SY(P) Software

[Jean-Claude]

SY(P) Software (freeware) Current version: 1.0 beta#3

Synopsis PTE: Sy(P) is a complementary tool dedicated to PTE users.

A sophisticated "spreadsheet" and an elaborated "light table" are the highlights

of this freeware I have offered to Igor and to PTE users community.

Their features allow you to examine at a glance all the parameters of your PTE project

from thumbnails to personal notes or "reminders" attached to any images of your choice.

With Sy(P) you can add, delete, rearrange several images at the same time and modify any of their

parameters with a click. AND MUCH MORE

Download address: http://www.diapovision.com/articles/syp.zip (3 MB)

Several tools are available:

* A print utility, allowing you to obtain the synopsis listing, with or without thumbnails,

* A light table displaying thumbnails of your pictures.

With the mouse you can move a picture or a group of adjacent pictures.

You can remove, replace, or duplicate images.

You can also switch one picture for the other,

invert the order of pictures within a selected block,

move a selected block of pictures along the time-line,

* A spreadsheet based on the main window set of information.

By Right Clicking on any line you have access to the parameter editor and the text editor

enabling you to apply any modification you want for the selected image(s):

comments (font, size, colour), time code, picture time, effect (type, length).

You can also edit an existing "object text", but you can't create a new one (it has to be present through PTE).

However this parameter editor allows all edited text to be presented in a single window

(otherwise scattered through the different rubrics, comments, object,etc),

* A picture pool that offers the same features for new images as the light table.

You can order and move pictures the way you want.

You can also remove a picture from the pool.

You can display a lot of information about your pictures in this pool such as name, dimensions, weight,

* A parameter editor, that allows you to edit and change time-related parameters

as well as types of effect.

You can activate it when working in the main window as well as in the spreadsheet or the light table.

You can edit a single picture or a block of selected pictures,

* A time marker editor that helps you to carefully adjust time codes for one or several images.

It enables you to assign a time Marker -i.e. a time code- of your choice to certain 'key' pictures.

Combined with Audacity, for instance, this editor can make use of Audacity 'labels track' file

to assign time-codes to some selected pictures that you want to match with aural events you marked on the sound track,

* A block editor which permits you to shift anywhere in the project a block of images without

changing following time codes,

* A picture and sound files path and name manager

which reconstructs the path to the image and sound files

if these have been moved from the folders they were in when the project was created,

* A direct access to *.PTE file contents enabling immediate reading of this file,

* A full screen view of any selected image at any time.

You move to the next image by clicking on it and by double-clicking or escape

you return to your normal set out,

* Finally, two languages are permanently available without restarting the program,

including a full documentation in html format.

HAVE FUN WITH Sy(P)

[Igor]

Dear Jean-Claude,

A wonderful tool. Let me express my best congratulations to you and to your product! I've tried it, and it also contains "dark table" view.

We must learn, how you've realized help system

I hope SY(P) will be useful for the authors.

Thank you,

[ContaxMan]

I've just spent some time experimenting with this tool & am very impressed! Like Igor, I'm full of admiration for the way you have implemented the Help section so well .

Thank you for all your work developing this tool and for making it available to members of the PTE community. I'm sure all will find it of immense value.

[boxig]

A MUST for all PTE users !!!

Thank you Jean-Claude for your great work.

Granot

[alrobin]

Jean-Claude,

Welcome to the Forum! You're starting off with a real "bang"!

I had a quick look at your utility, and it is obvious you have put a lot of effort into it! It should be very useful. I especially like the fact that it interfaces smoothly with the PTE files, something that I was not able to do with my spreadsheet-based "PTE-Adjustor".

I also applaud your efforts in making it bilingual.

Can you give us any information on how long it took you to build it, and what programming language you used?

Congratulations on a very well-thought-out and all-inclusive model! Nice work!

[bharkins]

I hate to rain on your parade, but I have not seen the benefits of this utility. There is a lot of programming put into it, but how does it help me make a better PTE slide show? I'm sure this will be useful for the techies, but from a photographer's viewpoint I can't see much use to it. PTE 4.31 is at a peak right now and it seems as if many of the "features" of SY are already available in 4.31. If this were available before the advent of the light box feature of PTE it would have been useful. I'd like to hear from Barry Beckham on SY.

If I've missed something outstanding, I would certainly stand corrected.

Bill

[boxig]

Bill,

First, I like honest people who say what they really think, no matter what other say. Checking this utility I realize the anount of work and time put to create it. I assume it took Jean-Claude at least a year or two from the moment he started working on it. If you go back a year or two and check the features available on PTE, you will see that at least half of them did not exist yet. The point is that there is a big difference between a program and a utility for spesipic program. For example, I have made some general utilities which where most needed for me when I used Windows 98, but now I don't need them any more because my Windows XP has those features not existing on Win98. A simple example is the ability to see thumbs in Explorer. Even some of my PTE utilities are no more needed since few last PTE versions.

In some way, and it depends who is using this utility and for what, you are right. Some people find one way of doing a specific task easier for them and some another way. For example, I never use Hot Keys to copy, paste or any other task, but other people do use them always.

Notice that the "Dark Table" feature is a very needed one, but again, not for all, only for those who need it. See my topic Changing Transition points - I started work on a utility which was almost done and then Igor wrote that what my utility is going to do will be probably available in next versions. I hope this point is clear.

Also I assume that the different view of files and settings of your pte show available in this utility will be very welcomed by some users, but again, some will never use them.

