Lin Evans

Good choice Tom - that would have been my selection also... Best regards, Lin

Here's an example which includes the above, but demonstrates a couple other effect possibilities made possible with PicturesToExe. http://www.lin-evans.org/waterfall/hawaiiwaterfall.zip (for Windows PC) http://www.lin-evans.org/waterfall/hawaiiwaterfallmac.zip (for MacIntosh) Though I named it "Hawaiiwaterfall" the first image is actually a scene from Plitvice Lakes in Croatia - one of the most beautiful waterfall series in the world... Best regards, Lin

Barry, that's only a valid assumption if one can also assume that visitors to the web site also accurately reflect those "who would" have an interest in PicturesToExe. In the case of people in the United States, that probably isn't a valid assumption. My reasoning is based on a serious dearth of advertising. In this country PTE is pretty much a "secret" and what advertising there is, is primarily word of mouth and perhaps somewhat aided by YouTube presentations, etc. The competition, on the other hand, has a fairly well-established presence because of a varity of reasons including appearances and booths at numerous trade shows, etc. Even back in the days of COMDEX the competition was well-represented. Obviously, the competition has financial resources to do this while Wnsoft is severely constrained in that respect. Add that to the discrepancy between published market share and recognized presence and one has to question the validity, especially when we find that published market share says Windows 7 users are nearly double Windows 10 users. Why then should these figures not be very similar for users of PTE? Just saying... Best regards, Lin

Not a problem as long as older versions of PTE support XP - there are lots of people in the world who still use XP - see this article from a couple years ago: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2142578/windows-xp-lives-on-avast-survey-shows-27-percent-of-its-xp-users-dont-plan-to-switch.html As long as version 8 of PTE is kept available - people using XP probably won't complain - they just will not purchase new copies of PTE or other programs which do not support that OS. There is a bit of a problem with making assumptions about use of XP by what browser reports in that pehaps people have multiple systems but use one for browsing and others for other purposes. For example, I use XP almost exclusively for browsing and rarely if ever go online with my Win 8.1 or Win 7 systems. So even though I use Win 8.1 daily, I don't browse with it. Conversely, people might use Win XP for things other than browsing and use their newer systems to access websites. This uncertainty can lead to errors in assumptions about use by using only browser reports to website to judge which OS is more popular? Perhaps a survey with questions might shed more light? Best regards, Lin

Yep - I read it - Wnsoft website... not Microsoft website which is presently advertising statistics about Windows 10. The question is, how are statistics on use gathered from the Wnsoft website? I don't remember being asked here either. Does everyone here have a new PC? LOL... How do you count people like me who have computers with Win 98, Win XP, Win 7 and Win 8.1 By the way, the "title" of the post is confusing because it says "Market Share of Windows XP" Lin

I suspect that statistic by Microsoft might be very misleading. Here's why. It's about the number of "visitors" to the Microsoft site. Many of us absolutely never go to the Microsoft site. Since they no longer support XP why would any XP user bother to go there anyway? Their latest software is literally always the "most popular" if you count the number of versions of Windows 10 including "shipped" but not yet purchased which is how they can make such a claim. How does one determine "popularity" of an operating system? I didn't get a survey question from Microsoft and I'll bet no one else did either. They make their claim about "popularity" based on the numbers of an operating systems being shipped. Since they only ship Windows 10 these days, it's bound to be the largest number, hence the "most popular." Beware of statistics - LOL Best regards, Lin I apologize about this being concerned with Microsoft statistics rather than Wnsoft statistics - but still the question remains how are the Wnsoft statistics gathered? How do you count those of us who use multiple systems with multiple operating systems?

Directly? No. But if you have a 2010 or later version of Powerpoint, it can export a show as a wmv or mp4 video which can then be imported into PTE. Otherwise other than exporting jpgs, the answer is no. Best regards, Lin

Just another fun project - a moving magnifying glass for your videos. Perhaps a tutorial will follow to demonstrate how to customize for a particular video in terms of motion and placement of magnifying glass... http://www.lin-evans.org/styles/MagnifyingGlassForVideo.zip (Link to style) Lin

Hi Igor - Thanks! Here's the same two styles with larger magnifying glass: http://www.lin-evans.org/styles/magnifylargerstyles.zip

