Using Video in P2E

[PeterPan]

I know this topic has been covered before, but I am more and more interested in integrating small video clips into my slideshows.

Nowadays, many digital "still" cameras include a "Video Option" which can sometimes be rendered in HD! Exactly what I am looking for since I just bought a new HD TV at home. So, I thought, why not be able to use all the tools I have.

My questions are:

1) Will we ever see a P2E version that will include a "Video option" (integrate video clips in P2E presentations)?

2) Proshow Gold offers that possibility, then what could be the advantage of staying with P2E instead of migrating to Proshow? (I know this one is a tough question for a P2E addict, like me )

Thanks for any insight!

Peter

[Lin Evans]

Hi Peter,

Proshow Gold has had the ability to integrate small video clips into the slideshow for years. There are a number of products which allow integrating video and have for six years or more such as Media@Show, Vegas Video, ProShow Gold, Adobe Premiere, etc., etc., but none of these products have hardware rendering which produces the ultra high quality and ultra smooth transitions and animations we have with PTE.

It is possible to display video clips with PTE now by using Boxig's ShowVideo PTE utility:

http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....p;hl=video+clip

but it's not yet possible to incorporate video within PTE as and integral part of your slideshow as a background while running PTE slides on top as it is with some products which incorporate video. Using video in your shows presents a plethora of issues when you have to somehow mix the fast frame rates allowed by PTE's hardware rendering engine and the lower video frame rates and lower quality animation, etc., of current video implementation.

The technical obstacles are many, and to date we must choose whether we want the highest quality output possible, or settle for what is in my opinon the mediocre image and animation quality found in the competition. Right now we can't have it both ways so users must decide which is more important until such time as the technology is available to give us both.

There is no reason to choose one or the other. It's perfectly acceptable to use numerous presentation slideshow products to create presentations. Proshow Gold is a pretty stable product; Proshow Producer is decidedly not. There are "many" unhappy people who are becoming upset with Producer and the myriad problems, crashes, patches and issues which have plagued it. It has great features and some impressive potential but largely unrealized and troublesome according to many who use it daily.

I can recommend Gold if you want to add video clips to your shows, but I could not recommend Producer at all. There is nothing wrong with using both PTE and Gold - I do myself though not as much as in the past.

Only the PTE development team can comment with certainty about the probability of incorporating video with PTE so I won't attempt to second guess the plans. In the final analysis, PTE has far more to offer me than either Gold or Producer or any other current product for that matter. Unless you want to spend really big bucks, you can't really top PTE and even when you do for some things there is no comparable product in my opinion.

Best regards,

Lin

I know this topic has been covered before, but I am more and more interested in integrating small video clips into my slideshows.

Nowadays, many digital "still" cameras include a "Video Option" which can sometimes be rendered in HD! Exactly what I am looking for since I just bought a new HD TV at home. So, I thought, why not be able to use all the tools I have.

My questions are:

1) Will we ever see a P2E version that will include a "Video option" (integrate video clips in P2E presentations)?

2) Proshow Gold offers that possibility, then what could be the advantage of staying with P2E instead of migrating to Proshow? (I know this one is a tough question for a P2E addict, like me )

Thanks for any insight!

Peter

[PeterPan]

Thank you for your answers. I think that video embedding is the way of the future, eventhough other solutions exist. Indeed, maybe Flash could do it. I don't know... I just take the pictures

A few years ago, I used a product called Mediabuilder (mediachance.com). I was able to make slide-shows with embedded short videos on top of JPG, with mask and everything. It was hard work, and the quality was so-so, but the effect was interesting.

I checked Proshow Gold, and they have an option to build Blu-ray DVD (1080p resolution), but I don't have that kind of player... too expensive! Maybe I'll make a demo of my own and try it at a local store.

For now, I'll stick with P2E which is still amongst the best out there for slide-shows.

Peter

[Lin Evans]

Hi Peter,

Actually, they only added the ability to "burn" your shows to a BluRay disk with Gold. You can create the same and actually "better" MP4's at 1920x1080 pixels with PTE then use other software such as Pinnacle Studio Ultimate Version 12:

http://pcworld.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsit...io+Ultimate.htm

which lets you burn BluRay output to standard DVD media blanks which are much less expensive than real BluRay media. Of course you still need a BluRay player to play these back to an HD TV but BluRay players are not all that expensive. BluRay "burners," on the other hand are still quite expensive.

Of course the down side it that you can only get about 20 minutes of video on a standard DVD blank but that's enough for the majority of slideshows. Of course once you start adding video to the equation, you up the ante for storage space by a huge amount.

Remember, when we create an executable slideshow without video to be played on a computer or by using a computer to play on a high definition TV, we are only encoding the actual images plus the "instructions" to the computer to create on the fly the intermediate images necessary for an animation. For example, we may have a zoom or pan or rotate which actually has hundred of intermediate images to effect that zoom, rotate or pan action. These images are not actually stored in the executable file, but are created on the fly by the video card at the rate of 60 frames per second and greater (that's what hardware rendering is all about). Only the first image must be stored and it is used to create all the intermediate images on the fly.

Now when we insert a video clip, things are quite different. For a video clip every single image that is necessary to reveal the animation must be created ahead of time and "stored" on the media or within the executable file (in the case of software which actually embeds video). This means that for a 29.97 frame per second (let's round to 30 fps for the sake of simplicity) for every minute of video play we have 1800 separate images which must be stored on the media and within the file. If these images are reasonably large, such as 1024x768 then we have enormous storage issues. Let's just say that each image is a couple hundred "K" in size then we have about 360 megabytes of data to be stored for each minute of video. As you can see, when we begin talking about seriously large video files such as a resolution of 1920x1080 we are going to have HUGE files. Not something you could easily post on the web or even upload to your website for download by your friends. If you used very much video at 1920 x 1080 resolution it could take a long time to download and even a much longer time to upload.

This is something which most users are not really consciously aware of. The fact that we would all like video included in our shows is one thing, but to have "quallity" with these videos we need larger file dimensions and less compression to maintain higher quality. These factors mean we will end up with some really big slideshows. Unfortunately there is no good trade-off yet. Either mediocre quality such as with Proshow Gold or huge file sizes and all that entails.

Best regards,

Lin

snip....

I checked Proshow Gold, and they have an option to build Blu-ray DVD (1080p resolution), but I don't have that kind of player... too expensive! Maybe I'll make a demo of my own and try it at a local store.

For now, I'll stick with P2E which is still amongst the best out there for slide-shows.

Peter

[Ed Overstreet]

This is something which most users are not really consciously aware of. The fact that we would all like video included in our shows is one thing, but to have "quallity" with these videos we need larger file dimensions and less compression to maintain higher quality. These factors mean we will end up with some really big slideshows. Unfortunately there is no good trade-off yet. Either mediocre quality such as with Proshow Gold or huge file sizes and all that entails.

Thanks for this explanation, Lin. I'm one who on another post has suggested that PTE incorporate video clips into shows, but I confess I wasn't aware or hadn't thought through the implications you just mentioned. On balance, given the current technology as you've described, I can live without that feature. I had briefly thought maybe I'd switch to Pro Show so I could have that feature, but then I downloaded the trial version, and after about two hours of struggling with the interface to produce what in PTE would have been a simple animation effect, then looking at the result on my monitor, I quickly gave up on that fantasy. I'll gladly stick with PTE, even if it can't incorporate video, after I've seen what the competition does

[gloryforixseal]

Are you using a PC geforce video card that you flashed to be compatible with your cube? Help us all out by telling us the model of the card and how it performs. Any artifacts or problems with resolution?