Lin Evans

Hi John, Perhaps the best way to help answer your question would be to actually see a sample of what you would like to achieve. If you could link us to one of your Animoto shows which demonstrates what you wish to achieve, then maybe we could all be on the same page. The bottom line is that the possibilities are pretty much limitless with PTE but the "methods" and approach might be different than with other products. The old adage "more than one way to skin a cat" comes to mind as well as "a picture is worth a thousand words." The two samples I demonstrated were just designed to show the some of the extremes possible and are not in any way representative of what constitutes a good slideshow. The PTE Demo sample project Barry created and linked is probably much more meaingful when it comes to ordinary use of PTE. Words sometimes fail when we try to explain what we are trying to achieve. If you could show us a quick sample - one or more here on the forum will be happy to help suss out how it can be done with PTE. Best regards, Lin

Of course - it's possible to animate any number of layers with PicturesToExe (PTE). You have multiple choices. It's possible to run a video or animated gif in the background with other animation running in the foreground. If you wish, you can have a video running continually, that is it never quits in the background while stll images and/or videos are sequenced in the foreground. There are multiple ways to do this with PTE. You can prepare PNG files with transparency in other software such as Photoshop or various freeware and animate any number of them. Here is a sample for you to see of some of the amount of animation possible with PTE. In this sample I have a zooming, rotating 3D icosahedron (20 sided geometrical construct) with three thousand six hundred twenty individual video displays in simultaneous operation with the moon and a rotating starfield is in the background and the rotating Earth moving behind the moon while a flaming asteroid flies across the screen between the icosahedron and moon. You can download and view this here: http://www.slideshowclub.com/files/file/22-icosahedron-animation-example/ Try creating this with Animoto or any other presentation slideshow product..... Or here one of my Youtube videos made entirely with PTE - a 3D room with 646 simultaneous video displays while a rotating zooming cube changes from solid still images to different videos on all six sides..... Best regards, Lin

Little bunny hiding in my lawn this evening - snapped this 800mm frame out my car window as I was leaving for an appointment. I'm really liking this verastile camera.... Lin

Incredible low light capabilities on this new video and still camera from Sony... Suggest watching at 1080 unless you have a super system... It's only 12 megapixel, but has impressive - very impressive low light capabilities. Lin

JT, You don't have to uninstall, you can just download and install the beta and run the demo by clicking on "help." You can also load the project and see all the details. Lin

Hi Andrew, Not a problem - thank Peter for asking the initial question... It happens to all of us now and then.... Click the link below and look at the red arrow. Put your mouse cursor in this area, left click the mouse and hold down the left mouse button and drag upward to expand the area where the sound tracks are located without having to scroll with the scroll bar... http://www.lin-evans.org/andrew/show.jpg Best regards, Lin

Hi Andrew, I downloaded and extracted and in both Win XP and Win 8.1 in either Windowed or Full Screen mode I can select either track. It appears to be a Windows 10 situation. Before turning this over to Igor - let me be absolutely certain that I understand everything correctly. 1. When you are in Windowed mode do you see the scroll bar to the far right which lets you scroll down to the bottom track? 2. If you can see the scroll bar, does it let you scroll down to actually "see" the second track? 3. If the answer to #2 is "yes" - you click on it but it won't change color to indicate it's been selected? 4. If the answer to #2 is "No" - can you click, hold and drag as in my linked example to increase the viewing area for the sound tracks? 5. If the answer to #4 is "yes" - you click on the bottom track but it doesn't select... Once we get the precise situation clear - they we can turn this over to Igor. He will want to know the type display, type video card, screen resolution and such from your system as well. Best regards, Lin

Hi Andrew, Let me see if I understand this fully. When you are in Windowed mode you can't select the main sound track, but when you are in Fullscreen mode you can? Can you see the second track in Windowed mode? Which version of Windows are you running? I've tried the same under Win XP and under Win 8.1 and can select either the main sound track or a linked to slide track. It's a perplexing issue but must be somehow related to something unique in your system. If you could zip up your project and post a link to it I would like to try it on both my systems.... You can give yourself a bit more working room without having to use the scroll bar by doing what's shown in the image linked below: http://www.lin-evans.org/andrew/show.jpg Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, Andrew didn't say, but generally I assume one links audio to a slide because they might want the option of moving that slide wherever without losing the audio which has been sequenced to fit it - at least that's the only reason I do it that way. Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, That's true, but if you intend to copy/paste a slide to another show, etc., and the audio is linked to the slide, it will go with the paste. If the sound is not linked to the slide, the audio will not accompany the "copy/paste" AFAIK... So sometimes there are good reasons for doing it as Andrew did?? Best regards, Lin

