Marianne

Hi everybody, Just returned today from a skiing trip to Cervinia Italy. I wonder, where are the Dutch in this forum? I live in the middle of the Netherlands, some 40 km. away from Utrecht in a very little village called Renswoude. With approximately 4000 inhabitants I don't think it'll be on an American map . It is a nice thought though to try to get in contact with PTE users in your own neighbourhood. So Dutch people, where are you?????? Hope 2004 will be good for you all! Marianne

Mark, I partly agree with you. Scanning in the highest resolution takes a lot of time when you consider this for 400 photographs. Furthermore I did some testing and with low quality originals most of the time the outcome of high scans is not worth the effort. Working in Photoshop with high scan resolutions takes a lot of RAM and processorpower, and even then the rendering takes time. And this need to be done on the original otherwise you'll have to do it for every compressed picture! I think scanning resolution needs to be overthougth for every different project you start. Marianne

Hi Bubba, I've just finished scanning some 400 old photographs of my family. I used the Epson Perfection 2450. Scanning resolution at 300 dpi without enlarging the picture. I found out that this gives pretty much pixels to even make cut outs for the slideshow. Pictures in portrait mode can this way even be cut out to landscape (1024 x 768). Furthermore I have made a couple of shows for people who very much appreciated the link I offered them to the highresolution photographs on the cd. I make it a habit of putting printable files on the cd. I am not very charmed by compressing photographs which are meant for printing, so I always use the TIF format. I don't know where you live, but I live in a very small village in the Netherlands, and I just take my cd with the TIF file to the nearest shop and it has never been a problem. So I suggest you keep doing what you already did and people will love what you give them! Marianne

Hi Granot, Your utility was right about my screenresolution, didn't doubt it though , all your utilities work okay! But what I was thinking is: with this utility you can make shows for a large screen, but that means also the size of the pictures will increase, and there is no way to measure the speed of the processor. On the other hand it will be possible to make windowed mode and use objects, and then be sure they are always where you meant them to be! I think it would be great if there is a choice, but I think 3 or 4 will be enough. Who wants to make a show for every screenresolution there is? When you make such a tool, I think I shall make use of it, because often you cannot be sure on what resolution your 'audience' will look. And, whenever someone upgrades his system and gets a larger screen, the show will grow along with it! Marianne

Hi Cindy, I'm sorry, I didn't make myself clear when I suggested not to use full screen mode. Because I use the Dutch language version I translated without checking. What I meant to say is that maybe it is better not to use the fit to screen option. But you say fit to screen is unchecked, so that can't be the problem. Perhaps you can adjust the fading time? Anyway, every new version has more or less improvements. Though not with every softwarepackage, with PTE it is always sensible to use the latest version. Marianne

That's about £3,50 less than we pay here for regular cd's! So yes, I'm very interested. Marianne

That goes for me too! I just downloaded some samples and it is great music. I have been looking for royalty free music because I don't want to violate anyone's rights and, in time, I would like to upload shows to Beechbrook too. For the price of a commercial cd (way too high in the Netherlands), I would buy this music for shure. So you can count me in also. Didn't read this topic until just now. Marianne

Hello Cindy, Nice show! I just played it on my computer which is Athlon XP 1500, 512mb RAM, and some of the fading is not quite smooth. My guess is that this is because your show was made for 800 x 600, but put in full screen mode. Since my screen is large (1280 x 1024) this makes the fading hard work for the processor. If you know all of your customers are using screens of 800 x 600, there is no problem. Otherwise I think it will be better not to use the full screen mode. But, it could rather well be that I should upgrade my system Hope to see more of your shows. Marianne

Hi Bill, Thank you for your very complete answer. I tried to make a music player but there are some things that I don't understand: When I do this, the music filenames don't appear, but the picturenames. How do you give the viewer a choice to which track he wants to hear? And the show on top should be a windowed show? Otherwise there is no way to get the music player back on screen but to escape from the other show. Marianne

