PicturesToExe Deluxe 6.5 Beta 15

[Picsel]

I think that in future versions, PTE should get rid of background music and sound comments etc. There should be only one type of sound objects to be placed on parallel tracks in the main window, as depicted here.

Regards,

Xaver

Xaver,

I understand your point and I would support your position. One graphical interface should be the best solution but I have understood that v6.5 was not ready for that and I hope that my two suggestions could be taken into account in future beta releases to come.

Coming back to your suggestion of graphical sound editor with several sound tracks, I think that Igor will have to face a big challenge.

Either PTE remains in the slideshows market and in most cases we only need one background sound track and another one for sound effects/comments slide by slide, either it competes with video movie makers by introducing mix of pictures and videosequences and in this case we will need several sound tracks as live, sound effects, background music, comments,etc.... Igor will have to take into account that this market segment (video movie makers) is already covered by several wellknown softwares as Studio (Pinnacle), Vegas (Sony), Premiere (Adobe), etc.. Is PTE capable to compete on this market at a short term?

Regards,

Daniel

[Barry Beckham]

Not being a Mac user I thought I would pass on this comment received today. I have copied it here becuase the two shows he mentions are the ones that were made with the new beta version using PTE sound, Botanical Artistry was not.

Hello friends at Beckham Digitall, I was formerly a PC user but late last year changed over to all Mac and have written you several times before about your great work! Both during our PC time and then when going to Mac. I just downloaded both "Perfect Exposure" and "Everlasting Home" and both played perfectly except the audio in both is missing and thought you would appreciate the feedback about the audio problems. I immediately downloaded and played "Botanical Artistry" for a test and it played perfectly both video and audio.

My system is a MacPro Quad 2.93 6GB Ram and is a late 2009 model. Thank you

[Lmoreels]

Not being a Mac user I thought I would pass on this comment received today. I have copied it here becuase the two shows he mentions are the ones that were made with the new beta version using PTE sound, Botanical Artistry was not.

Hello friends at Beckham Digitall, I was formerly a PC user but late last year changed over to all Mac and have written you several times before about your great work! Both during our PC time and then when going to Mac. I just downloaded both "Perfect Exposure" and "Everlasting Home" and both played perfectly except the audio in both is missing and thought you would appreciate the feedback about the audio problems. I immediately downloaded and played "Botanical Artistry" for a test and it played perfectly both video and audio.

My system is a MacPro Quad 2.93 6GB Ram and is a late 2009 model. Thank you

As I posted before, the last 2 show for MAC have no sound.(iMAC 4 GB ram, 256 mB ATI video)

All former shows play with sound. Something to do with PTE ?

Luc M

[Igor]

Thanks, Peter! We'll try again reproduce that issue with the tree of objects. Also we've sent you email.

Regarding audio editing.

We don't hurry with reworking of the timeline. We really faced to a number of problems and we need more time to find optimal solutions.

No audio in slideshows for Mac.

Please try latest version 6.5 Beta 2 and let me know about result.

[Ed Overstreet]

Either PTE remains in the slideshows market and in most cases we only need one background sound track and another one for sound effects/comments slide by slide, either it competes with video movie makers by introducing mix of pictures and videosequences and in this case we will need several sound tracks as live, sound effects, background music, comments,etc.... Igor will have to take into account that this market segment (video movie makers) is already covered by several wellknown softwares as Studio (Pinnacle), Vegas (Sony), Premiere (Adobe), etc.. Is PTE capable to compete on this market at a short term?

Regards,

Daniel

Pro Show Gold and Producer both support mixing of pictures and videosequences, and do it very well, as I am discovering. Also multiple sound sources. PTE is being left in the dust on this front, even in the "slide show" market.

BTW both Photodex products have waveforms in their "Effects" windows, the equivalent of the O&A window. Something I asked for in PTE a year and half ago, others were asking for two and a half years ago (it comes up in a December 2007 post I found in a search on this forum), and something we still don't have in PTE.

"I'm only saying" ...

[fh1805]

Igor,

I confirm that beta 2 has resolved the problem with Project Options...Comments using the "Insert template" feature. Also, I'm now in e-mail dialogue with Dmitry abouit the Object Tree problem.

regards,

Peter

[thedom]

> Improvements in the Objects & Animation editor:

+ To rotate an object in 3D space hold Shift key pressed, put the mouse cursor slightly outside of a side of selected object, click left mouse button and move the cursor.

