aplman

Peter - I'm totally thrilled that my suggestion has struck a chord with you! Thank you so much for the immediate feedback! I was inclined to send my suggestion as a private message to Igor, as I have found that one or two suggestions of mine have spawned responses that were not in line with my expectations. Now I am more inclined to feel that I have judged the mood of the forum appropriately. Thank you enormously! I'm looking forward to more feedback from experienced PTE fans. Regards to all ... APLman (Ken Travers)

Hello Igor ... SUGGESTIONS RE ANIMATION IN PTE I am using PTE 6.02. I think PTE is a wonderful program, and in general the animation features are implemented brilliantly. However, I gather from some recent discussion on the forum that some users do not find those features as exciting as I do. I have only one complaint, and that concerns the way keypoints are relocated when the duration of a slide is changed. Here are my suggestions as to how things might be enhanced. Specification of Keypoint Location I note that keypoint objects in a PTE file have their locations defined by the Origin= parameter and the Time= parameter. Origin can be SlideBegin, PrevEffectEnd, NextEffectBegin or SlideEnd (Let us call those the four “special points”). Time is a number of millseconds relative to the specified Origin. For keypoints that do not lie at one of those special points, the PTE user interface appears always to generate a time relative to SlideBegin. However, I have successfully edited PTE files to have keypoint locations specified relative to the other special points, and both positive and negative time values appear to work. However, if I subsequently move the keypoint (in Objects and Animation), its Origin reverts to SlideBegin (with the Time value suitably adjusted). The present behaviour has some unfortunate effects. For example: (1) if a slide’s duration is reduced, and “Scale keypoints” is unchecked, keypoints that were within the main viewing time of the slide (between transitions) can end up in the next transition; (2) if a slide’s duration is increased or reduced, and if “Scale keypoints” is checked, keypoints that were placed at PrevEffectEnd or NextEffectBegin are no longer located at those special points; (3) keypoints can get out of sequence, when those at the special points remain there, while others move past them. I suggest a change to the PTE program could free us users from these problems. It would be better if each keypoint had its Origin set to the nearest one of the four special keypoints, and its Time value as a positive or negative offset from its Origin. This should apply both to the initial creation of the keypoint, and to its new position after a move. This way, we would get the following benefits: (1) keypoints that are placed at one of the four special points would remain there, (2) keypoints that are supposed to be within a transition would remain within that transition, (3) keypoints that are supposed to be between the transitions would remain there. All these are true whether “Scale keypoints” is in effect or not. Scale Keypoints It remains useful to keep the option “Scale Keypoints”. Scaling should be applied within the range of adjacent special points, not across the whole range from SlideBegin to SlideEnd. In other words, scaling should apply to keypoints within a transition when the transition duration changes. Keypoints between PrevEffectEnd and NextEffectBegin should be scaled within that range only. If the user wants to adjust the duration of a slide, by extending or reducing the main viewing time (between transitions), but wants to keep the timing of the animations near the start and near the end, then Scale Keypoints would be unchecked. If the aim is to adjust the duration of a slide and the animations within the main viewing time, then Scale Keypoints would be checked. In neither case is any animation within a transition affected. On the other hand, if there is animation within a transition, then its keypoints should be adjusted when the transition duration is changed. This would have no effect on animation within the main view time. Potential Problems A reduction in slide duration, without keypoint scaling, could cause keypoints to “collide” or cross over in the centre. This should provoke a message to the user, with the option to cancel the change or drop the keypoints. Removing a transition should cause any keypoints within the transition to be dropped. Possible extensions It might be worthwhile to allow a right-click option on keypoints to enable them to be “anchored” to any one of the four special points. Different colours could be used to give visual feedback. It might be beneficial to have one more special point: Centre - Half way between PrevEffectEnd and NextEffectBegin. Thank you, Igor, for giving this your consideration. APLman (Ken Travers) - Moss Vale NSW Australia

Thank you, Pedro, for bringing a smile to my face! It's always good to find someone who has heard of APL! Ken

