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Please answer on two questions above. I'm looking for best default values of these options in future version. Also we plan to add a new option for main images to the Project options | Defaults tab - "Fit to slide" and "Cover slide". This option will be applied automatically for new slides.

Probably not enough users with these monitors to ask Igor to add a new PTE aspect ratio but this would be a cool LCD monitor to have for panorama viewing. Dell U2913W Tom

Do not move this topic: This is rather a bug report that a suggestion! If we create a new custom transition in a project of arbitrary aspect ratio, the editor for the custom transition always has a screen with AR 4:3. This is (in my opinion) not a good concept. It should be possible to create transitions for dedicated aspect ratios. You may look at the attached projects, one is 16:10, the other one is 4:3. Both use the same custom transition that has been created inside the 16:10 project. During the transition you should see the text "Next Slide!" three times, but it only works correctly for the 4:3 project. Regards, Xaver NextSlide_16x10.zip NextSlide_4x3.zip

I was able to create a 1080 x 1080 video (of a panorama) for use in Instagram by setting the "Virtual Size of Slide" in the "Screen" tab (after searching for a while) but it would be nice to be able to just pick 1:1 aspect ratio on the "Main Tab". P2E is handy for creating videos of panoramas (or anything else) that you want to display taking advantage of the full height and width allowed in Instagram. I don't use "i" products so the "Instapan" app isn't an option plus it has limited controls.

[This discussion has been extracted from "Comments..." topic. Igor] PicturesToExe Beta 3 As I understand things, we can now apply much higher resolution images into our slide shows so that they work on all monitors. There is less need to do any resizing of images inside an image editor. Then, In project options we can apply unsharp mask, which is great. The trouble I have found is that if I apply images in this way, some of the images are not the right format to fill the entire screen and will have a black bar somewhere around the edge. So, now I have to go into each image using O&A to select the cover slide mode (which should be renamed to cover screen by the way. We are not covering the slide, we use the slide to cover the screen) If your intention is to remove the need to resize images and give us unsharp mask options in the project options window, surely we need to be able to select Cover Slide (Cover Screen) at the same location and for the entire slide show. There seems little point in saving one job if it has to be repaced by another. In the drop down Aspect Ration Box, can't there be an ALL setting that applies the Cover Slide option for the entire show. Format and resolution is the biggest obstacle for newer users of slide show software, it needs to be simple for the new user to throw in some images and have them fit their 1280*1024 screen and also their friends 1920*1080 screen too. The inclusion of the F6 key toggle from the slide list to the time line and back again is great. Thank you

I have attempted to use Beta 7.1 using a video clip from Adobe Premier Pro CS4 (which is new to me). The clip was exported as MPEG2 with dimensions 1440 by 1080 and looks fine when viewed in Explorer, but in PTE the aspect ratio has changed to a square format, distorting the clip. I doubt if this is a bug, I guess I am doing something wrong! Any clues, please? Ray Groome

It might be interesting to see the outcome of this - maybe some use can be made of it by someone? If you have to use one of the the "OTHER" choices please indicate the actual resolution in a reply below? My monitor is 16:10 1920x1200 but if/when I'm in the market for a new one at any time my current thinking is that I will get a 16:9 1920x1080. DG

I have been told that the Nikon D300 aspect ration can be varied. I've scoured the specification & asked questions of owners who claim it can be done. Can anyone confirm if it can be set to 4x3 as opposed to the 3x2 standard. It seems to me this would cut out one of the onerous tasks when editing your images for PTE. Yachtsman1

Please read an article about some nuances with aspect ratio while preparing DVD discs by using PicturesToExe and Video Builder. http://www.wnsoft.com/apr/aspect-ratio.htm

