportunity. And... the one thing WnSoft should indeed be listening to is the voice of the customer - the many who form the market that WnSoft wants PTE to wow. The voice can be literal and vocal, and it can be in how sales increase. What Igor hears from people who respond in this forum is the voice of WnSoft's vocal, opinionated market members. We often see things differently between us. WnSoft must determine what the market as a whole demands most strongly. And they must drive the market sometimes in ways that are not immediately obvious to most people.

Igor - one other thought: An "AUTO-SYNC" feature If you start with a waveform display in this version you can create enhancements in later PTE releases. Here are some ideas for enhancements in later PTE releases: Create a beat detection feature that involves frequency bands as user choices of bass, vocals and highs. Use of a delay feature could support positive and negative slide transition offsets from detected beats. Another idea: Optionally give the person viewing the slideshow the ability to select desired music from a list of AUTO-SYNC tracks. Given the potential evolutionary improvements for later PTE releases, the waveform display is a very good starting point for the next PTE release. --------------------- Ed Overstreet, I have a question regarding your point that sometimes the music beat is not visible in the waveform. First, I too have seen music that has an unclear beat in a visual waveform. My question is: If you were to make an edit to the music file for slideshow creation purposes only, that has a frequency band filter that brings out the bass or other content containing a beat, later to be replaced with the original music track, wouldn't that help in those situations? I just took a 1950s rock song that has a very difficult to identify beat and tested this idea. I had to first adjust the entire track by about -12dB to make room for frequency response adjustment. Then I applied a graphic equalizer to the track with -24dB at all bands except 64Hz. The 64Hz band was set to +24dB to emphasize bass notes in a band around 64Hz. The results: Works like a charm. I could see clearly the location and duration of bass notes, easily recognizing the pattern in the music. I found that the waveform visual cues of music vocal parts could become crystal clear with a +24dB band emphasis at 500Hz, 1KHz or 2KHz. Further, I could make cymbal or tambourine beats clearly visible by a +24dB emphasis at 4KHz or 8KHz. I do not propose that Igor does any filtering until later, evolutionary PTE releases. We can do that if and when we need it to enhance the utility of a simple waveform viewer feature release for now. Band-emphasis editing is an advanced procedure that takes about one minute to do if you have digital audio editing software. We can use PTE's waveform view to learn more about what we might want in later AUTO-SYNC releases.

Thanks Mike (MikeL117) - I was surprised at how few respondents could see it the way you do. I agree with you. Igor, I would place a strong positive on this feature. Visual tools open doors to creativity and productivity - sometimes especially well for newbies as they become more advanced. Like everyone, I listen to music to determine and confirm a sync choice. But once I know the beat and offset I would find it very helpful to have the proposed visual cues from PTE in order to rapidly set other transitions. This would be a very useful addition, and probably a very popular one too in spite of the pro and con votes so far in this response thread. The best priority of this feature vs. others is your call. No external tool can match the effectiveness and simplicity of a PTE built-in waveform display. If block moves, light table and other highly-requested features will take 90% of your development time while a waveform display takes 10%, then I would do it for sure. If a waveform display will take over 50% of available development time before next release then that is too much. As Al Robinson suggests, if you believe this feature is likely to have a significant positive impact on PTE sales then I would follow the voice of the customer if at all reasonable in development cost.

Thanks! And you're welcome

Adding to Al's compression considerations, once again make a fullscreen test slideshow to see how it looks. Think of compression as another quality knob. For the same example 800x600 photo, the quality gets worse if the compression is greater. Adobe's scale value "0" is greatest compression. Irfanview's "Save Quality" value "1" is the greatest compression. The only reason we ever bother with compression is because high compression means small file size. Unfortunately it also means lower image quality. We want the best tradeoff between the image quality and photo file size because today's computers and networks work better when photo files displayed or transfered, respectively, are smaller. By the way, Adobe's save for web allows you to see the degradation for chosen compression value before you actually save to a file. Update: ppi relates to the apparent sharpness on paper (pixels per inch). It is a good metric for knowing how much enlargement you can do before a given photo looks bad. The watermark or studio credit should cover up something that they care about (but not someone's face!) for best protection. Of course the thief could crop the photo for the face.... So the resolution, if low, stems that avenue. Another option: If you use a degree of transparency in what you use to cover up content, then the photo is too hard to fix for the thief yet allows all content to be visible. In Adobe just use layers and set opacity.

