think(box)

Richierich, JRR, all, There is another alternative in PTE that is fantastic! You may have many other settings than just "effects check boxes" that you would always like in a certain state, including a customized help menu, navigation bar, display time per picture, comments settings and almost everything else that you can set. A "template" feature was *made* for this. I use it for almost every presentation as a starting point. You can define many templates to suit your needs. To use PTE's template feature first create one or more templates, each this way: 1. Read in a representative show that has most or all settings the way you want (or start from scratch). 2. Remove all pictures from compilation unless you want them in the template for all shows. To do this just click "Clear List" button below slide list. Do *not* "Save" project since these changes are for a template. 3. In the File menu select "Templates" and click "Create template from this show". Give it a name and click OK. From now on, for a new show using a "template" starting point: 1. In File menu select "Templates" and notice that your new templates are listed. Just click the one you want. 2. Make picture and music changes unique to that show and save or create to new show name. Done! To *change* templates as needs change, just start from that template, make changes, and then in File menu select "Templates" and click "Create template from this show". Enter name for update and click OK, OK. To *remove* templates as needs change, or to set a default template to always use at PTE startup: 1. In File menu select "Templates" and click "Manage Templates". 2. Select templates you want to remove, if any, and click Delete. 3. You may check the box "Default template for new projects" after selecting the one to use by default in the drop-down menu below checkbox. 4. Click OK to close window. Cheers,

Hello Bill, (from another "Bill") I have a long message thread that discusses shows far larger than the ones you are making, and in fact I've tested them on the most wimpy systems I could find (flawless play on 150MHz P1, 72MB memory, 14,000 pic's and 1.1GB file size). Since such large shows work fine, it is more likely that the features use are using in V4.01, a relatively recent release, are encountering a bug. I suggest the following: 1. Use the forum search command and try to find things like "Access" or "violation" to see if other users have reported the same - since I think this report sounds familiar. If you find that Igor has this problem in debug, you need an urgent alternative. I suggest that as long as you aren't requiring specific features that are new to V4.01, then you can uninstall it and try instead to install and use V3.80. Last time I checked V3.80 was still available for download. It may solve your urgent problem for now. I have used V4.01 PTE files in V3.80 software and it works fine for features implemented as of V3.80. 2. If specific music synchronization is not necessary, try using unsynchronized music playback (with repeat). Be sure to make a copy of your Name.PTE file so that you can go back or maybe send it in for debug when asked. Also, test things like creating your show without music at all in order to at least have the visual show play. You can always play the music separately while show is running, if necessary. Of course if you have specific sync requirements and V4.01 is possibly the problem, V3.80 may be the only way to fix immediately. 3. Be sure Windows Media Player is up to date. PTE calls and uses it. Be sure your music plays successfully (no currupt files, that is). 4. Be sure your picture files are OK, in that any viewer can view them all (not likely there is any problem here). 5. I didn't notice in your post what version of Windows - is it XP? This may be needed for debug. Good luck! PTE is quite solid. You should be able to get past this critical issue in time, we all hope. Cheers,

To those interested in the "slider" topic here is a partial quote from the "Mega 14,000 pic P2E findings" reply thread that you may find interesting. This description proposes a way to modify the navigation bar. Cheers,

Please excuse me for not giving correct credit to all forum member names in the "slider" picture scrollbar dialog. That dialog involved Math (Mattias), Al, Guido, Jim and "cc". Jim is the one who mentioned the "Bride" and "Groom" buttons he uses. Cheers,