I want to produce a DVD with two shows on the same disc, one 4-3 & one 16-9 to allow the user to chose the ratio to suit their TV. I read the "pinned" article in the Burn DVD section http://www.wnsoft.com/apr/aspect-ratio.htm but it is a little out of date. My TV has an auto ratio selection mode that when I play a DVD produced from a 4-3 show, fills the screen with the bottom line of the text at he bottom of the screen cut off. When I set the ratio selection to manual either 4-3 or 16-9 I get the black borders as shown on the tutorial. Has anyone managed to burn two shows onto one disc in the two formats, if so did you change the basic picture size from 1024x768 when producing the shows. Another way I've just considered is to copy the shows into my DVD recorder then burn them to one disc in turn, has anyone done this? Yachtsman1

I posted a request in the "Ideas for new versions" forum some considerable time ago about the need to be able to change the default setting of PTE from "fit to slide" to "cover slide". There were no responses to this post and I wonder whether anyone else has the same problem as myself and if so, what do they do. The issue is this : My Nikon D80 provides a 3872 x 2592 image - aspect ratio 3:2 My monitor is 1280 x 1024 - aspect ratio 5:4 My projector is 1024 x 768 - aspect ratio 4:3 I auto-resize the original images to 1530 x 1024 to maintain their original aspect ratio and then use"cover slide" in PTE so that the image fills the full height of my monitor. However I have to set each slide to "cover slide" manually as it is not possible to change the default setting of PTE from "fit to slide". Al Robinson's "PTE Adjuster" used to be able to make a global change, but the latest version seems to have dropped this function. Of course, using this process, I lose some of both sides of the original image. But I prefer to do this rather than have the image showing on my monitor with a black line at the top and bottom of the screen. This is what happens if you keep the original image's aspect ratio and use "fit to slide". Another possible tack is to crop each image. But this is much more time consuming than just resizing images using a batch process. I would be interested in any views on this topic. Jeff

Hi Could you tell me what aspect ratio I should be using for a dvd. Found under Project Options Screen. should it be 16.9. My monitor resolution is 1680 x 1050. Television size 66cms x 38cm Jean

I'm new to PTE and haven't been able to find a way to do this... I would like to build one exe slide show that I can give to anyone. I would like the images to be scaled (maintaining the image aspect) to fill the screen. If my PC monitor is, say, a 16:10 aspect ratio, I can choose that as the slide aspect ratio in project options and (along with the default "fit to slide" option) get the behavior I want when I view the show on my 16:10 monitor. However, if I take the same slide show and run it on a monitor that is 4:3, some of the slides have black on all sides because they are scaled to fit into a 16:10 slide area which is then scaled to fit in a 4:3 screen area. What I would like is an "automatic" option when choosing the slide aspect ratio. When the exe is run, I would like it to detect the aspect ratio of the current monitor and make that be the slide aspect ratio. This way, all of my images would fill the screen (in at least one dimension anyway) no matter what monitor they are viewed on. It seems right now, my only choice is to make several versions of my slide show and tell people to download the one that matches their monitor. That doesn't seem very portable to me, not to mention difficult to explain to non-technical people. Am I missing something? Is there already a way to do this? Thanks for any info you have...

The topic of aspect ratios has been discussed many times before but, with Version 5, I think there might be a slightly different twist. The issue arises from the different aspect ratios of monitors (e.g. my 19 inch monitor has a resolution of 1280 x 1024, 5:4) and cameras (e.g. my Nikon D80 has a resolution of 3872 x 1024, 6:4) and the standards for AV projection which are 1024 x 768, 4:3). The default setting in "Common" tab of the O&A window of Version 5 is "fit to slide". This works to constrain the width of an image to the screen width as set on "Project Options - Screen" tab. There is no way to change this default setting except on a slide by slide basis. Thus with Nikon D80 images, the choices are : Keep the original aspect ratio, thus seeing the whole image, but resulting in a black border at the top and bottom of the monitor. Manually crop each image to an aspect ratio of 5:4 and accept the loss of part of the image. Resize to, say, 1536 x 1024 and set to "Original" or "Cover slide" in the "Common tab. In Option 2 and 3, you lose some of the image but the remaining image fills the screen. Individually cropping each image is far too time consuming, thus Option 3 is my preferred choice unless I must see the whole image in which case it is Option 1. However to use Option 3, I have to set each slide individually to "Original" or "Cover Slide". Could this setting adjustment not be added into the "Screen" tab of "Project Options" as a setting which can be applied globally to all slides? Regards Jeff