Set PTE to 4:3 Aspect Ratio - No need to change aspect ratio of the images but set the "Project Options" aspect ratio to 4:3. One 60 second and the other a 35 second effect. http://www.lin-evans.org/styles/linsmagnifyingglassstyles.zip (link to styles) http://www.lin-evans.org/styles/magnifylargerstyles.zip (link to 2 more styles with larger magnifying glass)

Hi Jim, From Objects and Animation - Select your slide, click on "Slide Options" Main Tab - Advanced Options and check "Run External Application" then click on the little Open Folder icon and navigate to your slideshow and choose it. It will then run in a loop from the end of that slide back to the beginning of your show where the Menu should be the first slide. Do the same at the end of each segment and put an "exit" choice in the menu to end the cycle when desired... Best regards, Lin

Don't forget to download and play the small exe file which has additional animation... Lin

You can do this with PTE Essentials, but I would recommend using something like IrfanView or FastStone to resample your 5-8 megabyte images down to a size which all computer systems can more easily handle in quick succession loads. There is no advantage in terms of image quality in using images this large. Consider the hardware on which this show will eventually be played. Take the largest display you expect to see and resample your images to no larger than that native resolution with a compression of somewhere around Photoshop 7 and you will then have images which will work much, much better without quality loss when displayed in quick succession. Also consider whether you might want to do more later using some of the features of the deluxe version of PTE before you decide on which version will best suit your needs. Best regards, Lin

Hi Laszlo, Could you explain a bit more what the problem appears to be. I looked at both exe files, but am not certain what you are having issues with. High resolution video will not usually run smoothly in exe format unless you let PTE convert it. The best way I've found to run a high resolution video file in exe format is to convert it then load the converted video into PTE and create the exe file from that rather than trying to do it directly from the original video file. The reason AVI may be better has to do with the compression. Usually, but not always, AVI files have less compression so are larger in file size than an equivalent MP4 or MOV file. That's why when PTE converts, the converted file is usually larger than the original, but having less compression will play better in real time on PTE. Best regards, Lin

Jak - the PNG snow file is zipped in with the tutorial, just extract the wmv and snow5.png from the zipped second link above... Best regards, Lin

First the Example - then a link to the tutorial and PNG file to create the falling water effect: Link To Tutorial and PNG file (also found in PTE Made Easy Tutorials) Here's a link to the zipped win exe for a bit better quality - small exe file... http://www.lin-evans.org/tutorial/waterfall.zip Windows and http://www.lin-evans.org/bob/roxannemac.zip (Mac) Note: There is one subtle addition to the exe file in the link above - if people are interested - perhaps another tutorial to show how it is done also? http://www.lin-evans.org/tutorial/fallingwateranimation.zip Best regards, Lin

Mike, Did you look at the PTE file I linked you to in your other post? Are you trying to only change the brightness of a building, or the brightness of the entire image other than the sun? If you use the PTE default black background, when the "opacity" of the image is changed via keyframes, the entire scene will get dark as it did in the example I linked you to. Why don't you zip up your project and link us to it so we can see exactly what you are doing? It would be much easier to show you than to tell you how to proceed... Best regards, Lin

Colorado has some pretty fantastic views for sure... Best regards, Lin

Just a fun little project in response to a question by a forum member on the PTE Facebook Group. An alternative to using the "Copyright" method of using a PNG picture frame for each image is the simple creation of a "style" which contains a PNG frame and cycles any number of images... A seen in this little demo, the Picture Frame and content can easily be controlled with a PTE controlling frame a "parent" and the Picture Frame and content as child. The ensemble can then be placed anywhere such as on the wall and controlled with 3D for perspective as well as conventional PZR controls... Watch the Picture Frame at the right of the fireplace on the wall.... Lin.

