Lin Evans

Hi Tom, It's not the fps which appears to be the problem and in order to simulate the true browser response, you really need to play it via the html link. If you like, I'll send you a video with animation which challenges the browser but plays perfectly with the player. It just won't play smoothly via any of the browsers I have (chrome, IE or Mozilla) when called via the html. I've tried it with both my XP system with a pretty powerful video card (GTX 750Ti with 2 gig RAM) and with my super powerful Win 8.1 system (very strong i7 4770 3.4 gh 8 cpu's and 32 gig RAM with 3 gig Video Ram on an nVidia GTX 760) with identical responses. Plays perfectly in the player, but when called vial the html using the browser. Best regards, Lin

Hi Tom, It will be some time before they get it done. You can join their HTML5 beta but from all the comments I'm getting it's just not working well yet. There is still a problem with browsers which prevents 60 fps from proper playback. Even when I output an excellent and extremely smooth 60 fps video on my own hard disk and call it with a browser, it's not all that great. If I play the identical video with a good player, it plays perfectly, but when it's called from html, even though the browsers are playing the same video from the same folder on the hard disk which plays perfectly with any of the decent players, it's not satisfactory with the browser. I'm afraid we are in for a bit of a wait before video played over the web catches up with what can be done via players on our systems. I've tried IE, Mozilla and Chrome. Perhaps Safari is different, maybe you can try it yourself. If you have a web generation program such as DreamWeaver or Xara Web Designer which can output the code for the web to your hard drive, give it a try. That's what I did with the video I ended uploading to DailyMotion. AFAIK DailyMotion is the only current host supporting 60 fps video. Best regards, Lin

Thanks! It appears that probably because he used the albumen printing paper proscess, the results were as they came from the neagative. Since most all the work was generally done in the field, it's doubtful that he had any equipment to crop other than physically cutting the paper. I'm just guessing at this. I'm not certain if anyone really knows the complete answer. The glass negatives were quite fragile and what amazes me is how they were successfully transported the thousands of miles back from the frontier. Best regards, Lin

Hi and welcome to the PTE forum! You can add a video as a background now, but not via the project options. Go to the first slide where you want the video to begin as a backgrouns and in Objects and Animations add this video slide, position it on the layer under the still slide, select it, and on the "properties tab" make it the "master video track." Now copy it (right click and choose copy) and paste it to each successive slide. Position it under the still slide and It will automatically be "linked" to the master slide on subsequent slides where it is copied and pasted. If you don't want the sound from the video, turn it off via the mute on the master slide. When you play your show, the video will run continuously and uninterrupted in the background. Best regards, Lin

