stardealer

Hi Lin, in many animations I use non-linear movements but until now I thought scaling all positions of combined objects the same way with the same percentage wouldn't change the appearance. I thought of it as a time lapse or slow motion when all relative positions are still the same. Of course when changing not all corresponding keypoints at once then non-linear movement has to be reworked in the way you have described. This would mean for described function a. - finetuning of non-linear movements may be necessary if keypoints exist at start- or endtime of slide. I think it is not difficult for Igor and his team to implement such calculating functions in the "right-click-menu" with effect to all marked objects in O&A the same way like copy and paste, so maybe he can give a try in a beta of 5.7. Regards, Frank

I have created many slides with complex animations of several objects, often with childrelations and different keypoints on the different childlevels of a object node. I use these slides or part of these slides as templates (cut&paste) whenever I create a slideshow. After changing the used pictures sometimes it is sufficient to modify slide time with "scale keypoints", but often a group of combined objects needs adjustments like "move 1 second further" or "move 1 second back" or "compress animation time by 30%" or extend animation time by 20%" and so on. To rework all depending keypoints to one animation is a) complicated needs much time and c) needs more than 1 attempt to get it right. I think some difficulties could be solved if there were functions for a) move all keypoints of marked objects +/- X milliseconds (without moving keypoints exactly at starttime of slide or endtime of slide) compress/stretch all keypoints of marked objects by factor X (working the same way as modify slide time with "scale keypoints" but only calculated for the marked objects) With these functions every predesigned animation can be reused much more easy and also timing animations to music would be much easier. Regards, Frank

There are some topics in this forum regarding that you have to design your slideshows with "TV safezone on" to get the expected view when you want to play them by DVD-Player on TV (e.g. share it with my parents who don't have a computer). It is annoying and very time consuming to design slideshows for output on monitor or youtube or anything else and the same slideshow especially for TV to have the same viewing experience. My actual workaround is: create AVI with P2E or mpeg2-files with VideoBuilder, open these files in a videoediting software, scale them to fit TV-safezone, recreate mpeg2-files, burn DVD with VideoBuilder. This is timeconsuming and looses some outputquality. Maybe it is possible to create a output option with the effect that the resulting video is downscaled to e.g. 95% and the resulting borders in the output are filled with a colour of choice (or overlayed by a self created frame as PNG-file). Only my problem? Regards Frank

Hi, you should ask such questions in the forum section "Pictures to Exe", not in "Ideas". Beside that for pan, zoom, rotate in non-linear form you should get this tutorial Tutorial on non-linear PZR, How to quickly implement non-linear pzr effects

Maybe this can help Draft-PTEFAQ: How do I copy slides from one sequence to another? from fh1805 on page 2 in this "Tutorials and Articles"-forum. The other way would be to join the sequences by creating one show which starts the separate projects one after the other. How to create it and how to avoid several unwanted effects in this method like shortly showing desktop each time a new project is started was mentioned in some threads on this forum play multiple pte after each other, pte show for camera club More on building menu sequences Hide your desktop Greetings, Frank P.S.: My first time use of forum links in a message needed a three times edit to get it right.

Hi Lin, thanks for your detailed explanations. My knowledge isn't sufficient enough to understand all aspects of the technical explanations you wrote. As I know from my daily work as a developer of business applications there are many situations when you think that a requested functionality needs a big effort to be implemented. You treat the request exactly as it has been asked and implementation would be a pain. But many times only a small variation of the request is needed to get to the point that it is easy to implement and also satisfies the customer. Maybe there are DirectX-functions which can easy be used to accomplish some text animations but not video. OK if PTE is a niche product for AV enthusiasts and they don't want such things in the near future there simply is no "must have". Again, I decided to buy PTE because of image quality and I'm pleased with the results. @Xaver I tried Aquasoft 6. Beside that it has many bugs the smoothness of animations isn't comparable to PTE although I have sufficent hardware ressources with a new graphics card (Nvidia 9600GT). Regards, Frank

Hi Lin, good demonstration of PTE capabilities. Don't want to offend you, but the nuttella example doesn't look as sophisticated as text animations I have seen in Flash or other programs. I think you used many different objects with parent/child, pan and rotate to accomplish this task and in my point of view it is to much effort for such text animations. Yes you can do many things in PTE and it is fun to play around with the possibilities and create something new and brake the limits. But in normal slideshows I only apply effects which are not to complicated to use because of two reasons. 1. it is a matter of time 2. I don't want to spend half a hour with creating a slide, start the preview and decide - wrong animation sequence or another arrangement would be better I want easy to use functions, not expert tasks. I totally agree that PTE delivers best imagequality among the competitors when viewing EXE-files. Can't say much to your technical arguments. Regards, Frank

Sorry for not responding to perspective correction. Imagine you are in a cathedral with evenly spaced columns on the side. Now you look straight forward and walk with linear speed. The perspective changes with every step you take and the columns you pass leave your field of view at even timelaps. In a picture of a cathedral the perspective is static and so to create the imagination of natural walk (zoom) needs a non linear speeddesign of zooming. Checking "perspective correction for zoom" forces P2E to transform the linear zoom automatically to a non-linear zoom calculated based on starting and ending zoom factors. (Anyone should correct me if I'm wrong). This effect can best be seen by arranging the same picture side by side with different settings for perspective zoom. Regards, Frank