Hello Igor ... Seems to me that most of the posts in this topic describe other problems, but not the one you first mentioned on 23 December. I think I have some useful information for you. I too was finding that I could not add a slide to a small project, nor could I move a slide to a different position in the slide list. I would get a very striking effect of task bar buttons blinking and shrinking/expanding, multiple buttons in the task bar, and even the Task Manager window flickering when I tried to investigate. Here is what I have discovered, using PTE version 6.0.2 on two different machines: Desktop: Windows 7 64-bit, Dell Studio XPS 4 GB machine with ATI Radeon HD 4350 video card (512 MB). Notebook: Windows 7 32-bit, Toshiba L300 (Celeron) 2 GB machine. Toshiba notebook Windows 7 32-bit ... No problem of the type described. Dell desktop Windows 7 64-bit ... Yes, problem exactly as described. BUT: Turn off the Aero interface, use Windows 7 Basic Theme ... PROBLEM DISAPPEARS!!! I sincerely hope [A] this information is useful to you, and I can continue to be trouble-free on both machines! Igor, thank you for such a marvellous program ... and good luck in tracking down the reason for this annoyance. Best Wishes APLman (Ken Travers) Moss Vale NSW Australia

Thanks for your comment Xaver. I had not found that previous post. I noticed there that some folks think the scaling option is not very useful in its present form. I hope to see it fixed properly, because PTE's animation is a great fun, flexible feature. As I see it, there are several problems to be addressed ... if we users can agree on what we want! I'm working on a suggestion document for the "Ideas and Suggestions for Next Versions" sub-forum. Regards (APLman) Ken

Peter, I thank you for each of your comments. Yes, I do get a different result. If "scale keyframes" is used, only the SlideBegin and SlideEnd keyframes keep their special positions. All keyframes between SlideBegin and SlideEnd (not inclusive) are scaled. If there are keyframes at the special points PrevEffectEnd and NextEffectBegin, they are converted to SlideBegin (with a new Time= value, of course), and then scaled. So they no longer have their special location. I am currently preparing a full report on my findings and my wishes. I think PTE's animation is amazingly good, lots of fun, and extremely flexible. I hope I can contribute to a better scaling function so that it will be more widely appreciated. I believe keypoints that lie within a transition should be not be scaled unless the transition time changes. I believe very firmly that keypoints that DO NOT lie within a transition should be scaled according to the changing length of the non-transition duration only. At the moment, the scaling is proportional to the total time of the slide including its before and after transitions. That makes very little sense to me. Surely animation during a transition must be fairly rare? I only find animation desirable during the main (non-transition) view of an image. Agreed. Also agreed! I was hoping to find the challenge [a] fun and not too frequent. I take your point ... Thank you for that. My previous submission was not well presented. Best Wishes ... Ken.

and Image files attached here. Ken. KeyPointsImages.zip

Oops! Sorry. I forgot to attach the test files. Now attached here. APLman (Ken) KeyPoints.zip

