Lin Evans

JT, What does that have to do with PTE? Many, many, many software programs allow you to run multiple instances simultaneously. Try IrfanView, BluffTitler, Microsoft Office, Avidemux, PhotoScape, PhotoZoom Pro, etc, etc. Most software which doesn't allow opening the same image or document a second time does not allow multiple instances of the same program. Photoshop will not let you open Photoshop if it is already open. The advantage of software which allows multiple instances is the ability to borrow portions of work and copy paste to another instance without saving, closing, opening another instance, loading a different project, copy, close the second instance, open the program again, load the project you were originally working on and paste. Much, much easier to have the software running in two instances simultaneously then simply switch back and forth in the task bar. It's a tremendous time saving feature. Of course it assumes the user is capable of using the feature. It's not possible for a developer to foresee all possible user errors. It rather reminds me of the warnings put on coffee cups at McDonald's to not drive your car with hot coffee in a cup between your legs. Some woman did that, burned herself when she slammed on the brakes and then brought legal action against McDonald's. People should be assumed to use good judgment. Another person driving a large motor-home put the cruise control "on" then walked back into the motor home to use the rest room. It crashed - duhhh...

Roel, That has always been possible with Windows. Most software will open multiple times - that's why you have a task bar which clearly indicates what is running (at the bottom of your screen). Look in your task manager and see how many instances of your browser are running simultaneously. With Chrome there may be five or more. Many of us use this as a feature - it's necessary to pay attention to what you are doing... Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, Not to try to complicate this any more that already, but Manuel said the problem also appears with EXE files which previously ran fine. Once the EXE is created, PTE is out of the equation AFAIK? Also Manuel didn't say that his system has any but the internal graphics. Tis a mystery... What does this Windows 10 update 1803 offer in terms of "features?" I suppose if auto updates are turned on for the OS that could indeed be the problem and if it's not all that difficult to back out of that Win 10 update, that would be worth trying. For future Win 10 updates I'm wondering if it's necessary to have 1803 on board before more recent updates are done or whether it's like camera firmware where you can skip intermediate updates and just install the latest and greatest? Best regards, Lin

Thanks Ken, I will do that! She's a happy little camper. All her hard work over the years has paid off well. Best regards, Lin

Manuel, that pretty much removes the internal PTE 9 video player from the equation and begins to look like an issue with Windows 10 and the video card drivers. Do you know if they have been recently updated or if Win 10 has been recently updated? The fact that previous EXE files which did work fine have problems pretty much removes the latest PTE video changes from consideration since the exe isn't using PTE to play but only Win 10 and the video card. I still think your best bet is to let Igor know and deal with researching this. Best regards, Lin

Hi Rose, There are a couple ways to proceed. If your show is in EXE or Mac executable format you can either post it to http://www.slideshowclub.com or you can post it to your own website if your have one. To post a Windows exe file it's first necessary to zip it using any common zip program. If you are using Windows there is one as part of the operating system. Mac output can automatically be in the zip format when you create the zip file. If your shows are in video format, you can upload them to YouTube or Vimeo and post a link here or you can zip the video and put it on your own website or use something like drop-box or other file sharing service and provide a link for people here to download. If you need further help, just let us know and we will try to help you get started... Best regards, Lin

Logic would then say that the problem is some incompatibility between the algorithms in PTE 9 and Windows 10 or the algorithms in your video card and PTE 9. If the video runs smoothly in PTE 8 which I think you meant rather than "ran without problems in windows" (ran without problems in Version 8?). The video card is the same, the hardware is the same , the drivers are the same so something about the new video code and Windows 10 code or the video driver code is problematic. Not knowing exactly what the changes in video were I can't guess where the problem actually lies, but when it runs under other video programs and runs under PTE 8 but does not run correctly under PTE 9 with the same hardware and OS, then there would appear to be a problem with some interaction between the video in PTE 9 and Windows 10 or the video in PTE 9 and your video card driver. This is one which is best left for Igor to try to sort... Best regards, Lin

Manuel, What happens when you try to run the converted video under PTE 8? Just load the video itself - of course the PTE file won't be compatible... Best regards, Lin

Laptop or desktop? It runs smooth as silk on my systems, but the video is upside down. If you are running it on a laptop and you have recently updated either the OS or the video drivers, that would be a place to start looking. Also if you are running some sort of anti-virus which has been recently updated, try temporarily disabling that. The fact that this is a recent problem and things used to be normal implies some resource change. Lin