Here is a little more pixel and dpi help: The image resolution is purely a matter of the pixel dimensions unless your lens was out of focus Think of pixel as "picture element". An 800x600 pixel photo has 800 picture elements horizontally and 600 picture elements vertically for a total of 800 times 600, or 480,000 pixels (one half of a megapixel). Each pixel has a unique color and luminance. There is no variation within a pixel. If you have very few pixels in a photo then it has very little detail or total content. If you have very many pixels in a photo then there can be a large amount of detail. And now for dpi: Why you can set dpi for a given picture is related to how it will print. If you have an 800x600 photo, once again, and you use 72 dpi at time of printing, then this photo will take a sheet of paper that is 800/72 inches by 600/72 inches, or 11.1 by 8.3 inches. If you use 300 dpi at time of printing for same photo it will be sized to 800/300 inches by 600/300 inches, or 2.67 by 2 inches. In both cases there is exactly the same amount of detail in the paper print. But one print is larger than the other, and if that one is so large that pixels become visible individually, then it will appear to be poor in quality or too fuzzy if the pixels are smoothed by your printing software. In conclusion, for PTE slideshows ignore dpi altogether. Don't even bother setting a value. Just pay attention to the pixel dimensions. It may help to make a test slideshow in which you look at a reduced pixel dimenion photo with PTE's enlarge to fit screen feature. If it looks poor and low-res, then you have probably reduced its resolution enough to make it unattractive for a theft target. And then when you look at the same photo in actual pixels (not fit to screen) it appears much smaller on the srceen, but looks fine!

The term dpi refers to dots per inch. This makes sense when you are scanning as follows: A 5x7" print at 300 dpi will come out as 1500x2100 pixels. Just multiply inches times dpi (dots per inch) to get pixels. For your PTE presentations the screen settings of the computer used to display are in pixels, e.g. 1024x768 pixels. If your photo is 1024x768 pixels it will fill the screen completely. If you change that computer's screen to 1600x1200 pixels then the same 1024x768 photo will not fill the screen because it occupies only a fraction of the pixels. Never in this discussion did "inch" units matter. Scanning and printing are the only place where real world dimensions must be considered. As for security, read the many recent topic threads. You can either make the pixel dimensions very small, like 800x600 or even less, or you can deface your image with studio name to protect it, or both. You can also use invisible forms of watermark that can be used to legally confirm a theft. Best answer is use Irfanview here. It can limit h and v resolution in a way that Photoshop can not do without using two sets.

Adding movies to PTE: If you can double-click on the DV file to open it on your machine then there is a way. But it will only work on systems that can open that file type by double-clicking on it. That is because it takes installed software to open it. All that you have to do is use Run Application... from Customize slide or Visual object editor with action for button/image/hyperlink. Type in the full name and type of DV file in the Run application... name box. If you use the application selector button to right of box you will have to click on the box Files of type and select All files before your DV file will be selectable, however I do not recommend selecting a file this way because the selection will include drive and folder path that may exist only on your system. To run show from hard drive or CD, put both the created .EXE file and the DV file in same folder. By the way, this method can be used for almost anything that opens on a double-click. Saving to DVD, release plans: Igor has not announced. He has told us that he plans to add .AVI a/v file creation, from which you can make a DVD using your favorite DVD authoring software. WnSoft's history indicates that the next release will be December or January, with recent releases about 4-5 months apart. You can see the history yourself on the WnSoft web site.

A virus threat ... That will deter many potential thieves thanks to the cakewalk that Microsoft has set up for virus writers today and the resultant public paranoia! And Ron, not that any of us would agree that your photography isn't worth copying, that is one good solution! It's amusing how much this topic thread has morphed from the original Image size for full screen?

I like that last creative solution Al ! The sad truth is that it will indeed discourage some fraction of the population. Just be sure the warning looks legit.

Quoting myself from earlier reply: "Multires allows you to set the screen to any supported resolution by a single command." It only changes to a supported size. And it has automatic return on timeout like Windows Display Properties does, if you want. Multires is a very intelligent utility that will not mess up a machine. It has been around, in use and updated for quite some time. Perhaps for the benefit of the paranoid or ultra-cautious there can be an option to ask if it is OK to change the screen setting before proceeding. I think it will just confuse or intimidate the user, so I would not do this. It's really not so bad, Stu. Some applications that we use today change screen settings and no one gets bent out of shape about it when the application is bug-free. In the end, with any utility we can all choose whether to use it.

Both links work for me. Thanks for the other one that goes to the main page of same site Ken. With Windows and the many ISPs who knows if anyone else will have link trouble....

Well, if you change the screen size you are indeed making a change in the Windows registry. Everything about the state of Windows is stored in the registry. If anyone makes any change to the screen or windows features the registry is automatically updated by Windows. Some of your software may already be affecting the registry in ways you do not know, but I wouldn't worry about it. And for a windowed slideshow, displaying the finished product at a screen setting that matches the value used during slideshow development will assure the same viewing experience. Therefore changing the screen size to fit the slideshow makes sense.