Hello All! Having read recent discussions and tutorials on the subject of animation keypoints, I did my own research. It is interesting to compare the two PTE files, before and after making small changes. I made some interesting discoveries. I would like to share my findings here, for the benefit of users at a similar stage to myself. First I created a new project, and dropped in three images. My transitions are all of length 1 second, and I set each slide to have a duration of 5 seconds. Please see file TEST-1.PTE attached. This discussion will centre on the animation of slide 2. At this stage, the only keypoint for slide 2 (in Objects and Animation) is at the beginning of the starting transition. Looking into the text of file TEST-1.PTE, we can see that [slide2] includes a single object, representing the main image. Then I placed three more keypoints precisely at four key positions on the timeline - the end of the introductory transition, the beginning of the next transition, and the end of the slide. O&A shows that these are timed at 5, 6, 10 and 11 seconds. Now I save as TEST-2. We can see in the file TEST-2.PTE that the main image object in slide 2 now has four embedded object blocks. These represent the four keypoints. Notice that each object block has an Origin= parameter, and respectively they are SlideBegin, PrevEffectEnd, NextEffectBegin, and SlideEnd. Each object includes the line "Time=0". This, I presume, is why we see a + on the keypoint in O&A - they are special points. Now I place two more keypoints at 7 seconds and 9 seconds, and save as TEST-3. In the file TEST-3.PTE, there are now two more objects - KeyPoint3 with parameters Origin=SlideBegin, Time=2000, and KeyPoint4 with parameters Origin=SlideBegin, Time=4000. Let's think about KeyPoint3. I suspected that if, instead of simply adding it with the + button, I had cloned the second keypoint (6 seconds), and positioned the clone at 7 seconds, I might have seen these parameters in KeyPoint3: Origin= PrevEffectEnd, Time=1000. But PTE does not work that way ... new keypoints, however created, are given a time relative to SlideBegin, unless they coincide with one of the four special points. Next I edited the file TEST-3.PTE, and saved TEST-4.PTE. In it you will see that in KeyPoint3 , the lines with parameters Origin=SlideBegin, Time=2000 have been replaced by the lines Origin=PrevEffectEnd, Time=1000, in line with my hypothesis in the last paragraph. Similarly, KeyPoint4 now has the lines Origin= NextEffectBegin, Time=-1000 (that’s minus 1000). The good news is that works nicely in PTE, and we see the keypoints at the same position as before. So it appears that the position of our keypoints can be defined relative to any of the four special points, with either a positive or a negative displacement. Even better news is the we can change the duration of the slide, and keypoints 1, 2 and 3 will maintain their positions relative to the left end, and keypoints 4, 5 and 6 will maintain their positions relative to the right end. That’s providing we do NOT have “Scale keyframes in objects” ticked in Customize Slide”. File TEST-5.PTE illustrates slide 2 with a duration of 10 seconds. Keypoints 3 and 4 are still close to either end, as before. The not so good news is that if want to keep the keypoints proportionally spaced over the new duration, by ticking “Scale keyframes in objects”, it will not work. Unfortunately, PTE reverts in that case to timing positions relative to SlideBegin, and messes up the timing. TEST-6.PTE shows what I got after adjusting slide 2 in TEST-4.PTE, by turning on Scale keyframes in objects and then setting the new duration. Examine the keypoints in O&A, and you will see some shown in red, indicating multiple keypoints at the same timing position. By looking at the object code in the PTE file, we can see that keypoints 2 and 3 have the same Time=parameter, and keypoints 4, 5 and 6 share the same time. This is quite nasty. On some occasions, I was unable to separate, move or remove those keypoints ... but this may be part of the Windows 7 64-bit trouble I have been having.

I've now run TEST-1 and TEST-2 with PTE 6.0.2. Both experienced the problem ... crazy jumping around of PTE task bar button, and no interaction possible. Needed to "End task" via Task Manager. Sorry I have no further information. Regards Ken Travers (APLman)

Thank you nobeefstu ... How are we to know of 6.0.2? I have had no advice of it, and I see nothing on the web site about it. The Help/About for my version simply tells me it's 6.0. Would be nice to see the next decimal point! The list of changes for 6.0.2, now that I have tracked it down, gives me no encouragement to think it fixes the problem that has troubled quite a few of us with Windows 7 64-bit. Fingers crossed that Igor will track it down soon. Regards APLman (Ken)