But, is there some advantage of 30fps and 60fps over 29.97 and 59.94? If so, what is it? Photoshop, though having video capabilities, is not a dedicated video editor nor is Wings Platinum. Photoshop also offers 23.976 fps as well as 24fps but really, is there any advantage or is it just numbers? I can not visually see any differences between 59.94 fps and 60 fps myself and I seriously doubt if anyone can. Does a video rendered at 30 fps and played back at 29.97 fps look any different in reality? Are we just playing with numbers because there are so very many different frame rates out there, where does one stop? Does it make any serious difference whether we have a true 30 and 60 fps rate when the vast majority of videos are rendered at 29.97 and 59.94? Does having 30 and 60 fps for Photoshop somehow make Photoshop more useful for video than Adobe's flagship dedicated video program Premier? Convince me! Best regards, Lin

If there is some advantage to 30fps and 60fps I'm not aware of it myself. Anyone who has information why it would be advantageous to have also 30fps and 60fps please let me know. Best regards, Lin

Essentially, the difference is with expressed dynamic range. The "levels" adjustment could be used to make them virtually identical. The perceived sharpness differences are due to greater contrast on the image on the left. The image on the right has slightly higher saturation, especially in the blues perhaps due to the level's difference. Both are well within the range of normal and they could be made to look identical with existing PTE controls IMHO. Best regards, Lin

Thanks Igor !! Best regards, Lin

It's a long story, but 59.94 is double the 29.97 fps commonly called 30 fps. Most digital cameras actually use 29.97 fps even though they call it 30 fps often in the manuals. It's a hold over from early TV days where a combination of the frequency of the electrical supply (60Hz) and the amount of broadcast “bandwidth” that was available to the first color analog TV signals worked out to 29.97. Likewise the 60 fps from most digital cameras is actually 59.94 fps. It could be actually changed, but keeping the frame rates the same is easier than the math it would take to make them actually 30 and 60 fps. At least that the way I understand it. Best regards, Lin

My only granddaughter Lyndsey just graduated from high school in Norco, California. She was 2nd runner-up in the America's Miss Teen California pageant a while back, was a 4.0 gpa honors student in high school, one of only four at her school to be elected to All-American status on her high school cheer leading team and was invited to and performed in the London New Year's Parade. She received an academic scholarship to the prestigious California Baptist University and tried out and made their impressive cheer leading team who won the United States National cheer leading championships for the sixth consecutive year. All in all a pretty major accomplishment for a young lady who has a very proud grand dad! I made a little congratulatory show for her. Thanks Jean Cyprien for the Sapin Babel style used in this little show. Lin http://www.lin-evans.org/pte/lyndseycongrats.zip (Windows - about 20 meg) http://www.lin-evans.org/pte/lyndseycongratsmac.zip (Mac - about 20 meg)

Excellent use of images and dramatic background sound Barry. Nice job... Best regards, Lin

Yes Chris. Mute the video then in Project Options add the video as an audio. When you click on the Audio Tab of Project Options then the ensuing Add Audio File, you have the option of changing the default Audio File to a Video by clicking on the little blue box with the down arrow on the right. Once you have added the Video as an audio, a waveform will appear in the timeline and you can fade - in , fade - out, adjust the audio on the video in any way you like just as you would an mp3 audio. See user's manual... Lin

Hi Nelson, Really good green screen results requires a more dedicated Video editor than PTE. The Chroma Key capabilities are not terribly sophisticated. By using a tool like Adobe After Effects it's possible to completely eliminate the sight green halo around objects including the green plastic or cloth used for the effect. Unfortunately in PTE we don't have that level of control yet - perhaps in PTE 10, but the important thing to me is that it "can" be done and it's fun to play with. It's best if the background is other than mostly green. I didn't have a good place for a quick sample so used my yard which is far from ideal. Having all that extra green tends to complicate things. Actually, PTE can use any color for the key so when doing this exercise with lots of green in the picture, wear clothes with zero red and use a red cloth for the chroma key extraction sheet. I'll try to make another using red and post it later. Best regards, Lin