I can absolutely "guarantee" you that PTE 9.0 will be available for beta testing VERY soon and that the actual release will take much less time than with previous betas. After Effects is a great program and a powerful tool for what it is designed to do, but it's not a tool for making presentation slideshows. You "can" create presentation slideshows with After Effects or with a really good Video Editor, but it's awkward and time consuming to do. You can do word processing with a text editor, but again it's not designed for that purpose any more than Excell is designed as a database management program even though some try to use it for that purpose. The next version of PTE will not be MacIntosh compatible, but the cross-platform programming tools were used to build it so that the MacIntosh version will be forthcoming in the future. The new graphical engine will allow much better memory management and have some exciting new features which will make future powerful features much easier to implement. We would all love to have frequent upgrades such as Adobe is now doing with Photoshop, but they do come at a price. Talk to Panos of PanosFX who writes probably the very best Photoshop actions available. It too a whole year to fix a bug which instantly made many of his amazing actions for Photoshop unusable. He had to completely rewrite a number of them to make them work with the latest Creative Cloud version. Some of the Photoshop "features" such as their 3D are incredibly difficult to do things with which are simple to do with PTE. Even though Adobe releases frequent "updates" of Phoshop, they are not always working properly but since it's not costing the subscriber everytime they do this, people don't complain as much. Each product has its strengths and weaknesses. As time goes on, computer software is continually increasing in both complexity and specificity. It's not a simple thing to accurately estimate how long some things take to finish. I'm certain the developers of PTE would love to have been able to release version 9.0 a year ago, but it wasn't possible to accomplish what was needed with the new tools and the complete rewrite of code to facilitate future cross-platform compatibility. Best regards, Lin

But "After Effects" (which I also use) is not a presentation slideshow product - to recommend that for presentation slideshows doesn't make sense. And actually, After Effects is not "much more powerful" than PTE in my experience - it has a different direction, and features which PTE doesn't have, but also PTE has and does things not possible with After Effects. I've been using After Effects since it was introduced. For example - if you are an After Effects user, try to duplicate this with After Effects. It only took me three hours to do this with PTE and I absolutely can't do it with After Effects. I see that you have not upgraded to PTE 8 and so you are not seeing some of the very powerful possibilities with this product - I post on YouTube under the pseudonym of Icejasper - here's a demonstration of some of the things possible with PTE you may not be aware of... For example - try to create a rotating, spinning, zooming icosahedron with three thousand six hundred and twenty individual video displays in simultaneous operation with After Effects. I'm betting that in five years you won't be able to do it. Here's a sample...

What is the "upgrade issue?" Just because a company has been producing new versions much more frequently than the competition, then has a major rewrite to prepare for future versions and cross-platform compatibility doesn't make it an "upgrade issue." Let's look at the history of other products such as Photoshop: 1990 Version 1, 1992 Version 2, 1994, Version 3, 1996 Version 4, 1998 Version 5, 1999, 5.5, 2000 Version 6, 2002 Version 7, 2003, Version CS, 2005 Version CS2, 2007 Version CS3, 2008 Version CS4, etc. In 20 years essentially 10 versions. About one every two years on average. Versions depend on many variables and the first time that there is a delay in a new version of PTE you stop recommending it "because of these delays????" Pray tell what did you recommend? Between 2006 and 20016 Photodex has produced seven versions of Proshow Producer and of these most were just incremental bug fixes rather than introduction of any substantial new features. They still have no 3D transforms, no Parent/Child relationships, no simple method of changing the center of rotation, no serious hardware rendering capabilities, no multiple audio tracks, etc, etc., and still costs twice what PTE does... During this same period Wnsoft has introduced numerous powerful features and continued to offer what most of us consider the ultimate in a presentation slideshow product which can be used not only to produce superior conventional slideshows, but to create animations and shows simply not possible with the competition at virtually any reasonable price. PTE is by a landslide the most recommended and used presentation slideshow product for serious AV competition in the world. My hat is off the the developers of this product. Pinging on them because they work harder to give their users the very best product available is silly in my opinion. I hope you never have to develop software for a living - I did for many years and I fully understand the myriad issues of keeping up with the latest technology. The current product works and works very well. There doesn't have to be a new version for every bug fix like the competition - Wnsoft doesn't change the full version every time they fix a few bugs. It takes time to develop and write a new graphical engine and perform a complete code rewrite to support future cross-platform compatibility. Damn..... we need to cut Wnsoft some slack - they have continually produced a superior product and will continue to do so... Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, Slideshowclub opens normally now - but it will still not accept larger files - this is the error message when I attempt to upload a 260.6 mb zip file: Best regards, Lin

I only use Windows 7 on a notebook not connected to the internet. I use XP and 8.1 and no, there isn't the same reporting home information gathering from either Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8.0 or 8.1 as from Windows 10. Install a router with blocking and reporting and see for yourself... As you can see by the issues Barry had - restoring Win 7 with USB ports, hardware drivers, etc., is not always all that simple. Best regards, Lin

I can't open it either Bert... Lin