Hello Igor ... firstly, may I congratulate you on PTE - wonderful program!!! 1) Brief description of the problem. I had this problem some weeks ago, then made a number of projects without problems, but today struck trouble again. One small change seemed to fix that particular project, so I am steaming ahead on that one. Here is what happened: Start PTE, File/New, add 69 images to slide list. No problem. Then I added one more image into the middle of the slide list, and things went crazy ... task bar button expanding and contracting rapidly, etc. No response when trying to interact with objects on the screen. Had to kill it via Task Manager. I noticed that the image I was trying to add, by drag-and drop from the file list, had an embedded space in its file name - unlike all the other images. I renamed it without the space, and thereafter it inserted into PTE's slide list without trouble. I got quite excited, thinking I might have discovered something very relevant and useful to you. So, I made a very small project, to try to illustrate the behaviour for you. Please see TEST-1.PTE and TEST-2.PTE attached. TEST-1 has image file names without spaces; TEST-2 has image file names with spaces embedded. In each project, I remove slide 2, then insert the same image again. Worked nicely with TEST-1, but TEST-2 went crazy in the way I have described. So I was very excited! However, I now find that TEST-1 sometimes misbehaves too. TEST-2 appears to misbehave always. My pic files are too big to upload - about 2.5 MB each. If you need me to do so, I will try to provoke the problem with smaller files, and send you those. 2) Windows 7 Professional 3) 64-bit 4) Clean installation - new machine - Dell Studio XPS 8000 with Core i5 and 4 MB RAM, plus ATI graphics. Image files are on an external USB drive. 5) Did it help solve this problem when you installed all suggested drivers and updated through Windows Update? Did not try this - please tell me if I should. 6) The problem is resolved now? Probably not. Good luck Igor - I hope this helps. Best Wishes from Australia ... Ken Travers (APLman) Tests.zip

Hello Brian ... Thank you for your comments, but I fear you are too kind! My program does not do nearly as much as you have imagined. It simply reads a PTE file, and writes a new PTE file with animation code embedded for each slide. Perhaps I am claiming too much, when I say the image fills the screen, and I see no more nasty borders. I meant to indicate only that the image fills the normal picture area of the screen. Any "borders" imposed by the hardware remain, naturally. I value especially your explanation of modera TVs. I still live in the CRT era (widescreen, at least!), but I'm sure my passion for travel and digital photography will lead me to HD TV soon enough. I will be glad to have benefited from the knowledge of helpful people such as yourself. Thanks again for your interest and encouragement. Regards APLman (Ken)

The recent discussion "LED TV + WD HD player=Fantastic!!!" has been very interesting. May I suggest a different approach, using PTE's wonderful animation? Best done in a new topic, I decided. My shows tend to have a mix of 3:2 and 16:9 images. Whether on my TV or my PC, I want to see a decent show, with my images filling the screen. Definitely no distortion, and preferably no black borders. So I rely on PTE's wonderful animation to give a borderless display, with the added interest of subtle animation. To be able to enjoy shows on the PC or the TV, I need to produce two shows, one 4:3 and the other 16:9. I needed a reasonably pain-free way of producing two separate shows with different animations. I start with a PTE file with no animation, saved in two versions, 4:3 and 16:9. I then process each with a small program I have written that adds animation using gentle panning and zooming. The result fills the screen. Typically an image is shown in its entirety - just not all at once. I now have two PTE files with animation keyframes on each slide. I find I can accept the randomly generated effect on the majority of slides. For those that need adjusting, I don't need to add keyframes - they are already there - I simply adjust their position, zoom and pan parameters where desirable. Panoramic images are detected, and appropriately panned. My program is not by any means perfect yet, and will probably need to be altered for new versions of PTE. However, I do find it helpful at this stage of my PTE adventures - and I see no more nasty borders! I would be happy to share the program, if anyone is interested. Regards to all ... APLman (Ken)

Hello All! I quite like the idea of random transitions, but I don't really want my show to spring inappropriate surprises. I would prefer that my show looks the same, each time it is run. That is why I do not use random transitions at the moment. So I would very much like to have the ability to assign transitions randomly to all or selected slides. Then I would just change the transitions I am not happy with. It would avoid the need to set every transition manually, but still give an interesting effect that would be the same each time the show is run. Any supporters for this simple enhancement? Best Wishes APLman (Ken)

