Uneven animation quality with menu structure

[Ed Overstreet]

I don’t know whether what I’m about to describe is unique to my system components or whether it’s a more common problem, but I thought I should report it here.

My system is Windows XP Home on a Dell Inspiron 9200 laptop with 1 GB RAM and an ATI Radeon 9700 128MB video card. I am using PTE 5 Deluxe to create the shows described below, sizing all shows for 1400x1050 pixels and running on a monitor set for 1600x1200 pixel resolution.

I have created seven shows, ranging in length from about 3 minutes to nearly 24 minutes. All of them use animations, some panning and zooming, but also some of what I call “fade to black” animations, which involves adjusting the opacity of fades between specific slides so the fades overlap somewhat when the first image is nearly black but not quite (useful when transiting between portrait and landscape format).

All the animation effects work very smoothly on my system, with the 3D hardware acceleration switched turned on in each show, when I run a given EXE show on its own from Windows Explorer.

However, I created a menu “show” in which each of these shows can be launched from a button within a single-image stationary “wallpaper” design. Whatever I do with the hardware acceleration switch on that menu show (on or off, doesn’t seem to matter much), the pan-and-zoom animations look very jerky. The “fades to black” opacity animations still look OK however, but honestly the pan and zoom effects look so bad when I run the shows through the menu that I’ve decided to abandon the menu approach and to run each of the separate shows instead from Windows Explorer, which I know will produce a smooth animation appearance. The menu show consists only of three slides, the wallpaper with the buttons and a black slide before and after that wallpaper slide. It is totally controlled by the mouse buttons, and there is no music attached to the menu show (all the other seven shows have sound tracks for the full duration of each show, in MP3 format).

I can provide more technical information on the show sizes etc. if that would be of any help.

Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Any suggestions for a fix? (Please don't tell me to replace my ATI card, I'm not doing that for now, and besides the card is quite able to run the animations smoothly via Windows Explorer though with problems concerning color calibration as discussed extensively elsewhere on this forum.) I can live with running these shows (for a presentation at my photo club) out of Windows Explorer if I have to, but it would be nice to use the menu-and-button approach if I can do so without ruining the quality of the pan-and-zoom animations.

UPDATED: On some further investigation, I have discovered the above-mentioned problems with the quality of pan-and-zoom animations only seems to occur when I run a show through a button in the menu show which was launched by clicking on the menu show in Windows Explorer (i.e. run as an exe). If I open the menu-show project in PTE, launch the menu as a preview, and then launch any of my seven shows by clicking on its button in the menu when run as a Preview in PTE, the problem does not replicate. This problem seems to be unique to the exe file of the menu, not the pte file. Why would that be?

[nobeefstu]

Ed,

You might want to check your Menu Show file and verify again that Hardware Acceleration checkbox is disabled. Recompile the Menu Show just to be safe/sure.

The other Shows can be Hardware Acceleration and used from the Menu Show. Just remember that each Hardware Acceleration Show must be fully closed before launching the next ... as hardware acceleration resources can only be dedicated to one instance at a time.

I have no problem with using a Menu Show (with out Hardware Acceleration) where the other Shows are using Hardware Acceleration enabled. However, my shows are created in 1024x768 and not 1400x1050.

[Ed Overstreet]

Ed,

You might want to check your Menu Show file and verify again that Hardware Acceleration checkbox is disabled. Recompile the Menu Show just to be safe/sure.

The other Shows can be Hardware Acceleration and used from the Menu Show. Just remember that each Hardware Acceleration Show must be fully closed before launching the next ... as hardware acceleration resources can only be dedicated to one instance at a time.

I have no problem with using a Menu Show (with out Hardware Acceleration) where the other Shows are using Hardware Acceleration enabled. However, my shows are created in 1024x768 and not 1400x1050.

Thanks for the tip. The hardware acceleration checkbox was disabled in the menu show, but I re-compiled it and still replicated the problem.

Maybe the 1400x1050 size is part of the problem. I'll re-create a copy of the menu show and one of the other shows to 1024x768 and see if the problem persists, will post another reply with the results when I've done that.

[Ed Overstreet]

Thanks for the tip. The hardware acceleration checkbox was disabled in the menu show, but I re-compiled it and still replicated the problem.

Maybe the 1400x1050 size is part of the problem. I'll re-create a copy of the menu show and one of the other shows to 1024x768 and see if the problem persists, will post another reply with the results when I've done that.

Reducing all the images to 1024x768 in size does seem to reduce the problem, though it doesn't completely eliminate it. However the smaller images are very problematic for some of my pan and zooms, resulting in very-soft low-resolution close-ups in some animations. So the resizing option isn't tempting, even before considering the amount of work it would entail in my case (nearly 600 images spread over the seven shows).

I never had problems running shows from menus at 1400x1050 in version 4.48, but of course none of those shows had animations. If good animations in shows intended for display via a menu are going to require images be kept to 1024x768, for me at least that is a pretty serious limitation which will weigh against my using menu shows at all. If I can get what I want through Windows Explorer (and I can, in the case of these particular examples), but not through a menu show, then I'll just have to live without menus. Unfortunate.

[nobeefstu]

Ed.

It may be your current 1600x1200 monitor screen setting used. I believe this is peak setting for your video card ... try optimal resolution or just lower current to see if any improvement. Running both the Menu and the Show may be borderlining your card performance/resources. Some Monitors/Screens not set to optimal use alot more resources to achieve the higher screen resolutions. By lowering to default/optimal settings may solve your issue.

Usuall practice when doing zoom/animations ... is to double the normal image size. No need to double the size of non-animated slides.

[Ed Overstreet]

Ed.

It may be your current 1600x1200 monitor screen setting used. I believe this is peak setting for your video card ... try optimal resolution or lower to see if any improvement. Running both the Menu and the Show may be borderlining your resources. Some Monitors/Screens not set to optimal use alot more resources to achieved the higher screen resolutions. By lowering to default or optimal may solve your issue.

Usuall practice when doing zoom/animations ... is to double the normal image size. No need to double the size of non-animated slides.

Thanks very much for the tip about lowering the screen resolution while running the menu show, Stu. That seems to have cleared up the problem, without needing to resize any of the images.

I guess that means when I run this on projection at the club, we may need to scale back that system to 1024x768 instead of our usual 1400x1050 (that latter option isn't available on my video card but is on the club's), to play it safe. If I arrive early enough and there's time, I may run a test at 1400x1050 and see what it looks like, failing that we'll scale back the screen resolution.

Interesting how PTE can handle one monster pano file (about 6600x1050 pixels) resizing on the fly through the menu show down to 1024x768 equivalent size and still look very smooth (just one little blip about halfway through, but much smoother than when I ran it through the menu show at 1600x1200). Must remember this trick if I stumble into the problem again ...

Cheers and thanks again.