I had to laugh recently because a video was circulating on the web about a Chinese Physicist who had invented a cloak of invisibility. It was a nice little video which had fooled many halfway intelligent people - too many in fact. I then created the little slide of my plastic sheet which I pulled over a cougar and made her invisible then promised maybe a little video demo. Today I was rather tired - I mowed my front yard, edged and swept it and felt like disappearing - getting old I guess. So I decided to have a tiny bit of fun and made this little video so I could disappear in my front yard. For a fun project, it's a really simple thing to do with PicturesToExe. The things needed are a still camera (which can take video's), a tripod and a plain green sheet. Find a nice background (something much nicer than my front yard) and set the camera on a tripod and focus and zoom as desired. Shoot a still image then turn on your video and walk into the frame with your green sheet. Maybe it would be a fun thing for your kids or grand kids - make them disappear? They love this kind of thing. Just take your video and your still image into PTE and if you can't shoot the video and still at the same aspect ratio, you'll need to trim/crop/size to make them identical. Load the still then go to Objects and Animations and load the video. Use the mini viewer or pull the keyframe to get a good frame of your green sheet with the video selected and on the Properties Tab, click on the Chroma Key and use the eyedropper to select your green sheet. Adjust the value a bit higher than the default of five (I used 12). Add a leading blank slide and perhaps a trailing blank for comments - mute the sound on the video and put in your own audio comments or if the sound on the video is good, leave it. That's all there is to it folks! Happy invisibility Playing... Lin NOTE: If your video from your camera doesn't function in Version 9, try it in Version 8 and convert it. The conversion will work in Version 9 most every time. I've noticed my videos from my Nikon P900 which are a mov format are sometimes not recognized by Version 9 but play fine in Version 8. In my own camera (Nikon P900) I have to set the still image to zoom to 120 to match the video capture. The camera apparently does an internal zoom out without changing the actual physical position of the lens zoom. You can set the opacity on PTE to completely adjust the video and still image so that they perfectly coincide if necessary... To avoid all this, you CAN simply take two identical videos - one of simply the background and one of the object, person, pet, etc., to become invisible. Then use the two videos as you would the still image and video... either way works fine. It's best if your background doesn't contain lots of green like mine - easier to key out the green without interference. Also when using two videos, the keying must be done on the "top" video in O&A where when using a still image the video will be on the bottom rather than the top layer.

Hi Barry, I suspect that the majority of people who use satellite internet and have to pay a penalty for uploads and downloads which go over their allotted capacity are here in the USA and of our frequent forum participants, there really are a numerical minority from the USA. I don't know this for a fact, but I also suspect that the USA represents a much smaller percentage of PTE users than those from the UK, Australia, and Europe so being concerned about a relatively huge file size was really my concern for people I know. The vast majority of my own personal friends are not PTE users nor do most live in or close to cities. Other than my next door neighbor, whom I talk with mostly on FB, my closest friend lives 160 miles south of me and has satellite internet so I can't even link her to my shows other than on FB or YouTube. My closest relative lives about 1200 miles from me and the few friends with whom I communicate on a regular basis live very, very far away. I try to keep my own shows small enough that they can be posted to FB or YouTube but I've not been happy with the quality of either if there is any serious degree of animation. I was pleasantly surprised that even with all the animation and video in the demonstration on this last test, the actual video was, at least to me, virtually indistinguishable from the EXE version. However, I realize that trying to stream such a large show over YouTube or FaceBook is a recipe for disaster for all my non PTE friends who have slow internet so the great smoothness would probably be lost due to the bitrate not being amenable to their bandwidth in a streaming format. I have no problems myself with downloading or uploading a large file because I have multiple systems and can continue working while a three hour or more upload is happening. On the other hand were I on a satellite internet it would definitely be a huge problem. Sadly, many satellite internet plans here charge a substantial premium if one goes over their allotted capacity. In addition, for example, trying to upload or download a huge file often results in failure. Perhaps this fail is due to some glitch such as drops on a cell phone, but uploading 500 meg of a gigabyte or more file size and having to start over is not fun and it happens frequently enough that most here in the USA who have satellite service simply will not attempt to upload or download huge files even if their internet plan doesn't penalize them by capacity. I will check with some of my friends and see what the actual cost of exceeding their plan capacity is and post it. Lin Later: Below is the least expensive plan I could find for satellite service in my area. Their plans run from $49.99 per month for a 10 gigabyte limit without penalty (this one doesn't charge extra, but slows your service to a crawl if you exceed capacity) to 129.99 per month for a 50 gigabyte plan. The download speed is up to 25 Mbps and the upload speed is up to 3 Mbps. At this speed it would take six hours or more to upload my test file. There are provisions for higher capacity without penalty for certain off-peak hours but most people are sound asleep at these times. My two friend who have this service in my state tell me that they have never gotten anywhere near 25 Mbps on their download but generally get about 5 Mbps and the upload speed rarely goes over 2 Mbps.

The issue is that what is possible in some areas is nearly impossible in others. Here in the USA in or around large cities there is cable internet and in some places such as the nearby town I mentioned even gigabit symmetrical (download and upload are the same speed) which is fantastic if you have it. On the other hand, where I live and in many parts of the USA all that is available is DSL and in many rural places only satellite internet which is extremely expensive and very slow. You are often charged a huge premium if you exceed your allotted download or upload limits. The USA like Australia is a huge place, but our population is much greater and in our western states very scattered so that we have thousands of tiny communities which only have copper wire so fast internet isn't available from fiber optic and many do not have cable available. This leaves either dial up with DSL where it's available and in many, many cases satellite which at best is relatively poor. The bottom line is that many of my friends can't download huge files. It's not because of the time, it's because of the cost. I assume that sometime in the future (years) there will be fast and reasonably priced internet available, but I doubt it will happen during my life. The issue with AV competition is something I have no experience with at all since it's as rare as hen's teeth in about any area I've lived in on this continent to even find AV competitions. There was interest many years ago as well as many camera clubs, etc., but not any more. There is probably a good reason why Slideshowcub has file size limits and it may well be due to costs. I pay about $50 per month for my own web host which is unlimited for storage but more expensive than many would probably find comfortable. There is most likely much less expensive storage available, but using it would require losing things on sites I've participated on since the late 1990's and should it be that I couldn't keep my current URL, all images, etc., links to these photo sites would be broken by moving all my code and images to lesser expensive storage so I keep it even though I really can't afford it. Years ago I lost my lin-evans dot com and had to take lin-evans dot org and it was weeks of editing on sites like dPReview to update links. Usually one can keep their domain but when it's sold by your host and you change hosts it can get dicey at times.... Lin