Hello ... APLman (Ken) here again. I'm appreciative of all the comments my simple suggestuion has provoked - thank you all. However, I omitted to mention something that I thought was obvious. I can set up my chosen list of background sound tracks, and, sure, I can do whatever I like with those in Audacity beforehand. I can align my commentary tracks with particular slides in PTE. But if I subsequently want to change something as simple as the duration of a single slide, the relationskhip between the sound tracks will change. Therefore any arranged fading out and in of background music will no longer coincide with the commentary. I would prefer to have the flexibility to change either the visual or sound aspects of my project without upsetting the other. I really do need some help from the PTE program in this regard, and I judged that it would be a pretty simple programming matter, compared with the clever things Igor already plans to give us, such as support for video clips. Naturally the feature I suggest would be optional, and need not have the slightest effect on anyone who does not like or want it. A simple global Project Option would be enough. Please, friends, support my request ... save me (and possibly yourself) many future hours of fiddling!!! Regards and Best Wishes to all ... Ken.

I am very excited by what I have read in the "Plans for next verson"! May I make a small suggestion that might be conveniently implemented at the same time? When there is background sound (which I imagine is usually continuous music and not tied to particular slides), and also sound on particular slides (which is probably voice commentary), it would be great to have the background music automatically reduced in volume when the commentary comes in. Ideally, fading out before the commentary, and fading in after, would be fantastic. Also desirable would be a user option to specify the amount of volume reduction, from zero to 100%. The result would be a much more convenient process for building the slideshow, and a more professional-sounding result. Thank you for giving this your earnest consideration!

As a programmer of 48 years experience, I judged that it was best placed here, as Igor and the team are working on the audio facility. But thank you for the suggestion, I should put it there too. It is actually a suggestion not for the distant future, but for the "next version", the subject of this forum.

I too am excited by what I have read here! May I make a small suggestion that might be conveniently implemented at the same time? When there is background sound (which I imagine is usually continuous music and not tied to particular slides), and also sound on particular slides (which is probably voice commentary), it would be great to have the background music automatically reduced in volume when the commentary comes in. Ideally, fading out before the commentary, and fading in after, would be fantastic. Also desirable would be a user option to specify the amount of volume reduction. The result would be a much more convenient process for building the slideshow, and a more professional-sounding result. Thank you for giving this your earnest consideration!

Hi there! You have described the problem very well - it's exactly what happened to me at first. I have a new computer, Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. When my poor machine got into that excited state, even the Task Manager window got the jitters. Starting a new project, adding one slide, then adding a second slide - that was enough to trigger the strange behaviour. I would love to be able to tell you how I solved the problem ... but it seems to have simply gone away. Perhaps there was some Windows update. Possibly the fact that I changed desktop themes had something to do with it (as I see someone else has hinted at that). Maybe it was simply a reboot. Could even have been the fact that my pte file was transferred to my laptop, changed there and saved, and transferred back again. Sorry to be so vague, but I think you will succeed if you try enough suggestions. It's now behaving perfectly for me. Good Luck and Best Wishes!

Thank you, denwell, for your quick response, and for the welcome! I was hoping to avoid having to sort, for a second time, 14 shows with an average of 150 images each, from two folders containing 4300 image files in total. I will probably write myself a program to read the DVD PixPlay file and create a pte file. I was aware of the fullscreen Slide List view, but had not discovered the quick way to access it -- thanks for that. Trouble is, PicturesToExe seems so intuitive and easy to learn that I have dived right in and not read enough of the User Guide yet!

Thank you, nobeefstu, for your quick response. Now I can confidently suggest drag-and-drop from the Windows environment in the Suggested Enhacement section of the Forum. Sorry, I meant to say "File List", not "File Tree".

Hi All! First post here for an excited new user. I am keen to make PTE slideshows to replace some of my shows that have been created in other packages. Having spent a lot of time getting images into the right sequence, it would be desirable to be able to drag-and-drop them into the PTE Slide List. Is there a way I might do this? A simple second question -- having chosen my slides, I will spend a lot of time doing transitions, animations and captions. In that stage, I no longer need the File Tree window. Can it be suppressed? Appreciative thanks for any suggestions. APLman.