Please read an article about some nuances with aspect ratio while preparing DVD discs by using PicturesToExe and Video Builder. http://www.wnsoft.com/apr/aspect-ratio.htm

Can anyone explain the best Aspect Ratio to use in PTE 5 Beta 7 and DVD builder I have created a DVD in DVD builder using 4:3 but when I display it some aspects are just off screen My TV is quite new. Thank you Royo

This is the continuation of a thread I started on the other forum. I'm having difficulty producting video output with a 16:9 (anamorphic widescreen) aspect ratio. Although my images are in 16:9 (1920x1080 pixels), when I say I want a custom video with 1920x1080 pixels, the avi that PTE produces is stretched horizontally. Does anyone know how to achieve the desired output? Thanks, Ray

Greetings, I know this topic was discussed recently but I'm afraid to say some of the questions and answers were a bit over my head. Also I have a slightly different question on proper display. I recently created a family slide show. I used photos that are 1600 x 1200. I have rendered a DVD of that show. When I watch it on a 42" wide screen TV with screen size of 1920 x 1080 the show is stretched extra wide to fill the screen. I can live with that. It's not extreme but if I can improve it I'd like to try. I do not care if there are black bars on the sides of the screen. In fact, I would prefer black bars with no distortion in the images. Re-sizing and cropping all my photos seems like a lot of work for me. ( I know how to batch re-size them but the ratio is not changed) Is there some setting in P2E that I can use to make the DVD display properly? Specifically in the Project Options screen tab what should my settings be for Aspect ratio of slide? Virtual size of slide? Should the box be checked for Fixed size of slide? Can someone give a beginner a very basic description of what these 3 items do for me? I know some of you regulars are probably rolling your eyes because this has been covered before! I would just experiment and try different settings and burn a DVD for each to see the results but my computer takes over 3 hours to render the show so I am hoping there is an easy answer to my needed settings and I will then try another burn. Related question-- Do the above settings need to be changed if I create an MP4 file and watch that on my HD TV via a Western Digital media player or Playstation3 console? (I don't have one of those yet, but can borrow one on occasion) Thanks for your help and patience!

Well, I brought this up as part of beta testing feedback in the original beta annoucement thread, but there have been no comments. Since beta testing feedback seems to have split up into seperate threads, I started this one just to discuss aspect ratio! Here's my dilemma. All the images for my shows are scanned at 800x600. I want to keep that aspect ratio (4:3) when I burn my shows to DVD, because most of my customers still use 4:3 TVs rather than the newer, 16:9 digital TVs. I know that DVDs _can_ have that aspect ratio because I've rented many at my local Blockbuster that use it. When I produce a custom AVI at 800x600, that's what I get - an AVI with frames of 800x600 pixels. But not all those pixels are taken up by my original images. PTE is reducing the size of the actual image and putting a thick black border around them. I've burned that AVI directly to DVD using Roxio and also using Roxio after a TMPGenc encoding to MPEG2. In both cases I see the thick black border on my TV screen. Is anyone else having this problem, or have all of you who've managed to burn a DVD been using shows with 720x480 images? Is there still a thick, black border when using 720x480 images? Igor, is this intentional? If so, what is the purpose? I'd really appreciate help with this because it looks unprofessional and I don't think my customers will be happy with it. And I really can't take the time to rescan every slide to 720x480 and go through all the original digital retouching I did - that would be a 3-month project by itself!!!! Ray