Hi, I'm still busy with the making of a slideshow of old pictures of my family. I want to make a sync show of about 10 minutes and in addition to that, one which will be non sync because I'm sure my family will want to look at some pictures as long as they want. Now the making of a sync show is not the problem. But: about 300 pictures - This means at least 300 mouseclicks. Isn't that a little bit too much? Has anyone ideas on how to shape such a show? I did think of dividing it up in pieces, for example for each uncle or aunt a different show with pictures they are on. But I can't get the navigating right in my mind. Furthermore I think many of them would like to have the pictures printed. So maybe I should provide printable images also. Anyone have any ideas on this? Marianne

Why not ask Michel for a translation? His English is good, and his French is even better. And Barry, Black Country deserves it being seen by people with knowledge of the making. After several downloads, it is still my favorite, far ahead of all the other ones. (not to offend the rest ) Marianne

I vote for black too, but isn't it possible to adjust the color in the cfg file? That way everyone can use the background of his choice compliant to the background of the show the pano is in... Maybe you can let the user fill in the colornumbers as in Photoshop or webapplications, where FFFFFF stands for white, and 000000 for black. Marianne

Hi, I agree with Andrew on two points, or actually three if you count the matter of payment . I also did a test on a full screen. Uptill now I only tested in windowed mode. I also have the taskbar popping up, which is extremely ugly if you have a show with black background. Is there no way you can program a full screen mode? As for the help icon, I thought Granot earlier said this is only in the freeware version, so this one is solved if you pay for it. The fading in and out, well I'm not an expert in programming, but I think this is difficult with a moving picture, and how far can we push it? Marianne

Hi, I found where I went wrong. Since this utility plays in front of the slideshow, the panopicture should be a little larger than the rest of the show. Otherwise the pano won't cover the PTE show in the background. And that causes the line of backgroundcolor. The startup is a great improvement. I can understand you want the legal notes placed somewhere, but I think watermarked will be a more esthetic solution. And as it will be run from within PTE I don't think anyone expects a help button in the middle of a show. Marianne

Hi Granot, Great tool you made! But like Andrew, I found out that within PTE not the whole screen is used. I tested it with a pano of 768 high. Standalone, starting the panotool it plays whole screen. But started from within PTE it leaves a line at the bottom showing background or maybe taskbar on a smaller screen. I also agree with Andrew on not placing the helpbutton in the picture. But maybe you could make a difference here by making it freeware or shareware? And is it possible to make the start of the tool unvisible? Now on a white background you see the black line of the box and the helpbutton and on a black background it is even more visible. Although it is just for a moment, so if there is no solution to that I can live with it. Marianne

Granot, You keep amazing me! How many hours of computertime do you have in a day? I bet you beat us all. Thank you!

Hi, I took al look at the animation demo of Sharon and I wondered if it would be possible to show an animated panoramapicture within PTE. I mean, if I have a slideshow of a holiday in the mountains. And I have a panoramapicture of lets say about 4000 pixels wide. Could it be viewed moving from left to right and then let the show go on with the other slides? I have been thinking of a solution, but I can't think of anything better then start an external application which can do that, but then I am left with the problem that this application won't stop itself and goes on forever. And that is something I do not want Granot, maybe you have already made something to end an application from within PTE? There is so much at your website, I get lost now and then Marianne

Hello Grace, Have you tried to sent it as a zipfile? Most firewalls block .exe files as they come in, and emailscanners act in the same way. Another solution could be to rename the file temporarily to, for example, .p2e, and then your sister can rename it again to .exe when she wants to look at it. Marianne

I think you are looking for a way to convert your music from cd to put it into PTE? There are several ways to do that. I use a small freeware program called CDEX. You can download it. Start it up and import a whole cd or choose just one track. Then you choose Convert Wav files to Compressed audio files and it converts your cd song to MP3 which is the most used format to put into PTE. Another program that I use to edit MP3 files, for example when I want 3 songs to be just 1 MP3 is Audacity, also freeware. Go and try it out. If you have other questions, don't hesitate. People are very helpful here, and I know because this is the first time I give an answer, all my previous mails where questions Marianne

Hey Granot, What if you have a dualboot, like me, and mostly use the Windows XP on drive D? I do have C:/Windows/Fonts, but that is Windows 98 and that is not my default workingarea. I suppose lots of people have their Windows on different stations or partitions. Is there no way the program can detect the location of the default Font folder? Or am I overasking now. I did a test and the font was installed perfectly on the C drive, but it didn't show in my office program for example, and that is obvious because at the moment I am using the Windows on D. Marianne