Greetings Igor, Wow - that change to the MP3 player to avoid temp usage is perfect! I know that those files are supposed to be removed, and most of the time they are today. They get left behind when the system has a Windows or app failure and the normal exit can't happen. When I run a 2-hour music player, that's 100MB in temp. Thanks Al for the "slider" link. That's the one I discussed. I have thought about how this might be done and offer the following. A slider is no more than a horizontal scrollbar that may be placed along the bottom edge of the P2E navigation pad. When the slider is moved to 50% of the scrollbar length the picture will advance to the half-way point picture count. Since it takes some fraction of a second to read and display a photo it may not be good to start until the user releases the mouse button. Alternatively you could read next photo data immediately and create a tiny, low-resource, quick photo preview of where the slider is until the user releases the mouse button. This tiny preview photo visible during scrolling could be about an inch or 3cm in size (varies with screen area setting of course) and could be located just below or above the navigation bar depending on where it has been placed. If we make a navigation bar with less than the full button set, then the navigation bar is more narrow. I almost always use a single button nav bar - "Pause" - in top right of screen. This has bearing on the picture scrollbar horizontal pixel dimension. To solve this I suggest that the entire scollbar vanishes while the show is playing and appears only while the show is paused. You could then make the scrollbar a fixed, large pixel width - up to the full screen width for ease of use. By the way, you could make the entire navigation bar collapse to just small "Navigate" and "Pause" buttons next to each other when the show is running, and expand it to all creator-defined buttons and features only when "Navigate" is pressed. Show could auto-pause when "Navigate" is pressed, for ease of use. You need the "Pause" button in that set of two to allow pausing to view the picture without controls all over the place. The "Pause" keyboard key should do the same as clickable "Pause" button, as it does today. The above discussion is in reference to the April 16 post that Math made. Then on April 24 Math and Guido explained the use of "Bride", "Groom", etc. labeled buttons that go away after first slide. You could, of course make those buttons apply to all slides, but I offer this alternative. Lots of buttons mask my view of the photos so I would prefer that they appear only when the show is paused as described above. You could, as optional addition to the horizontal picture scrollbar make a set of delineated "buttons" across another screen-wide horizontal stripe similar in size and adjacent to the scrollbar. These buttons have text that we add when we make the show, and a picture number is coded for goto also at show creation time. Button count can be set to ten maximum, fixed at one-tenth of screen area pixel width, and centered horizontally when displayed, where less than ten buttons have been defined. I would prefer not to have to precisely place these buttons in an object editor interface. They can be autoplaced and sized after I define them in a "Project Options" tab where all I enter is button text, font info and "goto" number for as many buttons needed, up to ten max. For a slick alternative you could have a GIF button graphic optional user spec for each button. PTE places text on show creator's GIF button graphic. If you don't define a graphic for each button you get standard buttons. Igor, for large show startup time debug I think you can make a large debug show by simply adding a modest number of pictures several times until the count is large. I'll test and let you know what I find if you want. To make a debug show with gallery, I would try making one slide in object editor with dozens of copied thumbnails, each having a "goto picture number" definition. That slide could then be copied several times to make a large debug gallery. The number of "goto" items definitely affects both V3.80 and V4.01 startup adversely. Since I have some blank gallery templates I can test debug show creation if that would be helpful. You are correct that show startup got better for small shows, so I agree it is unexpected that it would get far slower for large shows. As my prior debug info describes, for only V4.01-created shows Windows spends a huge amount of compute time paging very little, and it is filling no more or less of an image in memory. It definitely can be 10X faster, as when same large show is made with V3.80. The slowness is quite visible for shows with well under 14,000 photos. I would make a debug show with more like 3,000 to 5,000 photos. Please let me know if it would help that I make a debug show for you. It may be possible to do this with a rather small amount of unique test photo material and a .PTE debug file that you could use to create big show. Cheers!

