Project file size versus Exe file size

[Antbrewer]

To all you bright people.

This may well be a very dumb question.....?

Why when the file size in the PtE window along the bottom states one figure but on creating the Exe file this turns out to be considerably larger?

I have checked on a few previous shows with both the pre exe size and the created exe size and there is perhaps 1

or 2(at the most)Mbs difference.

However I have just made a very short show reading 13.9 Mb in the window of PtE to find the Exe file is 20.5 Mb.

In this particular show there is a fair amount of animation and I wonder if somehow this isn't reflected in the size shown along the bottom. The music files I have used are very small as the show only last for 50secs in total.

Anthony

[thedom]

Hi Anthony,

Did you add text objects in your presentation ?

If you did, that's probably the explanation because those objects take a lot of space to be saved.

[Conflow]

Anthony,

Simple explaination:-

When you run any (Audio/Video) Slideshow on your PC that slideshow is under the control of the Source-Program (Pte)

which is writing instructions to the Computer-Processor which in turn is running your VGA + Display + Soundcard.

When you decide to make an Exe.(Stand-alone Executable) which plays on virtually any Windows-Computer now

your PC has to encode the entire contents of your Slideshow and generate Windows-Instructions within your Exe.File

so that it plays on other Computers. This is the additional programming & load which makes the Exe larger than the

original (self-running) Pte-Slideshow.

Brian (Conflow)

[Antbrewer]

Thank you Brian,

I understand now.But there does seem to be a big discrepancy between various shows in that difference of file size. However it does answer my question.

Anthony

[fh1805]

Anthony,

I think Brian (Conflow) may have answered a question that was different to the one you asked. If I understand your original post correctly, you are seeing PTE predict a particular size for the EXE file and then when you Create that EXE file it sometimes turns out larger than the prediction. Is that what you were concerned about?

The question that Brian answered was "Why is the PTE project file so much smaller than the EXE file?". The PTE project file does not store copies of the images or the sound files, when you Preview it reads them in "real-time" from their normal folder locations. When the EXE is created, all the image and sound files are included in the EXE file.

If your EXE files have been created with different version of PTE you must also expect differences. To give just one example: PTE, at one stage, for text would use the fonts that were installed on your PC. If you then ran the EXE file on another PC that didn't have that font file, PTE choose a "default" and your sequence didn't look like you expected it to. Then Igor changed the text handling to store a copy of the font file in the EXE, so your sequence always looked the same on any PC. And then he found a different, and presumably better way, of encoding text font information. So three different versions of PTE have handled text font differently. Those three versions would almost certainly generate different sized EXE files for what is actually the exact same sequence.

regards,

Peter

[Antbrewer]

Hi Peter,

I didn't take Brian's answer to my question to explain the difference between the project file and the exe file. I fully appreciate the difference between the two.

My query was simply why does PtE state one figure in the main window and yet once created the file of the exe is larger.

I am only using at the moment 6.5 and have been since it's introduction.

I have only used Jpegs and PNGs in the show, no text . Are you saying Peter that the figure we see in the window doesn't include the sound file in the show even though they are integral to the show at that stage?

I understand Brian's reasoning that there is extra load and programming to run a show on any other system but it still surprises me.

Anthony

[fh1805]

Anthony,

I didn't take Brian's answer to my question to explain the difference between the project file and the exe file. I fully appreciate the difference between the two.

Good!

Are you saying Peter that the figure we see in the window doesn't include the sound file in the show even though they are integral to the show at that stage?

No, I'm not. A simple experiment, noting the predicted EXE size before and after adding a piece of sound confirms that PTE takes the sound file size into its calculations.

Like, you I do not know why you see a difference between the prediction and the actuality of the EXE file size. Could you supply some screen shots showing what you observe?

regards,

Peter

[Antbrewer]

Peter,

After replying to you posing the question I went and turned on the computer. Then checked the file size in the window with the music and then without and lo and behold it changes. That makes sense....no problem.

Simply Peter just look at the file size of one of your projects in the main Pte window and then rt click on the created exe file to check properties and see file size there.

My intial question was to ask why this should be so different. It isn't a big issue but just seems odd to me ....perhaps I am missing something very obvious.

Whilst writing this to you I have just gone back into a number of folders with both projects and exe file and compared the said file sizes and sometimes the exe file is actually smaller than the expected size in the window prior to making the exe file.

I think I should give up. It is seemingly academic and perhaps of no consequence.

A bemused

Anthony

[fh1805]

Anthony,

I have checked a sample of my sequences and find the same as you. The predicted EXE file size is different from the actual file size. My sample also showed that the magnitude of the difference increases as the EXE files increase: at 10-15MB the error was about 2%, at 50-55MB the error was about 4.5%. All these checks were done using v6.5 of PTE and I didn't find any "smaller than expected" EXEs.

One possibility that might explain some of the difference is that of "decimal 1000" vs digital 1000". For example: let's assume that the total byte count in the exe file is 123456789. If we express that in KB by dividing by decimal 1000 we get (rounded) 123,457KB; and if we divide again we get 123.4MB. But a KB is not 1000 bytes, it is actually 1024 bytes (the digital 1000); similarly a MB is not 1000KB it is actually 1024KB. So if we do the division of our total bytes using the digital 1000, we arrive at 117.7MB. If the predicted value had been 117.7MB and the actual had been 123.4MB, that's a 4.8% difference. Could this be the explanation for the observed differences, or at least, for some of them?

I don't know whether Igor will be able to shed any more light on this. For us users, in practice, we must accept that the predicted size is only an indication and will have a margin of error of 2-5%, this error increasing as the EXE file size increases.

regards,

Peter

[Antbrewer]

Hello and good morning Peter,

Thank you for your reply and thoughts on the subject. Coupled with these and a kind reply personally from Brian(conflow) I feel that I understand this discrepancy that we see.

It is all due to the exe file having to contain much more than the basic size of images and sound plus the addition of PZR etc and all adds up into a 'gigantic mass of binary code' to facilitate playing on other machines.

It is academic and possibly very boring to most others so we have probably exhausted this subject now.But I do like to learn as much as I can about the software before my brain gives up completely.

What a great place this forum is.

Thank you for your interest

Anthony