Hi Andrew, Could you give a few more details such as which slide in the slide sequence you added the sound to and how you went about turning off the sound in the main track? I've tried to duplicate your issue but haven't been able to. If you clicked on the main sound track line and dragged the line down to the bottom of the display to turn off or fade out the main sound, you can right click on the tiny dots to erase the individual keyframe and return the envelope to the default position. Also you can use the Project Options Audio Tab to return the fade, etc., to the default of zero. When you say "it held on to the slide with sound added in the timeline view" I'm not clear on this. If you could elaborate a bit perhaps we can duplicate the issue and see where things went south... Best regards, Lin

Will be posting some images soon! The P900 is a poor man's treasure. Optical zoom from 24mm to 2000mm with digital zoom to 8000mm. It's actually possible to hand hold at 2000mm and get decent results. I just received the camera and took first images yesterday but so far it's an extremely impressive camera with a lens to die for. Absolutely zero chromatic aberrations at any zoom. Only jpg, no RAW but gives one the opportunity to get shots which would, if coupled with Nikon's own equipment, cost over $20,000 to duplicate with only marginally better results. A Nikon 800mm lens with built in 1.25x teleconverter, plus a Nikon 1.4x teleconverter and a D810 would set one back over $21,000. That would give one 1344 mm optical, which when cropped and enlarged is only slightly better than the 2000mm native on the P900. The really big thing is that you can carry the camera and have an incredible range of 83x zoom. It's slightly smaller and lighter than my D7200 with an 18-105mm attached. Of course one could substitute the D7200 for the D810 and get optical zoom to @2000mm with this combination and that indeed would be superior but could not be hand-held and would require a really solid tripod. The cost would be about $1600 less than with the D810 and it would be possible to substitute the very good Sigma 300-800 f/5.6 for the Nikon prime with about equal quality and save around $9500 but it would still be an over $10,000 investment. Then one would need another $1000 in terms of tripod and head plus the difficulty of toting this weight and bulk and the set-up time which would undoubtedly result in many missed wildlife opportunities since wildlife is unlikely to continue to "pose" while the photographer sets up the tripod, mounts the lens and camera and focuses. Here's a link which shows some of the results in a review of this jewel. Worth every penny of the $600 investment IMHO. http://photographylife.com/reviews/nikon-coolpix-p900 And below some size comparisons with my D7200 with an attached 18-105 mm ... Lin

There is no doubt that having color management is an important future feature for PTE, but I must agree with David, Barry and Peter that perhaps it's overstated as an issue if by no other reason than simple logical deduction. PTE is by far the choice of those winning audio visual competitions. If color management were a serious issue, then it would long ago have been a hot topic for discussion. The fact that the competition has color management yet has only a tiny presence in competitive circles seems to indicate that most have been doing well without it for quite a long time. This is not to diminish the importance of including it and I believe that this will probably be done shortly, but with or without color management, if the devices used to either project the show or to display the show have limited and irregular gamuts then the problems are distributed with or without this feature. Hopefully the Wnsoft development team will be able to include it in the next iteration of PTE and that should make everyone happy. Best regards, Lin

Hi Tom, There are a couple considerations which may or may not be important in your use. Most computer displays support more than one resolution while most televisions are fixed. So with a television for a display, you may not have the same opportunities to change resolution. Then there is the issue of actual image quality. 1080p looks far better on a 27" computer display than on a 32 inch TV (or computer display with the 1080p resolution). Also you have issues perhaps with input lag. Will the response be as fast as with the display designed for the GUI? In some cases it won't matter but in others there will be a major difference. Their will, as you suspect, also be a difference in refresh rate. Motion pictures and pro video use tricks such as leading edge blur to make motion look smoother. These are things we don't yet have with our slideshow software so that animation may indeed look quite different on the TV than on a display with faster refresh. The largest issue I would have with using a 32" TV at 1080P is image quality. Trying to read text unless the TV is mounted on a wall a good distance away might indeed be problematic. I have a 30" 2650x1600 resolution display and it is excellent. These have dropped in price so that they are available for as low as $340 these days. Assuming you have a video card up to driving one, that would be perhaps the better choice. Best regards, Lin