Hi Mick, Jean, Robert, Thanks very much for your comments! Timothy's story is fascinating. He used a wet plate process with cameras up to 20x24 inches in size. Glass plates had to be prepared immediately before and processed immediately after snapping the shutter. All the equpment and chemicals had to be packed, unpacked, packed and hauled over mountains, deserts, down and up rivers, etc., over and again. Glass plate negatives were coated with chemicals to make them sensitive to light. The chemicals had to be wet at the time of the exposure. This meant a portable darkroom for travel. Timothy adapted a war ambulance and he would treat the glass plate negative, rush out to the camera, expose it and rush back to the wagon to develop it before it dried. The exposure time, compared to modern cameras, was quite long. Sometimes as much as thirty seconds was necessary and for the period of exposure time subjects had to remain perfectly still or the results would be blurred or have multiple images. When one stops to think about all the issues, it seems nothing short of miraculous that the photographers produced the amazing results they did in those early years. Mick, I had to decide whether to have a space around the images or pan - it is always difficult to decide because some detail is lost in smaller sizes which result from trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The 16:9 aspect ratio popular on contemporary displays doesn't fit well with the old aspect ratios in the 1800's which sometimes were more square than anything else. Even our modern dSLR's usually default to 3:2 or in the case of Olympus 4/3rds systems to 4:3 with mostly only consumer level digita cameras and cell phone cameras offering 16:9. It's either crop or have space around or pan in most cases. It got even more complicated for Civil War era photos when stereoscopic images were also common. Many of the old photos are badly scratched and must be restored. A mixture of sepia and black and white is common and it was also problematic to decide to convert the beautiful sepia toned prints to black and white. In the process of making this little presentation, I also found it difficult to decide whether to add audio descriptions or to have text descriptions for each slide. The text would hide some of the photo, but make it easier for non English speaking forum members to translate. I also gained a great deal of appreciation for those who frequently do audio voice-overs - it's not simple to coordinate and organize so that each slide has the proper identification. I commend all of you who have been doing this for years - it's not easy! Jean, yes when I think of the lives lost and all the destruction from wars it is very sad. In our Civil War there were nearly more American lives lost than in all other wars from WWI to the present day. Nearly ten percent of the population of the United States at the time of the Civil War were killed or died directly as a result of the war. More human lives were lost while incarcerated during the Civil War than we lost in Vietnam. I try not to have too many photos of the death and destruction when I make a show like this, it's just too depressing. Robert, I'm off to have a look at your show now! I just watched it! Fantastic images - the color is absolutely perfect and most modern camera manufacturers would love it if they could produce the same color perfection as in those 75 year old photos... Best regards, Lin

Nice job Denis! I had to look twice to realize that you landed that jet yourself at the beginning of the show! I first thought it was a video!! LOL. Beautiful photography of a magical place. I loved the sequence of the calving of the glacier. Was that the west coast or the east coast? I assumed the west because of Perito Moreno. Best regards, Lin

A photographer not usually known to the public, perhaps because he died at the age of 42 from tuberculosis, but nontheless responsible for some of the most poignant and impressive photos of the American Civil War and probably the first ethnographic photographer in America. He died in 1882, fifteen years before Edward S. Curtiss took his first photograph of a Native American Indian. O'Sullivan covered the Civil War then went west employed with the US Geological Survey survey team with the intent of photographing the west to make it attractive to settlers. His work was a favorite of Ansel Adams. This is a brief introduction to his body of work. I converted his sepia tone photos to black and white for consistency. Timothy travelled the west in a mule drawn wagon which served both as his home and his photographic laboratory. Considering the hardships he endured, his photographs are absolutely amazing in so many ways. http://www.lin-evans.org/pte/thosullivan.zip (windows zipped exe - about 68 meg) http://www.lin-evans.org/pte/thosullivanmac.zip (native MacIntosh exe - about 68 meg) Best regards, Lin

One thing of note - playback over a browser is never as smooth as direct playback with a player on your hard disk. Even when I upload a beautifully smooth 60fps video to my own server and play it back fully buffered via any of my browsers (Chrome, Mozilla, IE), it's not nearly as good and smooth as when I play it from my hard disk with a good media player. Why? Either something gets dropped in the upload download chain or the browser itself causes an issue. My money is on the browser causing the problem. If this is the case, then even when YouTube gets the wrinkles ironed out, our 60 fps perfectly smooth videos with animations won't look nearly as good when played on-line as they do when played from our hard-disks with a player. For example, I create a beautifully smooth 60fps video and use the Kantaris player to play it back on my system. Beautiful! It's perfectly smooth and absolutely zero jerk. Then I import it into Xara Web Designer and output a web page complete with all html code to my hard drive. I then use Mozilla Firefox to "play" the html directly from the hard disk and the 60fps beautifully smooth video is no longer perfectly smooth. I go into the file where Xara calls the video and play the mp4 directly from there with Kantaris - result? Perfectly smooth. So there is some issue created by the browsers themselves which prevent perfectly smooth playback of 60fps videos. Until that issue is resolved, our animated videos will never look as good on-line as they do played directly on our systems with a player. Best regards, Lin

