P2e and Visisketch

[Tomuk]

Hi! Lin,

I have been corresponding with David Fitzpatrick the code writer for Visisketch and he told me how to get at the created bitmaps before the Avi is created, here’s how.....

In Visisketch create a sketch and click on build bitmaps, now without closing Visisketch navigate to the folder you installed Visisketch into (usually “C” drive...programme files... Visisketch) and explore it.

Inside you will find a temp folder called bitmaps, make a copy of this folder and paste it at a convenient place on your hard drive; this folder is now available for use in P2e like any other folder.

Load the files into P2e using the “add all pictures to slide list” command and the will appear in the correct order.

I won’t go any further as it would be like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.

If you know of any other tips and tricks for using this programme, please share with us.

Tom.

[Lin Evans]

Hi Tom,

Having access to these temp files allows one to bypass the need to decompile the AVI file to get the individual frames to make the animated show. How these are then used becomes the next issue.

To my knowledge, there are really only two "basic" ways to use individual frames to create an animated sequence which duplicates the "effect" of a video in PTE.

1. Place individual frames as separate slides then sequence them at a rapid rate to create the animation.

2. Place individual frames as separate "objects" within a single slide then turn each object on and off via opacity at carefully spaced keyframes.

Strengths and weaknesses of the above. The #1 metod, separate slides, let's you play the sequence back but is extremely limited in that you can do little else except see the sequence as if you were playing back a video. You can't have moving backgrounds, you can't have other objects in motion simultaneously, but it is rather easy to set up and it works fairly well but not nearly as smoothly as #2. The other down side with PTE is that any sequence set to faster than about 100ms will drop frames as long as you have the animation engine operational. This method actually worked better with 4.x and earlier versions where sequences as fast as 10ms would generally not drop too many frames and would create a very smooth video appearance.

So the strengths of #1 are easy setup, minimal fuss and fair response. The weakness is loss of slideshow flexibility and having to deal with realistically slower frame rates and less smooth playback.

Number 2 method of sequencing as objects works really well as far as smoothness goes (there are "tricks" to help make this so), and it is extremely flexible because you can have other objects in animation simultaneously with moving backgrounds, etc. Depending on how you set up the timings, you can have many neat things in your show during the playback of that single slide.

The downsides of #2 are serious though. First, it may take hours or days to program the thousands of keyframes which sequentially turn on and off individual objects (slide frames). In the process you must save and exit PTE possibly hundreds of times to keep from crashing. PTE keeps an internal log to allow the undo and redo process. When there are hundreds of objects, this quickly exhausts memory which isn't returned until you leave the program and re-open. Just saving doesn't help.

So the strength of #2 is extreme flexibility, smooth playback and versatility while the weakness is that it's very time consuming to program.

This brings us to the value of what JPD is developing which is, by all intention, a much "better" way to approach the issue.

As an aside, I just created a sequenced PTE show using David's "Le Mans" car, a sketch which is significantly less detailed than the one JPD did in his example.

JPD's show was 19 megabytes. The bitmapped files from David's Visisketch Pro Bitmap folder created a PTE show of over 500 megabytes. Perhaps it would be possible to make these smaller by making a smaller than 640x480 image size, but we still have a "huge" difference in file size for a similar type slideshow.

I guess my point is that JPD is on to something really neat which may allow PTE users to do some great sketch animations with much smaller resource load than using Visisketch Pro output.

Best regards,

Lin

[dcbyrne]

Anyone have any idea what JPD's progress is? I have not seen anything in awhile....

Douglas

[Tomuk]

1. Place individual frames as separate slides then sequence them at a rapid rate to create the animation.

2. Place individual frames as separate "objects" within a single slide then turn each object on and off via opacity at carefully spaced keyframes.

Lin,

I use option 1. but as you say the drawbacks from each method are a problematic.

I recently produced a sequence using method 1. and the result was a exe.file size of 537mb for a 3 min show and i used 2012 bitmap images.

The show runs reasonably smoothly on my machines.

Option 2. for me is a none starter, far to time consuming for an end product that is just a gimmick.

