Pictures-To-Exe v7.0

[fh1805]

On the evening of Friday 17th September I, and approximately 100 other attendees at the Royal Photographic Society's 19th International Audio-Visual Festival, listened to Igor Kokarev as he gave a brief insight into the features that are being worked on by the WnSoft developers for v7.0 of PTE. I spoke with Igor several times over the course of the Festival weekend and he agreed that I should post this summary on the forum:

Video clips

It will be possible to include video clips in a PTE project. The development team have set themselves the objective of us being able to include a video clip just as we do any other object, with all the O&A capability that we have for single objects: pan, zoom, rotate, 3D transforms, etc. - and to do this in a manner that will run with the lowest possible requirement for hardware capability. An immense challenge for the Wnsoft team!

Blur

It will be possible to apply blur to an object in a smooth manner between two keyframes on the object's timeline. Igor demonstrated a simple example of this Blur feature. The creative possibilities of this are almost limitless.

Enhanced timeline

The timeline display will be given a major re-write so that it can support the display of multiple audio files.

Release date

The current target that WnSoft are working towards is to release v7.0 approximately 7-8 months after v6.5's release. If they can keep to that schedule I think we could see the first beta release in late-November or early-December (what a wonderful Christmas present for us all to play with!)

Mac version

Igor also spoke briefly about the Mac version. It is coming along but the scale of the project is very large for such a small company. Their desire is to have just one set of source code that is common to both the Windows version and the Mac version. To make this possible they have had to learn a new programming language and are having to totally re-write all of PTE in this new language. Another major challenge for the team! The native Mac version will not be part of PTE v7.0.

In our private conversations Igor expressed his gratitude to everyone on the forum for their ideas and suggestions and for the contributions that the forum members make to the beta testing of each new PTE version. He really does appreciate all that we do to help WnSoft develop this wonderful product. I pass his thanks on to you all.

On an entirely unrelated matter I can report that Igor is enjoying his vacation in the UK. He has spent the first week in the English Lake District and will be spending the second week in the Snowdonia area of North Wales. He expects to be back home on Sunday 26th September.

regards,

Peter

[8321]

Hello Peter.

Thanks for passing on what you learnt this past weekend. I am sure everyone on the forum who could not be there appreciates your summary.

On a related point, where are the results of the judging posted? They are not on the Competition site yet.

Regards, Jeff

[fh1805]

Jeff,

Give Ian Bateman a chance to get back home! I feel sure that they will appear there in due course.

regards,

Peter

[davegee]

Thanks for the update, Peter.

Exciting times ahead for all!

The Blur feature promises to be great tool for all who use PZR creatively and the Timeline changes are a positive step toward an integrated Audio Editing package.

DG

[Jean-Cyprien]

Thank you Peter ! A lot of work for the team !

[fh1805]

...On a related point, where are the results of the judging posted? They are not on the Competition site yet...

Jeff,

The results can be found here: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=12407

regards,

Peter

[thedom]

Thank you very much Peter, much appreciated!

I can't wait for this new version and especially the blur feature.

Fingers crossed for a first beta before christmas...

If you have the opportunity, say Hi to Igor.

[Maureen]

At the Royal Photographic Society International Av Championships Igor was one of two recipients awarded the prestigious Dobson-Henry medal.

This awrd is not given very often and is awarded for long term services to the AV World.

It was a great honour and shows the high regard and esteem the RPS Av Group give to Igor and his work with PTE.

Igor was delighted.

The Festival was a great success and it was wonderful to meet so many PTE workers from all around the World.

[jkb]

The Citation for Igor's award is available on www.avnews.org.uk along with some details about the award & previous recipients.

Maurice and Liliane Dorikens of Belgium were also awarded a Dobson Henry medal for their services to AV.

Pictures & results of the Internationals are also available on the website along with details of other events & festivals (on the Calendar Page)

Jill & John

Editors of AV News Magazine

[baumettes]

Thank you Peter for this very exciting information and congratulations to Igor (and the team) for his award.

[smithore]

Video clip capabilities? Whaou!!! I'm waiting this till years!!!

Now I'm obliged to use video software editor to mix pictures and films.....

thanks Igor!

[Cameraways]

As the song goes; - "I'm so excited"

and "All I want for Christmas" -

Good luck to the Mac development team. Hopefully the stability of the Mac won't let you or the "Flat World" critics down!!

Can't wait!!

[potwnc]

When it comes to importing video I wonder how anyone feels about the following issue that it will inevitably introduce.