Thanks for the kind words.... And by day I co-develop kick-butt computers! Screenshots? I'll try to capture some. I can think of a few notables, like the fixed-size P2E music player, install and show screens, and my most fancy gallery screen format from Photoshop's "Contact Sheet II" with some style enhancements. My simplest gallery format is just a screenful of thumbnails that abut, macro-created from a template screen that is full of blanks. A mini P2E show could display everything as it really is, just a lot less of it. Even a shortened-list music player could be incorporated with the startup feature - a home screen button click from photo set show. I never even thought about *posting* any show stuff. Thanks for the request. Cheers,

I went through most of the Beechbrook Cottage collection and was impressed with how much people want control, that is, show creators want absolute control over the show playback and want the show viewers to have none! Perhaps for artistic purposes, maintaining the show and music synchronization etc., we do this. It may also be that many of us are just control freaks.... Thanks so much to Bill and Karen Hines for providing the web site and to all of the people who have shared their really nice shows. I especially liked the car show. And you guessed it - that show allows user control! I have made shows where I, the show creator, have absolute control and select music to sync. But as a viewer, rather than creator, I often find that obnoxious. Therefore most shows I create do permit the user to at least "pause" by a clickable button alone in top-right of screen. They can arrow ahead/back too and keyboard to "Home" screen, just not by clicking. Do we have concensus? So this request to Igor (I haven't addressed you directly yet - hello and thanks!) is about viewer control of slide showing duration. For those shows where viewer control is granted it would be very much appreciated by most viewers surveyed if the UP and DOWN keyboard arrow keys could change slide showing duration instead of what they do today. The show creator could check a box in the Project Options -> Advanced screen to permit user control of slide duration using up/down arrows. The RIGHT and LEFT arrows should always be as defined today, ahead and back. I and a lot of others who wish to be granted control in shows would really appreciated it. Cheers!

Greetings to all - I am a new forum member, although I have been using PTE origination software and P2E shows for several months. I will use those two terms to denote the software we get from Wnsoft.com web site and the software we create with it, respectively. It shouldn't be too confusing. PTE is the greatest - my thanks go out to everyone on the team and all of the users who have contributed feedback along the way! The P2E shows are out of this world cool. I have been pushing the limits of PTE and would like to share findings about various mega shows that I have created and tested. In this lengthy (sorry) topic note I provide show size info, show design feature descriptions, PTE origination software and P2E show play software performance findings, and info about bugs and limitations encountered in PTE V3.80 and PTE V4.01 in a section labeled to be for people who know enough to be dangerous :-) Here is some size and feature info for my larger shows: * 5,000 to 14,000 pictures * Photo set galleries with from 200 to 400 clickable index thumbnails * Clickable screen after each photo set for returning to current gallery photo * Music that is started from the photo show by a button click (a second PTE "show") * Mega photo show file size from 500MB to 1.1GB (<700MB when made for CD) * CD-based small P2E show with brief music for mega show install/remove/CD-play * Most shows start in 6 to 25 seconds, even a 14,000 photo show (400MHz+) * System resources required for even a 1.1GB 14,000 pic show are very small; tested on a 150MHz P1 CPU with 72MB RAM: 1. It works! 2. Starts in 60 seconds! * PTE-based P2E show creation varies from 6 to 25 minutes "create" time on 400 and 650MHz desktop and notebook systems, resp. Sample show content, organization and distribution: Years of family 35mm slides scanned and organized into an indexed mega show complete with separate P2E music player for independent control and no-wait startups. An all-Windows autorun CD-ROM runs a small P2E one-screen show (built-in pleasant music on this small, installer show) that gives users buttons for install, view from CD only, remove, help and exit. The install option copies showfiles, puts all-Windows shortcuts in the Programs menu and runs it, all from a single user button click. The mega show itself has home screen buttons for start music, start gallery, start show, instructions and exit. The gallery is many screens of thumbnails linked to hundreds of photo sets in a several thousand photo show. Between every pair of photo sets is a clickable photo that tells the user to click to return to gallery (if they wish). This links back to the just-watched photo set clickable gallery photo so that the user can click again to watch the same set once more, or they can move around from where they left off in the gallery. The mega show has NO music. The "start music" button in the mega show does