Great feature, it works perfectly. Thanks.

All in all, it's really a very good version with a lot of things to make our life easier.

Keep up the good work.

[kosheyar]

Dear Igor

In language file in English.ini , phrase of "Music_Check5=دًèمëَّàٍü ىَçûêَ âî âًهىے çâَêîâîمî êîىىهيٍàًèے" is not readable

[Igor]

Thanks, Peter!

Jean-Cyprien,

Dominique,

We just discovered an exact reason of slow work with masks. It will be completely fixed tomorrow.

Dear Igor

In language file in English.ini , phrase of "Music_Check5=دًèمëَّàٍü ىَçûêَ âî âًهىے çâَêîâîمî êîىىهيٍàًèے" is not readable

It's for the nearest beta releases - new audio options. We didn't translate it yet.

[Jean-Cyprien]

OK, fine, thank you Igor !

[Lin Evans]

Hi Ed,

Lots of slideshow software products mix video and still pictures. Long before there was the first Photodex product (Proshow) and way before Proshow Gold and Producer existed there were several good products which allowed drop-in video clips. But "none" of these products and that includes Proshow Gold and Proshow Producer can output the same "quality" of imagery as PTE. Having used nearly all these various products for many years including Wings Platinum, in my opinion and even as it is today, PTE is "still" the best for the Audio Visual Producer unless you want to spend thousands of dollars for the ultimate version of Wings. Even then things are not always all that rosy. PTE offers features which absolutely "none" of the inexpensive products (including Producer) have. It's possible to do things easily with PTE which simply can't be done with Gold, Producer, MemoriesOnTV Pro, MediaShow, etc.

Sound versatility has not been one of the strengths "yet" with PTE, but the developers are working on this and have made huge strides. What is it that "you" believe they are not doing? In this beta we "have" multiple sound sources - more audio versatility than either Proshow Gold or Proshow Producer with the exception of a visible waveform. The developers have stated that they are not finished with what they have planned for audio so "why," at beta level 2, are there so many complaints??

PTE - Left in the dust??? Hardly. Try to output a slideshow for a MacIntosh with Producer or Gold? How did that work out for you? Try to put your show on multiple monitors simultaneously. How did that work out? Try to do simple 3D Transforms with Producer or Gold ... even try to rotate to easily move the center of rotation with Producer to get that special effect you want..... you get the picture.

PTE is the closest to being "everything to everybody" of the products of its type. We all have different approaches to creating AV shows. Some are more interested in the animation possibilities and some are more interested in the audio possibilities. With the advent of dSLR's which can also do HD video, it "may" become an important feature for the future, but having worked for years with products having the ability to mix video and still photos, I can assure you that it's not nearly as useful as might be imagined. Wait until your slideshows are so big that it takes "hours" to upload them because of video clip sizes and the "importance" might be less intriguing than you imagine at present.

PTE is a work in process. There "will" be video clip drop in and there "will" be audio waveforms in the future. There will also be a full blown MacIntosh version and many other possibilities which only the developers are privy to. Have patience. No one is "being left in the dust." I'm not seeing AV professionals rushing out and buying Photodex products to replace PTE. I am seeing a number of former Photodex users buying PTE to replace or augument Producer and Gold. Let the developers work at a pace which allows them to keep PTE the most "bug free" and useful product of its type which allows us to output the very finest image quality.

I believe that the developers of PTE have gone above and beyond to cater to multiple whims from multiple inputs of users with disparate ideas of what constitutes a superior product. If we want to continue to be allowed to give input then we need to back off a bit and let them work. Have a bit of patience or use a different product which better suits your needs. PTE works fine for me. If I absolutely must drop in a video clip, then I'll use my Sony Vegas Suite, Premiere Pro or one of my many other products which allow this. If I can't do what I want with audio in PTE, I'll use Wings Platinum; but I have yet to find an audio requirement for any of my shows which I can't easily do with PTE and Audacity. Now I don't even need Audacity. Will I enjoy having an audio waveform for each track to use simultaneously? Of course. Can I live without it until PTE's developers have the feature ready? Of course....

Best regards,

Lin

Pro Show Gold and Producer both support mixing of pictures and videosequences, and do it very well, as I am discovering. Also multiple sound sources. PTE is being left in the dust on this front, even in the "slide show" market.