In Project Options -- Screen, the aspect ratio of the slide has to be specified, i.e. 4:3 or 16:9, etc. to suit the corresponding display ratio of the PC monitor. The problem is that the slideshow may sometimes need to be displayed on monitors of different ratios. I found that when I set the ratio of the slide at 4:3 and display it on a 16:9 monitor, 4 black strips appear around all sides of the slide whereas I expect that only 2 black strips appear at the left and right sides. Similarly, when I set the ratio of the slide at 16:9 and display it on a 4:3 monitor, 4 black strips appear around all sides of the slide whereas I expect that only 2 black strips appear at the top and bottom sides. Could the administrator or any member help to fixt the above problems in PicturestoEXE 5.XX, which do not occur in version 4.xx?[size="4"]

I am tearing my hair out because I have saved my slideshow in all 6 screen formats and have established that the best one which fills my TV screen height and only has a small gap at each edge is 1200 x 768 - this plays fine via my laptop onto my TV screen from the .exe format. When I take it through video builder however and choose 16:9 option for screen size it squashes it and leaves a large gap top and bottom!! The only other option I have is 4:3 which is clearly not the correct one for a letterbox format TV screen (15:9) Please can anyone suggest what settings I choose to get my slideshow DVD to fill at least the height of my TV screen - it seems to make everyone look like dwarfs! Thanks Joy

The recent discussion "LED TV + WD HD player=Fantastic!!!" has been very interesting. May I suggest a different approach, using PTE's wonderful animation? Best done in a new topic, I decided. My shows tend to have a mix of 3:2 and 16:9 images. Whether on my TV or my PC, I want to see a decent show, with my images filling the screen. Definitely no distortion, and preferably no black borders. So I rely on PTE's wonderful animation to give a borderless display, with the added interest of subtle animation. To be able to enjoy shows on the PC or the TV, I need to produce two shows, one 4:3 and the other 16:9. I needed a reasonably pain-free way of producing two separate shows with different animations. I start with a PTE file with no animation, saved in two versions, 4:3 and 16:9. I then process each with a small program I have written that adds animation using gentle panning and zooming. The result fills the screen. Typically an image is shown in its entirety - just not all at once. I now have two PTE files with animation keyframes on each slide. I find I can accept the randomly generated effect on the majority of slides. For those that need adjusting, I don't need to add keyframes - they are already there - I simply adjust their position, zoom and pan parameters where desirable. Panoramic images are detected, and appropriately panned. My program is not by any means perfect yet, and will probably need to be altered for new versions of PTE. However, I do find it helpful at this stage of my PTE adventures - and I see no more nasty borders! I would be happy to share the program, if anyone is interested. Regards to all ... APLman (Ken)

If I´ve prepared my images (from my Nikon D300) in Photoshop by resizing them to 1626x1080 (the projectors resolution is 1920x1080) what settings do I use in Project Options "Screen and Slide" for the best viewing quality? __________ Your display - 16:9 and fullscreen (obviously) Aspects of ratio of a slide - ?? Size of slide - ?? Should I choose "Fixed size of slide" or not __________ ?? = what should I put in there ;-) I will show the slideshow as an exefile from the computer via HDMI on the projector and only use the effect fade in/out. I´m aware that I will get black strips on the sides because the ratio on the pictures from the D300 doesn´t fit the 16:9 ratio but I don´t want the pictures to fill the screen because I will do the composition of the picture in the camera and don´t want to take away anything or change the image in any way.