a P2E "start external application and continue" button function. The external application is a P2E music player. It is a P2E show exclusively for music playback. The track artist and selection are provided in text in a fixed-size window that has P2E comment (filename) used for track info, a P2E control pad for music play control (pause is actually a repeat track feature), and an "Exit Player" button that runs a tiny cleanup application since I have found that P2E and the Windows Media Player sometimes leave the MP3 music files behind in Windows temp area. Each P2E "photo" is a blank background color "photo" that is programmed to display for the length of time that the music track lasts. Hence music playback is timed for each "track". Separating music from photo set show allows the user to start photo show very rapidy, choose music only when they want to, control music separately, start watching show while music "starts" (loads two hours of MP3s in WMP), and even to play just music if they want. It also makes it possible for me to help them keep junk clutter cleaned up in the Windows temp area - as part of player exiting. The show install CD runs on any Windows platform and has all three P2E .exe files, a self-extracting zip .exe for windows menu loading, and a few loading, playing from CD, removing, etc., related applications. You can play the show, even music, directly from the CD-ROM without "installing" anything. Even the music area cleanup works from CD-based show playback. There are no lags in performance when played from CD. And the install option completes in no more time than it takes to read the whole CD at full reader speed. No extra copies of the huge show .exe file are made on the boot drive, even temporarily. Show USERS are my extended family members, many of whom are in my opinion barely qualified to be owning and operating a PC. Therefore everything is easy, automatic, and suitable for "dummies". Not at all meant to be derogatory, this is the best way to design applications! I have made the show in "template" form so that I can make add-ons and whole new shows with the greatest of ease. Now for one feature comment - Gallery vs. "Slider control": Another user has requested a "slider control" to have random access to large shows. That would certainly be nice. A linked gallery on the other hand takes some effort to create, yet is best for the viewer. A slider control built into P2E would be most welcomed though. Please consider it! Template show generation method (doesn't take very long for a new show!): Starting from a PTE-made template .PTE file, I use an emacs keyboard macro that determines link slide numbers by simply reading from PTE-placed photo info in the PTE file being edited, and then placing photo numbers in appropriate PTE action line arguments. The gallery photo filenames are generated as part of the macro, from info already in the PTE file. I use variations on these themes too. It takes about five minutes for me to reenter the (documented) emacs macro for a new show and about 30 seconds for emacs to complete the PTE edits for an 8,000 photo show with gallery. It takes PTE from 6 to 25 minutes to generate the show on a 650MHz P3 notebook with 128MB of RAM. Best performance is with all pic's on external 1394 or USB drive. System resource needs: I would like to differ in opinion with others who have stated the belief that system resource needs are large and not practical in mega shows. To the contrary, I am super-impressed with what the PTE/P2E developers have accomplished. Hats off! Here are my specific findings for a worst-case show tested so far, with 14,000 photos and a show file size of 1.1GB. Expert users - you'll like what you read, yet developers please note that there is some important application feedback herein! Show format: 14,000 pictures, random playback order, no gallery, music start button in home screen that you get from "Home" keyboard key, that is linked to second P2E show for music as described above. The 1.1GB P2E showfile has no music. The P2E music show file is about 62MB (90 minutes at 128Kbps) of MP3 music. To RUN the PTE V3.80-COMPILED P2E .EXE SHOW FILE: I took the slowest, oldest, junkiest machine I could find and recorded performance metrics. That machine is a 150MHz Pentium 1 overdrive with a paltry 72MB of RAM. Internal bus transfer speed is a pathetic 2MB/sec from hard drive. [My 400MHz P2 system, by comparison, achieves 15-22MB/s disk transfer speeds through PCI IDE.] Back to the slow machine description: OS software is Win98 Second Edition with every update available, including IE6. Graphics support is a pathetic 1MB video RAM and is built in to the mainboard. It only gets better than what I measured with that 8 year old clunker machine for the most part. Show P2E file startup is only 60 seconds on that old machine. This is a 14,000 pic show that has a 1.1GB file size! Show playback is smooth, even though I used a 100ms simple fade from picture to picture, with 4 second display time per pic. The show plays back this well whether created with V3.80 or V4.01 of PTE software. Startup times differ. SYSTEM EXPERT INFO: Please stop here if you don't know and/or don't want to know what goes on under the hood of your machine. System