Newbie question

[r2dee2]

Hi - Just trying the demo on Win7 pro 64 bit os but I will be updating to W10.

Anyhow, are there any limitations of the demo?....and is there any limitation of the time lenght of the mp4 show that can be produced.....is this the same for standard and pro versions?

Looking for a movie maker to make mp4 from my holiday photo's/video collection.

Can you make a menu with hotlinks to chapters in the slide show.......I'm thinking not but I'd thought I'd ask.

Thanks for any replies.

[jkb]

The demo is a fully working version & you can easily switch between the standard & pro versions to see the differences.

As far as I know there is no restriction on the length of an MP4 other than the capacity of your system.

I have recently made a 2 hour show in 2 parts, called from a Menu.

Making a Menu to run shows is also very easy.

Select a Slide for the Menu, set it to 'Wait for Key Press'
In Objects & Animation add Text,  image, or button with the name of the show you wish to run.
Then under action on mouse click select 'Run Slideshow' or 'Run Application' & navigate to the show you wish to run.

With 'Run Slideshow' then  both the Menu & called show must be made with exactl the same version of PTE.

Jill

[r2dee2]

Thanks Jill.

2 hours is way longer than I need........maybe 20-30 minutes per slide show I'm thinking for mine.

Nice to hear it can handle menu's ..........I will try it.

I am finding one irritation at the moment......using timeline view when I start a slideshow I see lots of space to the right to add slides but then after I've filled the screen I can not scroll right to see more space to add slides by drag and drop but can add them by right clicking on them and then add to end of slide show....but then I have to mess around spacing them out. I'm thinking by adding music tracks this fixes this until the music track runs out then I need to add another music track. If this work around works then fine but normally I'd add slides to get them in the order I want then add the music.

Am I missing a trick?

[Paul L]

Jill,

I am a bit confused now.

r2dee2 wants to make a mp4 file, I suppose to play on a TV set.

Does the procedure you describe makes it possible for the program to make mp4 files with a menu? 

[jkb]

R2dee2, add, delete or move your slides in slide view not timeline, it is much easier.

You can then use timeline view to fit the slides to the music.

You can also use the full screen file list view to quickly select multiple slides in the order you want. Double click on the individual ones you want or single click on one then ctrl click on others and press add (bottom of screen)

Jill

[jkb]

Paul, a menu is a small exe file that will run other shows or programs. The shows can be exe or video files or you can open another program such as Photoshop, Word etc.

They are used when running competitions or by presenters giving talks etc.

A TV cannot run this sort of menu as it is an exe file.

Jill

[Paul L]

Thanks Jill,

That confirms what I was thinking.

One can launch a show (or any app) from a menu/button but you can't add a menu and/or chapters to a mp4 video file the way we know from DVD or BD disks.

It was my understanding that r2dee2 was looking for a way to have a disk like menu and chapters in a mp4 file and that's not possible AFAIK.

 

[davegee]

The TV Media Player Home Page is your Menu.

That way you have all of your MP4 files separately and not in bundles with chapters.

DG

[Paul L]

I have an external HDD and I save all my exported slideshows/movies on it in an organized way.

I connect that HDD to my TV and use TV 's Media Player to browse the HDD. 

[davegee]

I think that is what I said?

If I want to show a specific series of shows it is a simple matter to put them into a folder and play them in the required order.

DG

[r2dee2]

Thanks for some great replies and advice......will give it all a go hopefully during next 7 days......started playing with PTE slide show and love the great youtube help so this looks like what I'm after.....just need to make a few mp4's to try it....already found standard version does not allow you to ramp the music down or up which is a pity but I'll live with that for the moment.

Bit busy at moment with other jobs ....so will keep reading this for tips and advice and I'll ley you know how I get on.

Did think of using slide view to rearrange ...but at the moment its how to add slides from picture folder when I can't see it in slide view......unless I add all and then delete the ones I do not want.....I will try it.....but sometimes 100's of pictures as in the digital age I take 1000 - 2000 of pictures on my travels.....then edit and narrow down to the ones I like and still 100's.

But I will give it all a try...many thanks.

Good forum too ...thanks.

[Paul L]

2 hours ago, r2dee2 said:

....already found standard version does not allow you to ramp the music down or up which is a pity but I'll live with that for the moment.

....

It's not ideal but there is kind of a workaround for that.

At the place you want the music to drop down, make a cut, grab the second part and move it to the right, to the location you want the music to go up again.

Now apply a fade out to the first part and a fade in to the second part of the music.

The result might not be acceptable in some cases as in between there is 100% silence .

[jkb]

If you overlap the two pieces PTE will do a perfect cross-fade.

Or put one above the other.

With standard version you have to do the fade in, out, in the audio tab. Also to adjust the overall volume of the clip.

With the pro version you can adjust the volume dynamically in the timeline view.

You can also easily split a track into many parts with the pro version.

These two options alone make the pro version worth it.

Jill

[r2dee2]

So managing with the sound with standard app and so far so good. Also got the hang of using Slide tab to navigate away from TimeLine view to Slide view so I can change slide order........though done this a few times and I can't help feeling some slides are misplaced during the auto shuffle.....I need to keep a check on this.....have about 100 slides and half a dozen vidio clips added to time line and music....managed to separate sound from vido clips and deleted them.

So have to try some video clip editing to shorted it.....if thats possible.....then some text credits.....then export to mp4......did try this quickly but had to stop it as it took 1 min to do 1%......though it was processing the first video clip so I thought it would speed up on following slides....

My Lenovo lappy is about 6 years old though 4GB ram and i5 quad core......thinking of getting a newer one though not latest expensive one....I'll try PTE on my desktop as it had 8GB though still i5 quad core (HP8200). Looks like W10 might force me to buy new hardware.....though W10 runs fine on the HP8200 and on Lenovo lappy.....but maybe PTE needs a little more cpu power?