I have been spending a little time investigating the effect of differing aspect ratio slide shows being presented with the current (Beta 2) version of PTE5. (Following onfrom Ken's Topic). I have come to the conclusion that there is no problem as long as the following procedure is adopted. Let's take, for example, a show which I decide to put together using full screen on my 1.333 ratio (1280x854) monitor. It just so happens that this is the aspect ratio of my camera images so nothing is lost if I want to use these images straight out of the camera. The "Project Options" that I set for Screen would be: Fit Slide To Screen - 4:3 PC/DVD - 1.3333 I also set Windowed Mode and enter the same aspect ratio figures there i.e. 1280x854 My background would be Solid Black. Obviously, if I now add an image which is 1280x854 it will immediately cover the black area in Objects and Animations and if I press preview I will get a full screen image. If I had wanted to start with a 120% zoom into the image and then zoom out to 100% or vice versa then I would start with a 1536 pixel wide image (or greater). To this I would now add a thin white line around the image by inserting a 1280x854 pixel PNG file with a 3-6 pixel white border inside (as an object) on top of my original 1280 or 1536 pixel image making sure that it is not added to the Main Image but as an independent object (otherwise it would zoom with the Main Image). The preview would now show the same image, full screen, but this time within a thin white line border. I would have to add this same PNG file to every image in the show but this is not a big problem. My one image show is now ready to be turned into an EXE file and will play full screen on my 1.3333 ratio monitor. But what happens if I send this to someone with a different size or different aspect ratio monitor? If the recipient has a 1280x1024 (1.25) monitor then the EXE will play full width, all zooms etc contained within a white bounding line with black bands top and bottom. I have not tried it, but I am assuming that anyone with a wide screen (wider than the 1280x854 aspect ratio) would see the black bands on either side of the image rather than top and bottom. So there it is - one size fits all. Other things to consider: The recipient might have a larger monitor (bigger than the 1280 pixel width). If I want to cater for this possibility then I will have to make the minimum size of my images the same as the maximum monitor resolution which is possible in order to avoid PTE having to interpolate upwards. For instance if I want to cater for a 1600x1200 monitor then all of my images will have to be 1600 (plus any zooming percentage) wide. DaveG

Hello Everybody This is just an experiment I wish to share with all that might be interested. I’ve been trying to get a good understanding of Pan & Zoom as related to a photos aspect ratio and the corresponding aspect ratio of the monitor to be used to view the photo in PTE 5. Most cameras shoot photos in two different aspect ratios, i.e., 6x4 and 4x3. There are variations but these are the most common. PC monitors used to be exclusively 4x3 but the world has changed. 4x3 is probably still the most common. The new flat screen LCD monitors are normally 5x4. Wide screen Laptops are typically 8x5. Plasma or LCD HDTV’s are typically 16x9. Thus, the aspect ratios a PTE 5 designer must contend with are: 6x4 4x3 5x4 8x5 16x9 I grabbed a photo from a digital 6mp SLR that has an aspect ratio of 6x4. I then proceeded to crop from this original (3072x2048 pixels) the various aspect ratios listed above. These were all straight crops with no resizing. This resulted in 5 jpgs with pixel sizes as follows: Photo_6x4 = 3072x2048 Photo_4x3 = 2741x2048 Photo_5x4 = 2560x2048 Photo_8x5 = 3072x1920 Photo_16x9 = 3072x1728 I divided each photograph in precise quadrants with a white outline for each quarter. I created a PTE 5 slideshow with the 5 images. The slideshow starts with the 6x4 image at a zoom of 100% with the properties mode set at “fit to screen”. The show then zooms to the upper left quadrant at 200% zoom. The show then pans to the upper right quadrant followed by a pan to the lower right quadrant and then to the botom left quadrant all at 200% zoom. The show then zooms back out at 100%. This is followed by a zoom to the photos center at 200%. This process is then repeated for the remaining 4 photos of varying aspect ratios. I have posted the slideshow PTE files at the following location: http://briefcase.yahoo.com/bc/sknickles@sb...ic+Data&.view=l It’s the file named Pan&Zoom and is approximately 6.5mb in size. You may have to hit the browser refresh several times to access the file. The project option for screen has been set to 4:3 PC. If you download you may desire to change this option and view the effect. The object property for all images was set to “fit to screen”. You might also desire to change this and view the effect. I presently have computer displays of 4x3, 5x4, and 8x5 aspect ratios that I have ran the show on. I’ve not drawn any conclusions yet but it does give me a pretty good feel for how the Pan & Zoom is affected by aspect ratios. Of course most of you most likely understand all of this…I may just be a slow learner. nickles