Hi Frans, Thanks! I'll see if I can get one done this week and post a link to it on both the PTE forum and on the Facebook Group... Best regards, Lin

Hi Alan, It's apparently "fixed" now - sorry for the earlier snafu, probably my fault for not completely understanding the proper procedure for completing the process. Best regards, Lin

Hi Ken, It does get you feet moving doesn't it? LOL. Good to hear it's finally working! Bummer about the rain - but it beats a couple feet of snow any day... HA! Best regards, Lin

Hi Robert, Thanks! My son-in-law is a career Marine Master Sgt, and has about four more years before retirement. Hopefully after four combat deployments he won't have to do another. The right side of the two sided book is him leaving on his last combat deployment to Afghanistan and the left side is my daughter (with the red hair) greeting him on his return. As a life member of the Military Order of The Purple Heart myself, I hate it every time he is deployed because I know the statistics and probabilities. He's been extremely lucky so hoping he's done his last combat deployment. The image quality isn't great because the pictures were all snapshots taken by family members and most with cell phones, but it was fun for the grand kids ..... Best regards, Lin

Hi Jim, I'm relieved to hear that it's finally working! Actually, everything in that little show for my daughter you can easily do yourself. The "rubik's cube" was done with a great style provided by Jean Cyprien and also the Kaleidoscope was done with a Jean Cyprien style. The books were created with Photoshop actions by Panos Efstathiadas (Panos FX) from his new Books - Brochures - Boxes commercial actions. The waving flag on the last slide was created as an RGBA Alpha Channel avi video using Bluff Titler by substituting a PNG image of an American Flag for the default Holland Flag (just renamed the Holland Flag and named the American Flag Hollandflag.png) then deleted the "plasma layer" and the layer with the flagpole, then output as a compressed avi with transparency using the free HuffYU2.1.1 codec. The RGBA alpha channel avi was added to the last slide, then resized and placed where I wanted it and then that slide was converted to an MP4 h.264, converted with PTE and placed back as a video slide replacement for the original slide. If there is interest, I will create a little video tutorial showing how to use the above styles, etc., to do your own animations. Best regards, Lin

I "think" it's fixed now - sorry for all the issues. It was unclear to me why it wasn't published but appears that it is finally "fixed." Thanks for checking it Bert.... since you could see it, it should be available now... Best regards, Lin

This morning I saw a "not published yet" message. I click on "publish" so hopefully it's fixed. Someone else will have to try it because it's always worked for me so I can't be certain... Best regards, Lin

As some of you may know, most video sharing sites are limited to 30 frames per second which is simply too slow to support optimal animation. Even though 1080p looks great for still slides, when animation is present things get jerky. This is true of Vimeo or YouTube. YouTube is presently doing beta testing of 60fps with html5 but from all reports it's still very buggy and far from optimized. A google search revealed that Dailymotion supports 60fps at 1280x720 so I created a little show for my daughter and grand kids using their own low resolution (mostly phone photos) shots and output it from PicturesToExe at 60fps. It looked great on my own system so I uploaded it to Dailymotion and it doesn't look too bad. Whatever they did lowered the quality a bit, but it appears to be at 60fps and the animation is nice and smooth. Try it and let me know what you think - link below: http://www.dailymotion.com/linatdata2 Best regards, Lin

Nice one Dave, Thanks!! Best regards, Lin

A compendium of some of my Native American Indian Art photos using the PanosFX Books - Brochures - Boxes Photoshop/Elements actions... About 48 meg download... http://www.lin-evans.org/panos/panosactionart.zip http://www.lin-evans.org/panos/panosactionartmac.zip If you use Photoshop and have a need to create boxes, brochures or books these are dandy commercial actions... Best regards, Lin

Topic locked - this post was intended as informational only - not really intended for discussion and especially not for political discussion. If someone would like to start another topic for discussion please feel free to do so... Lin right on Lin ken

That's Great!! Thanks Igor and Bill... Best regards, Lin

Then you might want to consider having a look at some of the greatest Photoshop actions ever created. My friend Panos Efstathiadis, of (link) http://www.panosfx.com creates some of the most useful free and commercial Photoshop actions I've seen. Here's a few pictures from about 20 minutes work this morning made with my photos and Panos' new actions set...