Hi John, When using long slow zooms, the difference is nearly unrecognizable. So to see the difference I would advice to test it with a (smaller) image and fast zooms. Then you can see that linear starts harsh and goes linear to the end and then stops instantly. The other options start with a smooth acceleration and/or end with smooth deceleration. Seperated and glued only makes a difference when not using linear. At every not glued section the motion comes to an end (smooth or instantly as selected) and motion then starts again as defined. Regards, Frank

Hi Dave, 3 months ago i downloaded trialversions of nearly every slideshow product to find out what best suits me and my workflow. I then decided to buy P2E and created slideshows of the last 5 holidays and was very pleased with the results. So I spend about 30 or 40 hours working with P2E. The ideas of arranging and presentation the pictures where mostly easy and sometimes tricky to achieve. Some couldn't be realized within an acceptable amount of time and some couldn't be realized because of missing functionality. When you refer to PSG ($70) I have to say I tried PSP ($250) but after one has seen the output quality of P2E in comparison, especially the smooth pan and zoom, no one can buy another product. I don't want and I don't need all the functionality of other products. When I suggest enhancements then it is something I missed more than once. If its only me, then no need to implement. WnSoft has to decide which suggestions can be implemented easy and/or are requested by a majority of users. I agree, for example "masks". Regards, Frank

Hi DaveG, The argument - "I see danger in making PTE so complicated (versatile) that beginners can't get a grip of it straight away and dump it for that reason." - one can find in this or another form in many different topics in this subforum. I won't agree, because versatility and usability are two different things. You can add versatility on additional tabs and so keep the usability for existing functionality at the same level. And another point - if P2E wanted to be a beginner friendly slideshow software more functions for template based automated generation of slideshows would have been implemented (like in "Memories on TV" or the Ulead slideshow product). P2E is a slideshow tool for the ones that want the best quality appearance of there pictures with a lot of control for a reasonable price, that's in my opinion the unique selling point. But, as I said in my last post, I personally don't want to use a picture editing tool to achieve a function that is a typical slideshow functionality. Your argument can be rearranged like " I see danger in leaving P2E functionally so targetgroup indifferent that beginners don't find automated generated slideshows and sophisticated users are attracted by the functional evolution of competing products". ;-) Regards, Frank

Hi DaveG, certainly you can realize many things when you combine P2E with other tools. But the requested functionality is a typical slideshow functionality. I generally wish to have typical functionality in the specialized tool (P2E). And also the range of typical functionality expands over time. Regards, Frank

I mean something like when text appears character by character or other character based animations. The best way to understand what I mean is to look at other text animation tools, like http://www.jumpeyecomponents.com/ TXeff, a tool for text animation in flash. I think we don't need such a powerfull set of different animations, but some basic ones would be fine. Regards, Frank

In many situation I miss text animation effects in my slideshows. In P2E you are restricted to pan/zoom/rotate and opacity. I would like to have text effects as in competitor products like e.g. proshow. I know that it is a big deal to implement a text animation engine in P2E and programmers ressources are restricted, but I think it becomes a must have feature in the near future So what do other members think about it? Regards, Frank

Many times when using portrait pictures in a slideshow I arrange them side by side in O&A window and use opacity to make them appear and disappear controlled by opacity, e.g. 1 - first picture appears 2 - second picture appears 3 - third picture appears with overlaying first picture 4 - and so on I would like to have other controls then opacity to create the transition between these pictures. My suggestion is to have a new control for transition-effects on every O&A object like the transition control on every slide. Frank

Hi Bryan, you may try the following. Remove music files from the pte-show and try again. In the past there have been many problems with integrated soundcards with miscellanious software, causing interruption or totally misfunctioning. When the show runs perfect without music, you may look at your sound settings or new drivers for your integrated soundcard. If it doesn't, try with starting TaskManager before starting the show and look at the used systemressources when you stop the show after it begins to loose transitioning. Maybe it's a bottleneck in memory, then inspect your pagefile for optimal performance (e.g. defragmentation) and stop other memory-consuming programm like virus-scan, etc. and try again. Hope something helps to solve the problem. Greetings, Frank

But keep in mind that with progressive you loose some quality in transitions. You must decide which one is more important. For my slideshows I choose progressive when there are many panning-panoramas or slowly moving singlepictures to avoid the streaky lines. For all other slideshows I go for interlaced. Good luck, Frank

Video is only 25fps, fast animation can't be really smooth. With .EXE the frame rate of your screen typically is 60 fps, enough for smooth animation 2 times faster than with video. When animation gets fast enough so that human eye can't recognize a sharp still picture the fps limit doesn't matter anymore. There is another important point for video. The faster the animation the more important is to set video type to progressive, because interlaced produces streaky pictures coming from alternate processing of even and uneven lines per frame. So far no solution, the only advice I can give is - use real slow animations - are use real fast animations when creating slideshows for video output. Greetings Frank