resources as reported by System Tools --> Resource Monitor (Win98 app): Metric /// Before starting show /// After starting show /// (then when running) Allocated Memory /// 161MB /// 172MB ///(180MB running) Disk Cache /// 38.5MB /// 22.3MB while running Unused Phys Memory /// 2.3MB /// ~zero /// ~zero Swap file size /// 100MB /// 104MB /// (122MB running) Swap file size in use /// 40MB /// 40MB /// (35MB running) Bytes READ in file system during show startup /// 3 to 5MB /// (50KB/s running) (from the 1.1GB show file) CPU kernel utilization /// 12% (for Res. Monitor) /// 100% for 1 minute /// (and CPU is at 50% when show is running at 4sec/pic, 100ms fade & Resource Monitor is running) Page faults /// zero /// sporadic /// (~300 running) In summary, a mega show at 50% of PTE's application limits (spec'd at 2GB file size and 32,000 photos max) uses around 18MB to 19MB of RAM. It does not load the 1.1GB image into the swap file as some have suggested may happen, and it runs very efficiently using about 40% of a 150MHz P1 machine with 72MB RAM. This means a 60MHz Pentium clunker could just about keep up with resource needs of this 14,000 picture mega show. Bug findings on BOTH V3.80 and V4.01 except as noted: When P2E file exceeds 1GB, any Win98SE system will abort P2E creation with an "Out of memory" error, even with 512MB main memory and >2.5GB free space for swap and temporary files on C: drive, with ALL show-related files stored on another physical hard drive than that used for C: drive. This happens whether or not an icon was specified for the P2E output .exe file. Except that the icon does not make it into the .exe file when show creation aborts, the show that is created is actually complete and works correctly. Apparently since 100% was reached in creation, the .exe file is complete and operable. When you do NOT specify an icon in V4.01, the "Out of memory" abort still happens after reaching 100% creation, yet the snazzy new default icon DOES make it into the .exe file. There was no default icon in V3.80. I will second the finding of another user that when you specify an icon (and the show file is <1GB....) the show creation time doubles, as the .exe file appears to shuffle onto the boot drive and back to the storage drive *after* hitting 100%. This is the same in both software versions. Music and show "link" buttons slow down the show startup. Music startup delay was definitely reduced in V4.01, when compared to that of V3.80. But unfortunately show startup was dramatically slowed down in V4.01, to the extent of being not practical in mega shows. I am keeping V3.80 around on my notebook system, with v4.01 on desktop system, until this is cleared up. First I will explain what happens on a show without photo link buttons, then later on - with them. Here is what happened to the above-mentioned mega show when played on my 400MHz P2 desktop system tested separately with 64MB and 512MB main memory in order to show that there is little performance dependency: V3.80-created .exe file startup time was 26 seconds (14,000 picture show) V4.01-created .exe file startup time was 12.5 minutes (14,000 picture show) More modest shows of 5,000 pictures still exhibit a similarly large slow-down factor in show startup. And as other users have pointed out there is no status during this time. You might expect that the app would never start if you shut the system down in less than 12 minutes after trying to start P2E show. I studied the performance during startup for both V3.80 and V4.01 and found that the rate of page faulting is high and short in duration for V3.80-created .exe files, while the rate of page faulting is slow and exponentially decreasing in rate for V4.01-created shows. CPU utilization stays at 100% during this startup activity in both cases. The final amount of memory used is the same, 18-19MB, in both cases once the startup as completed. I/O reads are sporadic and low overall in both PTE versions, with only about 3-5MB total read-in from that huge 1.1GB image. But in V4.01-created shows the read-in rate also exponentially slows down to just kilobytes per second as the slow startup proceeds. A lot of processor cycles are spent on little accomplishment. Performance WITH photo number link buttons or clickable goto-link photos: The very existence of these really important features causes show startup to be slowed down substantially, in both V3.80 and V4.01-created shows. Yet in V4.01 the startup time is 5-10X longer. matching experience without link photos in show. Further, the show startup time is somewhat proportional to the number of clickable photos or links in the show. A same-sized show with 400 clickable photo gallery takes more than twice as long to start (~5 minutes@400MHz) as one with 200 clickable photo gallery (~1-2 minutes@400MHz). In both cases about 5,000 photos were in show. I would like to make one final point - if there is any reasonable way to make the GUI hold a change journal and only update the full data structure when writing the .PTE save file, this could make the GUI usably fast for making mega shows and better on modestly-long shows, of course. I know this gets deep into the implementation and I trust your judgement and respect your constraints. Thanks and cheers! Bill