Though I have multiple video editing programs, this little jewel is the fastest, easiest and most straight-forward editing tool I've found to date. Highly recommended. Extremely fast... Works on multiple platforms... Lin Link: http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/

Congratulations! Very nice Jacek!! Best regards, Lin

As most here know, Igor opened a great new official Facebook "Page" for PicturesToExe here: https://www.facebook.com/picturestoexe Hopefully, everyone who uses Facebook will go to and "like" this page to help promote a wider appreciation of our great tool! Join in the conversations and posts and let's help promote our favorite software! I decided to also start a PicturesToExe Facebook "Group" here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/picturestoexefans/ and invite all Facebook users to go there and put in a request for membership. Once you are a member of the group, then please invite all your Facebook friends whether or not they are PTE users. If you invite all your Facebook friends, they will become group members as quickly as I can add them. As a Private Group, their membership doesn't show when people click on their individual Facebook page group memberships. Only the "public" groups show memberships. So the only way outsiders can know that someone is a member of the PTE group is to go to the Facebook Group page and scroll through the membership. If some of your friends don't want to be members, they can easily opt out, but I think most will enjoy the things we talk about there. The group is private which means that people who are not members can see the membership, but not read the comments. There are good reasons for this because it allows us to discuss things privately about PTE and even other software without adverse comments or arguments from distractors. It will still come up on search engines and help promote PTE. There is no reason why we can't also have other PicturesToExe groups under different names such as the suggestions by Dave and Ian such as "Friend's of PicturesToExe", etc. These groups can be made public if users desire. So stopy by, request membership and it will quickly be approved then join in and post your comments, pictures, links to shows, and such. Your other Facebook friends who are invited will be members unless they actively decline and many of them may get interested and become happy PicturesToExe users! UPDATE: By popular request - the PTE Group is now public.... Lin

A Technique for Maximizing Chroma Key Extraction With PicturesToExe One of the issues with using Chroma Key Extraction with nearly any software not specifically designed for that purpose is that there is almost always a light green or blue “halo” which will surround the video subject shot against a green screen or blue screen backdrop. Even with powerful software designed to specifically extract subjects from green screen video, it is sometimes an issue. Of course there are certain “rules” which must be followed when doing the initial video capture. There must be no wrinkles in the backdrop which tends to change the uniformity of the shading, add shadows and make extraction much more problematic. Then the subject of the extraction must be sufficiently far away from the backdrop so that the green or blue shade doesn’t cast unwanted color reflections and of course the backdrop must be properly lit to create uniformity of color making it much easier to extract. With all of the above done properly, chroma extraction with PTE will still usually leave a slight green “halo” around the subject. After extraction, placing the subject on a backdrop of complementary color (such as green) will de-emphasize this issue, but in some cases, especially with amenable subjects, there is another way to proceed. Below are some screen snaps to show one way of dealing with this issue in PTE with amenable subjects. I created the running horse for chroma key extraction using Particle Illusion, a software widely used by the movie industry for special effects. Original – notice light green “halo” around the horse Conversion to Sepia – changes color of horse to a nice chestnut hue Conversion to grayscale – very close to original except no visible green halo! So essentially, what has been done is that in PTE the chroma key extracted video has been converted to either sepia or grayscale. In the case of amenable subjects this effectively removes the green halo without resorting to use of green backdrops to “blend” the halo. Obviously, if the chroma key extraction is of a video subject not amenable to this, it will not help, but in many cases the subject may already be of a more or less monochrome shade and the color adjustment feature of PicturesToExe can be put to optimal use. Lin