BTW both Photodex products have waveforms in their "Effects" windows, the equivalent of the O&A window. Something I asked for in PTE a year and half ago, others were asking for two and a half years ago (it comes up in a December 2007 post I found in a search on this forum), and something we still don't have in PTE.

"I'm only saying" ...

[thedom]

We just discovered an exact reason of slow work with masks. It will be completely fixed tomorrow.

I'm glad you could fix it quickly, thanks.

Igor, does it mean you will release a new beta version tomorrow ?

[Igor]

Probably yes.

[Ed Overstreet]

Hi Ed,

But "none" of these products and that includes Proshow Gold and Proshow Producer can output the same "quality" of imagery as PTE.

... PTE - Left in the dust??? Hardly. Try to output a slideshow for a MacIntosh with Producer or Gold? How did that work out for you? Try to put your show on multiple monitors simultaneously. How did that work out? Try to do simple 3D Transforms with Producer or Gold ... even try to rotate to easily move the center of rotation with Producer to get that special effect you want..... you get the picture.

Wait until your slideshows are so big that it takes "hours" to upload them because of video clip sizes and the "importance" might be less intriguing than you imagine at present. ...

Have a bit of patience or use a different product which better suits your needs.

...

Best regards,

Lin

Hi Lin. I don't want to get into a point-by-point discussion of the above, because we're obviously coming at AV from very different perpectives, but my experience with Pro Show to date does not jive at all with yours. I'm fresh out of patience, I have some projects coming in the Fall in which I know I'm going to want video clips, and I know I'm not getting that from PTE in that time frame, at least not in a "final" release and maybe not even in an early beta (which I'm not going to want to cope with). The 3D stuff and the Mac translations and the multiple monitors are of no interest or use to me. So I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree. Pro Show Producer is meeting my needs a lot better, at least for now.

I am genuinely sorry to have to say that, but I must and am.

[Lin Evans]

Hi Ed,

Then that's what you should use! Good luck with your projects and support!

Best regards,

Lin

Hi Lin. I don't want to get into a point-by-point discussion of the above, because we're obviously coming at AV from very different perpectives, but my experience with Pro Show to date does not jive at all with yours. I'm fresh out of patience, I have some projects coming in the Fall in which I know I'm going to want video clips, and I know I'm not getting that from PTE in that time frame, at least not in a "final" release and maybe not even in an early beta (which I'm not going to want to cope with). The 3D stuff and the Mac translations and the multiple monitors are of no interest or use to me. So I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree. Pro Show Producer is meeting my needs a lot better, at least for now.

I am genuinely sorry to have to say that, but I must and am.

[Barry Beckham]

Edd

The one thing you don't say is that for the discerning customer, PSG simply does not work correctly. I tried it again myself only the other day. I took a few images from my Botanical Artistry Slide Show that PTE handles a dream and tried just 3 images from that show. Two were 1920*1200 one was larger for animation. PSG just could not handle the animation at all, so much so that it even interferred with the transitions between the animated image and the static one too. It made the simple fade transition stuttery as well as the animation. Which for me makes it unusable.

It seems to me that PSG works OK for many people because it meets their needs. However, once you leave basic behind then it just doesn't do it. I wish it did, so that I could make a few tutorials using PSG, but I can't. Every time I try and make a demo to demonstrate what we are going to do, the demo is awfull and I will not put that sory of work in front of anyone with my name on it.

I don't want to appear too defensive of PTE, but the debate of which is best has already been won. Most serious AV enthusiasts gravitate to PTE and the reason is pretty simple, because its the best.

PSG asked me to demonstrate for them once at the National Exhibition Centre in the UK, but I just couldn't accept their invitation because I couldn't get their software to work right and it still doesn't.

[Barry Beckham]

Not being a Mac user I thought I would pass on this comment received today. I have copied it here becuase the two shows he mentions are the ones that were made with the new beta version using PTE sound, Botanical Artistry was not.

Hello friends at Beckham Digitall, I was formerly a PC user but late last year changed over to all Mac and have written you several times before about your great work! Both during our PC time and then when going to Mac. I just downloaded both "Perfect Exposure" and "Everlasting Home" and both played perfectly except the audio in both is missing and thought you would appreciate the feedback about the audio problems. I immediately downloaded and played "Botanical Artistry" for a test and it played perfectly both video and audio.