Hi, I am still struggling with the quality of my show. Like Al advised me I compressed the jpegs with a factor of 5. Seems to the eye the same as a compression of 8 so that is no problem. But my pictures still are about 150 kb in size. But now I'm trying to get them as sharp as possible on screen without looking unnatural. I am talking here about scanned images, some of them are in medium quality for a start because they are several dozens years old. The oldest picture among them is of my great great grandmother and is made around 1880. Now I'm not looking to get that one perfect on screen, but as they are scanned out of an album which I don't posess, and this show will be part of an archive cd for my whole family, it should look good. What can you say about sharpening? I have been experimenting with a program recommended earlier in this forum : SharpControl 1.1 by Vtie, but that one seems to make faces a little bit too smooth. I also tried to use Photoshops Unsharp Mask Settings: Amount 100%, Radius 1, Threshold 0. This seems to work although it gives a lot more noise. But maybe that is not too bad for old pictures. By the way they are not totally black and white as I find that is getting the authenticity down. So what would you recommend for this show? And what do you use for your digital images? As my next show is definitely coming out of my own digital camera Marianne

Hi, I never intended for you all to get angry at each other . It's just that because I'm starting, I look very careful at what others make and hope to achieve a level I for myself can live with because I am a little ambitious and like to make beautiful things . It is indeed a matter of taste and making choices. But, I think it is useful to hear why other people make their shows the way they do. Usually it is well thoughtover, so for me it is part of the learning process to read how you all think about it. Anyway, I have an Iiyama 22 inch screen with (according to the manual) a recommended resolution of 1280 / 1024 at 85Hz. I've never noticed my squares to be rectangle... and I don't have problems with text being too small. By the way, I have glasses, so it's not that my eyesight is extremely sharp. But, correct me when I'm wrong, when you want to project your slideshow to a large screen, as I intent to do with my next show, then you can use the fit to screen option. But what size do you make your original pictures then? Will 1024 x 768 be large enough? The show I just finished had about 100 slides, synchronized to a mp3 of about 12 minutes. But when I tested it on other systems slower than mine, it did give some problems. For example less than 600 Ghz will not play the show, even not when installed to the harddisk! The file is 23,2 mb. I compressed within Photoshop at a level of 8. Pictures are about 220 kb in size. So I still have the question: How does everyone present shows with splendid sharp photographs and still use jpegs? Marianne (who is sorry to have risen an argument between forummembers)

Hi Tom, I just looked at your show and I realized you must be about the only one who uses full screen pictures. On what resolution do you base them? I have a big screen (1280 x 1024) and your photographs seemed a little unsharp to me, so I changed resolution to 1024 x 768 and indeed they did become sharper. Why don't you use the windowed mode? I do like the full screen pictures though. Would like to use it myself for making a holiday slideshow (mountaineering), but I am afraid the show will get to big on such high resolution, or when I compress to much my photographs will be unsharp. Does anyone have any suggestions on that? Marianne

Nobeefstu, I just tried your solution and it works great! This is what I meant. Now I don't have to add an explanation on how to get to the high resolution files (by the way Al, they are in the TIF format, uncompressed to get the best quality). Thank you both for helping out! Marianne

Hi, I just finished my first show. That is, my first serious show because I've been playing around for a couple of weeks. But now I have a question. I have made a separate show as startpage with 3 buttons: the first one will start a selfplaying slideshow, the second one a clickable kind of presentation and the third one to close the startscreen. The clickable presentation is to present the high resolution photographs which are also in a separate map on the cd. The cd is ment for a just married couple, so I suppose they want to have prints out of the photographs. But now I've been wondering how to make this separate map available through a button on the startpage. Can this be done within PTE? I know Boxig made some fabulous menupages to put on a cd, but... they are all in English and there is not a possibility to adjust the language. I would like to see it in plain Dutch . Did I oversee something or has anyone a suggestion how to do this? And eh.. Boxig, if you wonder what to do next, maybe you could arrange some language modules for your great programs???? Congratulations with your 100. I haven't joined this forum for too long, but you are one of the famous guys around here, even for starters! Marianne