If I have a current PTE project I can set the frame rate of rendered video to anything I want: 25fps for most of the world, 29.97 for NTSC countries, 24p for Blu-ray etc. But when I (or someone else) shoot the video I intend to import I can only shoot at a pre-determined rate. So if I import, say, 30fps video that a friend in, say, Canada shot (being from Canada it is likely to be 30fps) but I want to render out my final video at, say, 25fps because I live in Europe, how should PTE handle the conversion? It may sound simple but when you add in factors like interlaced imported video to progressive final video output etc. it becomes complicated. This is an issue that the digital video industry at large has to deal with and there is no one solution. What do we want PTE to support in these scenarios?

[Igor]

We've decided move Blur feature of objects for a further version after 7.0. Apparently it will be 7.5. There is a need to vastly rewrite graphical engine to vastly optimize Blur effect and reduce requirements for video card. That was a bad news.

There is good news. We've added another fantastic effect/option which will be useful for almost all users. I came up with this idea (and technical realization) in mountains of North Wales during my recent vacation. I consider this feature as a main key feature of version 7.0 and great step in evolution of PicturesToExe. No other slideshow software has this feature yet.

[Guest Yachtsman1]

We've decided move Blur feature of objects for a further version after 7.0. Apparently it will be 7.5. There is a need to vastly rewrite graphical engine to vastly optimize Blur effect and reduce requirements for video card. That was a bad news.

There is good news. We've added another fantastic effect/option which will be useful for almost all users. I came up with this idea (and technical realization) in mountains of North Wales during my recent vacation. I consider this feature is a main key feature of version 7.0 and great step in evolution of PicturesToExe. No other slideshow software has this feature yet.

That's like looking at the sweets in the shop with the wrappers on, Give us a clue? what is the feature?????

Yachtsman1

[Picsel]

Hi Igor

we are eager to know a little bit more about these good news...suspense!

Just coming back to video clips, it seems that the video market (cameras, camcorders, HDTV) will use mainly 3 formats based on H264 (MPEG-4 AVC) video coding standard :

- 1280x720p (50fps and ~60fps) for HDTV programs and some cameras

- 1920x1080i (25fps and ~30 fps) for HDTV programs, AVCHD camcorders and cameras

- 1920x1080p 24fps for blu-ray movies

The main parameter is the video coding data rate, high quality videos requires between 10 and 25Mbit/s following the coding profile(which is the case for my Sony AVCHD camcorder HP@L4 : 16Mbit/s) which provides very huge video files (around 2Mbytes per second of video).

Could you explain how you intend to insert such video clips with PTE slideshows without making PTE too much complicated to use?

By experience, AVCHD video editing requires very powerful PC configuration (quad core processors and more than 6Gbytes RAM). And on top of that you spend half an hour for 5' video rendering in comparison with seconds for an exe as it is today. I can guess it could be less power consuming if it was possible not re-coding all the video clip but only the transtions with slides and that would be a very great improvement in HD video editing.

Another way (refer to DivX Plus, Youtube, HD coding) would be to lower the video quality by reducing coding data rate. For example, DivX Plus or YouTube video data rate coding for 1280x720p is around 3.5Mbit/s which provides a good compromise and acceptable result but requires re-coding all the video clip with a lower quality profile.

Waiting for your comments...

Best regards and good luck!

Daniel

101029 Edit : ... more than 6Gbytes RAM (and not 6Mbytes RAM)

[potwnc]

By experience, AVCHD video editing requires very powerful PC configuration (quad core processors and more than 6Mbytes RAM).

I think this is a good argument for a 64-bit version of PTE. Today the .AVI that PTE outputs with the PTE codec cannot be read by the 64-bit version of Sony Vegas Pro that I use (version 8.1, but I'm sure the same will be true of the latest version, 10). So I have to use the 32-bit version which cannot see 6GB (I'm sure you meant GB and not MB) of RAM - only 2GB. That makes AVC encoding even slower!

Ray

[Picsel]

I'm sure you meant GB and not MB) of RAM - only 2GB. That makes AVC encoding even slower!

Hi Ray

thank you for correcting my error, obviously...more than 6GB! I agree with you, AVC editing requires 64bits processor architecture and compatible softwares to speed up the video coding process .

Daniel

[vilara]

Igor, what about this sugestion : Can I afford a suggestion for a future version?

Would it be possible after a animation of picture to retrieve the final image that it serve as point of departure for a new animation? In fact, make a copy/paste instant

[potwnc]

I think this is a good argument for a 64-bit version of PTE. Today the .AVI that PTE outputs with the PTE codec cannot be read by the 64-bit version of Sony Vegas Pro that I use (version 8.1, but I'm sure the same will be true of the latest version, 10). So I have to use the 32-bit version which cannot see 6GB (I'm sure you meant GB and not MB) of RAM - only 2GB. That makes AVC encoding even slower!

Ray

I can now confirm that the 64-bit version 10 also does not see the .avi files created with the PTE codec.