My system is a MacPro Quad 2.93 6GB Ram and is a late 2009 model. Thank you

Regarding the above I followed Dmitry Hapilin's advice and remade both these slide shows in Beta 2. My contact then reported that the Everlasting Home slide show then worked perfectly, but the Exposure tutorial show still didn't play the sound, visual only. The sound file in the exposure show is commentary only and is a mono soundtrack, so I took that into Audition and converted it to Stereo. I remade and uploaded the show, but have not had any feedback yet that the problem has been fixed

[fh1805]

I'm posting this to bring a post from another topic to the attention of Igor and the team.

The post linked to below seems to suggest that there may be a bug in the way PTE processes changes made externally to image and sound files whilst the project file is open in PTE.

See here for details: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=11848&view=findpost&p=76462

regards,

Peter

[Bruss444]

I thought I would also add some thoughts to Lin's and Ed's discussion. I too was a Proshow Gold user and then upgraded to Proshow Producer and spent many, many hours particularly with Producer making presentations for my clients. From the animation standpoint it was amazing what one could do with this software but I was never completely satisfied with the output quality both as a stand alone file or DVD but my customers seemed to be satisfied. I would say that I had good support from them when an issue came up. It wasn't till last year though that I found out about Wnsoft through reading many reviews on the Web while searching for something with better image output. About the same time I found Wnsoft I replaced my Laptop (IBM) with a Mac Book Pro while searching for a laptop which could play my EOS 5D MARK II video files without studdering. My early experience with Wnsoft, shortly after purchasing it, was that I was astounded at the image quality. I also found that support here was so good and thanks to many and particularly you Lin in helping me with some early issues in not being able to make a HD file. Even though we never fully solved the problem I believe you were correct that the problem was specific with my PC but your help here was appreciated so much. I should mention that shortly after I got the MacBook Pro Wynsoft upgraded their software so one could build a Mac executable presentation for Mac on a PC. Still having my PC-desktop I then built executables to run on the MacBook Pro/HD TV which were razor sharp. After replacing my PC with a MacPro in December I then lost the ability to build presentations with such image quality. Then being entirely on Mac's system I build a memorial presentation with Mac's Keynote and actually the image quality was better than my experience with Proshow but it was not as good as Wnsoft's PTE and had it's limitations. Still without PTE I was asked a couple of weeks ago to build another memorial presentation for another client so I had to "hurry" and fine some software beyond Keynote so I purchased FotoMagico Pro. The image quality I found is quite good and the DVD I built was considerably better that all the DVDs I built with Proshow (image quality wise). Unfortunately FotoMagico doesn't have layering and masking capabilities so this presents a sizable handicap for what I want to accomplish. Thanks to Lin and others here I now see what is possible with layering and animation with Wnsoft which is incredible. To Ed I would say that I too want to be able to incorporate some video clips into the presentations for my cleints and particularly memorial presentations but I think this may be possible in my case having a Mac by exporting a HD file from Wnsoft, when it is available for Mac, into Mac's Final Cut Express which I don't have at this time but even more than having video clips I desire the pristine quality of images Wnsoft can produce. My final words:"Oh how anxious I am for a Mac stand-alone version of Wnsoft and maybe I am a pixel peeper but nothing I have seen or used so far has matched PTE in Image quality".

note: I am fully aware that one can run Windows with the Mac OS on a Mac but that defeats some of advantages I now enjoy using a Mac. Greetings to all here at Wnsoft! Bill

[Bruss444]

A big "thanks" to Barry for finding the audio problems with his latest 2 additions at Beckham Digital! It appears going from mono to stereo took care of the problem! Thanks Bill

[Igor]

PicturesToExe Deluxe 6.5 Beta 3 is available

Download link:

http://www.wnsoft.com/apr/picturestoexe-beta.zip (7 MB)

Changes in this beta:

* Fixed bugs (v6.5 Beta 1-2) with a slow performance on heavy slides in comparison to previous version.

[davegee]

Igor,

The 6.5B3 is problematic - gives error message when trying to install.

File is only 500Kb - should be 7Mb?

DG

[Igor]

Please try again now. I had a problem with uploading.

[baumettes]

It's OK for me. No problem

[Jean-Cyprien]

Yes, downloading is now possible, and PTE 6.53 works now perfectly with my project. Thank you Igor