Thanks! I figured it was already too big and that most would not have the bandwidth to download it. In a few years I'm guessing that more will have fiber optic lines and fast internet in this country. As I said earlier, I'm jealous of the town about ten miles south of me where everyone has gigabit symmetrical. They can download or upload a full HD movie in 10 seconds. Hard to understand when it take hours for me to upload a 1.27 gig video. I have plenty of computing power (32 gig's RAM, etc.) on my Win 8.1 system but I much prefer using my XP system. I've completely resisted Win 10 - I doubt I'll ever load it - just too many problems. Maybe if I were 20 years younger I would give it a try, but I doubt I'll last long enough to "have" to download it. I may try a 20p at 40Mbps just for fun, but the one I created works perfectly so I'm not certain I would notice any difference. Best regards, Lin

Nice job Dave - Yes, it was JPD who first suggested this many years ago. One of my old tutorials (number 33) covers it also but the addition of the style will make it much easier for new users to understand and serve as a blueprint to build their own versions by substituting their own PNG objects for the Earth and Sun.. It works well for creating simulations of atomic motion (orbiting electrons) too. Below is a quick sample using essentially the same process with the additional use of a rotating Earth inside a circular mask, keyframed brightness control for the orbiting moon and more dramatic size change. The new features of PTE give the user lots of additional tools for making dynamic animations. I'm fully aware that the Earth is rotating in the opposite direction than reality - it's a "fantasy" so even though it's incredibly simple to reverse the video direction of rotation, I chose not to intentionally. The purpose of the demo is to show the elliptical orbit and the use of keyframed brightness control of the orbiting moon to closely approximate what it might really look like. Also ignore the the Earth's rotational speed and the imaginary galaxy - not realistic but fantasy... Best regards, Lin http://www.lin-evans.org/pte/moonorbit.zip (PC - about 25 meg) http://www.lin-evans.org/pte/moonorbitmac.zip (Mac exe about same size)

Hi Dave, That would be a possible solution for viewing for those who are PTE users and especially perhaps after pte 10 when hardware encoding will greatly accelerate production of the MP4, but depending on the individual's hardware, the time necessary to both download the BIZ then create the mp4 might be the equivalence of the time necessary to download the huge MP4. In either case it might not be greatly different than downloading the zipped exe version but then that would negate the evaluation of the video as being perhaps equal to the exe. The other caveat is whether each person's hardware will create the MP4 in exactly the same qualitative way? For example, I found that trying to do this with my old standby Win XP system was impossible. Whether this is because of the known incompatibility between Win XP and PTE 9 or because of a system hardware deficit is still unknown. I haven't had problems with my Win XP and other projects or creating the EXE file, but creating this video simply couldn't be done with my old system. I did notice a couple other interesting anomalies which I will take up with Igor later. I found that using Jean-Cyprien's book style before his Rubik's Cube style in the same project resulted in loosing the background on the Rubick's Cube animation with it being replaced with a blank green screen and also adversely affecting the initial timing on the Rubick's Cube animation. It's still a big head scratch but not terribly important at this time when version 10 is on the horizon. Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, Yes the file size can be an issue for many of us - not so much for storage because storage is really inexpensive these days - but for sharing over the web when one doesn't have fast internet it's problematic. I'm always reminded of this because my neighboring town only 8 miles away has gigabit symmetrical internet available for the entire town and it's very reasonably priced. It's possible with that to download or upload an entire HD movie in ten seconds! Fiber optic lines will eventually make file size a non issue, but sadly smaller communities and the great distances between will mean that it will be many, many years before this type speed is commonly available in the USA. Perhaps is may be possible to create some sort of slight gaussian blur feature which will help with the banding. I know sometimes with photos I find that using a blur feature then subsequently using wavelet sharpening on the same image, banding can be made almost invisible. I'm not certain how amenable to this video might be? Having the much faster hardware video encoding with future version of PTE will be great!!! Best regards, Lin