So I'm very happy so far.......just to make a mp4 and see.....

Thanks again for advice

[tom95521]

A laptop usually does not have the GPU performance of a desktop PC. PTE 10 uses the GPU during slideshow viewing and also when rendering MP4 videos (not AVI). So if you buy a new computer make sure it has a powerful graphics card. Currently Nvidia is the preferred graphics card but AMD is also an option.

Tom

[r2dee2]

Well ....just made my first mp4 slide show and am very pleased with it. Some 200 photo's and 4 video files and used PTE to strip the video audo as it was rubbish,  music tracks added with fade in and fade out, scrolling credits at end and of course various fade in and fade out between slides. All done with the standard version though I'm sure the Pro version makes music fade in and out and text scolling easier as well as maybe able to chose font size rather than having to use zoom animation with standard version.

So at the moment cannot find anything I want that this cannot do but will try again with pro version to see what it offers thats worth having.

Only issue, might be my old desktop pc with no special graphics card, is that the slide show that is 25 mins long took 1hr 15 mins to publish.

So am I correct in thinking a good graphics card would speed things up or offer some advantage?     ......and my pictures are 18Mb each and my TV is 55" 4k QLED but I'm thinking publishing can be speeded up by reducing picture from 18Mb to ?.....without losing quality?

Anyhow - thanks for the great advice and I hope you can shed some light onto my questions above...

Thanks again

Kevin

[tom95521]

Hi Kevin,

Igor has commented on hardware specs in the past. I have a Ryzen 7 2700x processor with Nvidia 1660 Super graphics card. It works great with PTE 10. The video encoding hardware encoding (GPU) will usually be faster than CPU encoding. Resizing the images will usually make the slideshow smaller if you save as an EXE file, but will not make the video smaller. It may speed up video encoding. I don't know the resolution of your images but I think it's safe to resize the images to 4K (3840 x 2160) unless you zoom to very small areas of the image.

Tom

https://www.pteavstudio.com/forums/topic/22419-computer-specification/?do=findComment&comment=144998

[Robert Albright]

15 hours ago, r2dee2 said:

Well ....just made my first mp4 slide show and am very pleased with it. Some 200 photo's and 4 video files and used PTE to strip the video audo as it was rubbish,  music tracks added with fade in and fade out, scrolling credits at end and of course various fade in and fade out between slides. All done with the standard version though I'm sure the Pro version makes music fade in and out and text scolling easier as well as maybe able to chose font size rather than having to use zoom animation with standard version.

So at the moment cannot find anything I want that this cannot do but will try again with pro version to see what it offers thats worth having.

Only issue, might be my old desktop pc with no special graphics card, is that the slide show that is 25 mins long took 1hr 15 mins to publish.

So am I correct in thinking a good graphics card would speed things up or offer some advantage?     ......and my pictures are 18Mb each and my TV is 55" 4k QLED but I'm thinking publishing can be speeded up by reducing picture from 18Mb to ?.....without losing quality?

Anyhow - thanks for the great advice and I hope you can shed some light onto my questions above...

Thanks again

Kevin

4K (3840 x 2160 or 4096 x 2160) is about 8.5 megapixels, so your 18 Mb pictures are more than twice as big as they need to be. You areb right that a good graphics card is essential but even with this you will find speed improvements if you cut your individual image files to sensible proportions.

[r2dee2]

Need a bit of help now.......with demo (standard version) I somehow managed to make a blank slide and add vertical scolling credits in script font. I did this by clicking on Objects and animation and added a text field and I can see I can select my font and add the text I want.

Then I go to animation and use the zoom % to make it fit the slide as required. Then I went to Pan and entered a number in the Y box and by trial and error I could see I could push the text south off the slide. I entered 200 in the Y box. Now my issue was how to get it to scroll up the slide. So I believe I selected Pan modifier and was able to selecy Y shift and by trial and error I found putting -400 into amplitude I could get iot to sort of do what I wanted without really knowing how to use this correctly. Anyhow - so happy I bought the standard version and decided to have a play around with the credit slide to see if I can ...well ...figure it out to be totally happy. But now Pan modifier only offers to change animation speed....no sign of Y shift?

I realise there might be a better way to add a slide with vertical scrolling credits coming onto and going off the slide. I'd like to be able to pick a nice font too.

Can anyone help....thanks

 

Oh...and thanks for the help and replies.

 

 

[davegee]

Add a second Keyfame (KF) and set pan y to zero in that KF. 

https://docs.pteavstudio.com/en-us/10.0/how_to_v9/simplepan

Or look for one of Barry's Videos.

DG

[r2dee2]

Perfect....many thanks.

[r2dee2]

So I've made a slide show and it works fine but I'm still new to this and have a few questions.

Just as a comparison I had tried the demo of ProShowGold and I liked the many transitions so wonder if more can be added to PTE?

I also liked the many different ways PSG offer for text intro's like flying on letters to make up the title and then sliding off the screen....how do I do such things with PTE.

What I love about PTE is the ability to synch slides with points in the music.....something PSG as far as I see cannot do and for that reason alone PSG is a pain.

So for me what I would like to see or do are more transitions and especially adding text in exciting ways as an intro screen or on a slide and this for me would make PTE perfect.

I'm hoping its just my inexperience with PTE and what I would like to do is possible hence asking for advice here.

Not sure if I mentioned it but I bought PTE AV Studio.

Thanks for any replies

[Barry Beckham]

 This video may be some help. PTE AV Studio can do all you describe and slide styles will help. One thing to remember. PSG had all these wonderful features, yet they couldn’t remain a viable business.