There is always a way to steal your photography, regardless of the very many protective features, even watermarks. Your only true protection is to give out only low-res photos (very small) in slideshows that you distribute for review. You can also modify the photo by placing the studio name on the picture covering less important content, such that theft is not attractive. In this case a higher res picture is better protected.

The correct way to do this is download the lastest PTE from WnSoft, install it on newer computer that you will be using, and then use the key file that you received when you bought PTE originally to register PTE on your replacement machine. If you don't have the key file, I have a utility that will recreate it for you on your old machine where you have the registered PTE software. Or if you have a printed copy of your order with the order number you can send the order number to WnSoft support and they will resend your key in email. You can then use the key file to register PTE on the newer, replacement computer.

Terri, I have pushed PTE to 14,000 pictures and .EXE file size of 1.1GB. The program limits are 32,000 slides and 2GB max .EXE file size. All of the large slideshow features have been well-exercised and large slideshows now load and start playing in just seconds. Give it a spin. Search the forum from the last 365 days (not just the last 30 days as the search default goes) for the word Mega and you will find plenty of information. I posted a full story in Mega 14,000 pic P2E findings, Mega show designs, P2E performance info for example. One thing that you need to do is provide navigation capability when slideshows get very large. Clickable thumbnails, hyperlinks or buttons are needed in the home slide (first) or the first several slides. To make this even better, Igor is planning a first ever random access navigation feature in the next PTE release, around December or January.

Terri, watch out for ultra-perfectionism here among the other pro photographers, but PTE has a feature in Project options --> Screen --> Fit to screen that together with "Use smoothing" will always make your images full-screen. It works very well to make images the same at all screen settings, except where objects have been placed with the visual object editor. The objects will get smaller at higher screen area settings. I have used this feature extensively and find that as long as one of these two conditions applies, it will work very well: You have fairly high res originals, 800x600 or larger in your slideshow You are looking for only a small amount of enlargement, regardless of original size What this feature allows you to do is present the same fullscreen appearance regardless of a customer's screen area setting at time of presentation. If you are there with the customer you probably don't have to worry about image theft, so putting higher res images on your CD and playing from CD keeps it safe. See if this fits your needs.

Granot may I suggest that you consider changing the screen size to fit the slideshow in addition to the option to select a slideshow that fits the screen? As it is now, people will have to make multiple slideshow versions for a given presentation, each requiring significant effort. Your MMB utility software can support screen size changes, but to make it easy there is a free utility Entech's Multires freeware - click here to download that can operate automatically in conjunction with a new slideshow selecting utility from you Granot, or from the command line all by itself for those who know how to do this. Multires allows you to set the screen to any supported resolution by a single command, and it remembers the previous screen setting so that it can go back to whatever screen setting was in use previously after the slideshow is complete, once again by a single command.

I have pushed this a bit further, with several thousand pictures all in the same folder. And I prefer using the same folder to keep things straight, as it appears that you are concluding. My technique involves renaming the photos in groups to make the PTE slide list better for finding photos. By no means would you want to rename thousands of photos one by one. I suggest Bulk Rename Utility freeware. It is very flexible and easy to use first time and every time (no big learning curve). Click here for download page One tip: If you have several thousand files in one folder Windows slows down in handling that folder. Do whatever operations you can in smaller sets in another folder and then just move or copy the files into the final folder.

Ron, if you don't have a good photo editing tool, Click here for Irfanview It is top quality and free for non-commericial users. I have a hunch that you have a 5 or greater megapixel camera. At 5Mp and little compression the jpg file size can be 2MB for each photo. With 14 photos that is 28MB out of your 35MB total. If you would like to keep your photos high-res but make files smaller as suggested, I suggest aiming for more like 300KB to 400KB. Most of the time we suggest smaller than this so that people make slideshows that will play on the oldest and slowest computers. It sounds like you want a top-quality compromise on this. I suggest Irfanview resizing your photos to 1280x960 at 80% quality (this is determined when you save). This will give you a 300KB to 400KB file size and better res than 800x600 or 1024x768 as is commonly suggested. The only consideration is that if you use tight timing in a synchronized slideshow the minimum performance computer that can play it successfully may be up a bit, 500MHz to 1GHz min. While in Irfanview, experiment with sharpening and other tools. If you've followed Ken's tip on MP3 (or Ogg music) everything should be OK now, and your slideshow should be more like 6 to 8MB for 14 photos and 1 music track.