Like Douglas, I to am waiting on JP coming up with a solution.

Tom.

[Lin Evans]

Hi Tom,

Yes, it will be interesting to see how JPD was able to get this to work so well.

As for the second method being too time consuming, I quite agree, although I don't really see it in any way as a "gimmick". In both approaches you are simply displaying sequential frames. The trade-off is that you have no real control over the speed of playback in terms of frames per second in method one but it's easy to implement. With method two you have complete control over playback speed "and" you have complete control over what else is happening simultaneously during display where with method one you are limited to only those frames in the video itself. With method one you can change the timing of the display of each slide, but when you go too slowly then you have very "jerky" motion. With method two you have the ability to slow down the frame rate and still maintain smooth motion because of overlapping opacity blend.

Let me give you something to think about. Once you have laboriously created an object sequence by method two, you can speed up things by displaying these same objects with the same keyframes but in a shorter time frame. That is, you can set the slide time to complete the display in let's say 10 seconds, or you could set it to display for 60 seconds. What would then happen with your "movie" portion is that it's like you have a film reel which you can run in slow motion or in fast forward or at normal speed and everything in between.

Also consider that once you have programmed a sequence of say "X" number of frames using some generic file names for each frame and saved this sequence, you then have a "template" which you can plug into virtually "any" video sequence you might have by simply decompiling to get individual frames then using a batch renaming algorithm such as found in Irfanview to match the generic file names of your template. If you have fewer frames in your decompiled video that in your template you simply remove the excess frames from the objects list. By doing this you have then complete control over the speed of your video as well as the content. You can program any desired backdrop or simultaneous animation. It's actually a "very" powerful means of displaying a video yet preserving all the other PTE animation benefits while it's running.

Of course the down side is, as we have discussed, the labor and time intensive job of creating the individual template. Also there is the issue of memory resources. There is a limit as to how many objects one can have in a show so your "video" will be limited as to how long it can run unless the animation is cyclical such as a demonstration of something which by nature repeats. The solar system comes to mind.

Here is a link to one recent demo I programmed this way using about 640 frames - notice that not only does the Earth spin on its axis, but dynamically changes size and position while in rotation around the sun:

http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/template/earthtodom.zip

So what you have is by making your "movie" (the earth rotating on its own axis) as a "child" of a controlling parent (transparent rectangle in this template) you have complete control over the placement and size of your video. This dynamic motion and animation is simply not possible with programs which simply "display" a video. For example, this type animation is not possible with Proshow Producer or Proshow Gold even though they allow substantial control over their inserted video. They can move or size the entire video or even use it as a "background" with animation running in front, but they can't "combine" the dynamics of the video as animation as shown in this demo. To do this requires the parent/child relationship. So with PTE we "can" do some pretty impressive things which with the coming new features in PTE are soon going to be even more impressive!

Best regards,

Lin

[Tomuk]

Hi Tom,

As for the second method being too time consuming, I quite agree, although I don't really see it in any way as a "gimmick". Lin

Hi! Lin,

I wasn't for one second suggesting that the above method was a "gimmick", on the contrary, I was referring to the use of a Visisketch sketch in a sequence was a gimmick, I don't see very many Audio/visual buffs taking to it, I myself only had a go at making one because I could, but I don't think I will ever produce a serious sequence with it, no my shows are primary about my photography.

Tom.

[Lin Evans]

Hi Tom,

I misunderstood your sentence, sorry.... The Visisketch idea has uility, but yes, in a narrow sense. It is a very interesting way to "paint" and can be quite realistic especially if you build your own "brushes." This can be done by simply creating the brushes as PNG objects and naming them the same as some of the default brushes. It does take a long time to create some of the sketches/paintings and if you use small brushstrokes, the number of bitmapped files increases exponentially. This makes the file size grow cumbersome. It is a very neat program, but whatever JPD is doing to get around the file size using his own sketch tool is absolutely amazing. I share your and other's enthusiasm and eagerness to hear from him!

Best regards,

Lin

[Almark]

Thank you all, very interesting stuff here.