Hi Peter, It will be seen differentially depending on the color calibration, type of display and even in some cases the browser. I too see little value in color profiles for the vast majority, but some professional photographers who work in Photoshop save their work in wider gamut colorspace than sRGB even though "most" displays and browsers today use sRGB. So for these photographers whose images are in other colorspace it's a pain to have to save copies in sRGB to use in their slideshows. Having a colorspace aware program solves this issue. It would be nice if the feature could be turned off or on as an option. Admittedly, having this capability will only be important to a few users, but if it's not a major issue to implement, it would be an added feature to make those who use other than sRGB very happy. Best regards, Lin

Hi John, If you use a codec to make the AVI compressed rather than uncompressed, you can just place the AVI in PTE and if you wish, output it as an MP4. That avoids having to use a third software. Best regards, Lin

HI John, I guess it depends on how you have your Mac OS set up. Mac exe files carry the .zip extension and Windows the .exe extension. Not being a Mac user, I'm not sure what you see when the Mac native exe is not in zipped format so perhaps having a different defalult icon makes sense at this time. Once a full Mac version is available, I'm not certain there will be any need for a different icon but it's definitely something you might consider adding as a suggestion on the Suggestions for Next Version forum. Best regards, Lin

Hi Eric, Probably - I was only replying to John's lament about a different icon for MacIntosh.. Best regards, Lin

Hi John, You have the option to use your own Icon rather than the default PTE icon don't you? Best regards, Lin

Hi IG, If you look at the top of your open PTE file and click on "File" "Create backup in zip" it will zip everything into a single zipped file including the six photos. This should probably make the file smaller. Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, I only use it for aspect ratio crops such as creating square images and for splitting and combining for the most part so I really don't know all the details about the RAW converter. I use mostly Sigma and Nikon and I "know" they don't have a converter which will handle Sigma RAW files and probably not the latest Nikon so I use Sigma SPP and Nikon and as of the latest version of Adobe Camera Raw, it now supports the latest Nikon RAWs. I'll see if I have an older RAW file to test it with and maybe then I can answer that. Later: I found an older RAW to test and it appears that it only creates jpg from the RAW. I wouldn;t suggest it for the RAW converter any more than I would suggest a program like Fastone Image Viewer, etc. - that's really not its main use, rather a convenience I suspect. It's made for people who are not super competent with photo editing software but the interface is very good. Best regards, Lin

Trust me - it has layers. It loads all images into the editor portion over a transparent layer. That's how it allows creation of PNG files with transparency. It also converts many RAW files, etc. Many of the fancy borders, etc., are done in PNG with transparency. It's really a pretty sophisticated program.. Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, I guess what I didn't understand it why you think PhotoScape can't post process in 16 bit? It has RAW conversion, handles 16 bit tiffs, etc. Not that you need it because you can do what it does in PhotoShop, etc., but I thought you might want to look at it if only temporarily to see what the differences are. My suggestion for people to try it is that it is much, much easier to do things with such as aspect ratio crops, add borders, split and combine files, etc. than Photoshop, Pixbuilder or most other editing software. Editing is a small part of what it is used for. It's really an excellent tool which the unsophisticated user can do things with which might take them literally weeks to learn how to do with Photoshop, etc. Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, I guess I missing something. I can't really see the relationship between 16 Bit Layers and PTE. This software is useful for those making slideshows because is makes quick work of creating things like borders, various aspect ratios, etc. for preparing images for a slidshow. I wouldn't suggest it for the purpose of serious image manipulation but since what you use in PTE isn't 16 bit??? PhotoScape allows loading 16 bit tiffs and in the editor it loads all files automatically over a transparent background??? Best regards, Lin

Hi Denis, That was my understanding as well: "As for adjusting the area to fit into a cube, essentially the style "should" do that for you unless you are creating a cube manually. If you are creating it manually such as explained using one of my tutorials, you need to use square images to begin with." Which is why I ask the OP for more information.... Best regards, Lin