The only thing I have to say "against" this utility is that for the avarage pte user it is a bit complicated. And again, some people like to have one big program which make everything, while other people like to have many small programs, each dedicated to a simple task.

Another point is that many people do not read "Help" files. This is a very important thing that programers should notice, and they usually do not. I never read Help files, unless there is a short "Readme" file. I have no time and no patience, and I know I am not alone there.

Here is another point: I am sure at least half of PTE users never use synchronization ! But it is there, you want you use it, you don't want, you don't use it. The same is with any utility, it's up to the user to use all its features or only one feature.

I am also sure that one or two years from now, in PTE version 7 or 8, PTE will have most of the features of this utility. Even then, like now, I know some users will prefer to use the utility, and some will not, depending on where you feel in ease and in more control.

Any utility is great or useless - it all depends on the user's specific needs and poing of vew.

Granot

[ronwil]

Granot

That was a very useful contribution. Thank you.

Ron [uK]

[Haddock]

Yes Ron I agree with you.

Here is an example of quite a neat trick I use with Sy(P)

I don't know how you proceed building a Audiovisual, but a lot of people send drafts to friends for critic. It's then quite convenient to send a "light" copy, so friends have no hassle downloading them. You can resize, hard compress and put in a different folder the pictures, then open PTE files and with the appropriate editor change manually PTE's path to the folder you just created. Of course when you want to work again on the full scale project, you've got to do it again the other way round.

Sy(P) offers you a neater way. Create a new folder for your resized pictures. Change slightly the name of the current images folder and go in Sy(P). Open your project. Sy(p) tells you that you've lost your way to the pictures. Show him its way to the created folder and hit "apply". You've got a new PTE project working perfect ; Save it as… , name it : "project light". Remove the modification you made on the initial picture folder : You have now 2 projects on which you can work indifferently, create executable, send to friends for advise.

[d67]

Hello

I too agree with bharkins comments, and of course, agree with Boxig's comments.

I too warmely congratulate Jean Claude for his great work , but as bharkins, I will probably not have use of it because of it's rather important complexity, and the absolute need of reading the help file.

For a little more than one year I choosed PTE for creating slideshows for it's fine and great possibilities and, first of all, for its tremendous ease of use.

The first time I oppened PTE help was a few months later and ... after having created half a dozen family and friends targeted slideshows !!!

Thats to say how easy it is to use PTE.

Anyway, once more bravo for Jean-Claude's great job even if I will not be using it.

By the way, thank you Granot for your numerous little and very helpfull utilities.

Regards

Patrick

Sorry for my poor english

[Haddock]

I would like to highlight one use of Sy(P):

Who has never been tempted to add to a project, pictures that belong to an other folder than the one where you had carefully stored the carefully chosen ones.. If you go for them through the "file" panel, you can bring them in, but you loose the ones you didn't use yet in your "pictures" panel… With the "pool" in Sy(P) you can bring as many as you want from as many folder as you wish with no pain and no loss…

[Haddock]

I would like to show you how difficult it is to use Sy(P) ! Here is the answer to gogs wish :

gogs - Posted: Sep 15 2004, 09:15 PM

...The other thing that it would be nice to have is tabular window with slides listed in order with transition types and times that are possible to be adjusted quickly on the table.

1) Open your PTE project in SY(P)

2) Click on Light table icon

3) Click on Sigma

4) Click one or several images you want to modify

5) Click modify

6)Do as you please in the parameter editor

For those who can't read, you'll find screen shots to help

here as reply-to-Gogs

[Jean-Claude]

Thanks to you, Igor, Roger, Granot, Al and D67 for your compliments.

Granot supposed well. Work started exactly one year ago after the first french digital AV forum in Hayange. At that time PTE didn't offer a light table.

Answering to Al, Sy(P) is developped in Object Pascal language, and contains about 30 000 lines of code. Knowing that 150 to 200 lines per day is a generally admitted number, it's easy to calculate the amount of work.

Help file comes simply from a Word document (with a great number of tables), saved in HTML format.

I appreciated very much Granot's post regarding the necessarily ephemeral character of software products. As I already told to Igor I'm sure that future PTE versions will need less and less complementary tools.

Sy(P) is a tool-box in which users can find tools which may seem somewhat complicated (e.g. all synchronization features, which don't seem being currently used in USA) but others are very easy to handle and don't need help reading(as print utility, modification of grouped image parameters etc.).

Anyway, Sy(P) is a freeware and people are free to make use of it or not.

There is a french proverb, by the way :

"Il ne faut pas dire, fontaine, je ne boirais jamais de ton eau" which means

"Never say, Fountain, I'll never drink your water".

[bharkins]

I can appreciate Jean-Claude, the work you have put into Sy(P). Now I can understand that it has a lot of features if viewed from a PTE level of, say 3.5. But since 4.2 - the light box - PTE became very intuitive to use. I'm sure many photographers work on an intuitively visual basis. There may be some who can make use of the various statistical data available in Sy, but if I look at some of the PTE slide shows on the Internet and particularly Beckham Digital, PTE can produce beautiful work as is. I will let the main developer Igor, do his creative work and I'm sure it will get bettter and better as a stand alone program.

Bill

[Haddock]

I wonder when you have had time to study Sy(P) to speak the way you do. You look like an expert, don't you.

May I drag your attention to this request made by RonH. Here it is :

RonH - Posted: Sep 16 2004, 01:41 PM

...What is missing, however, is a bridge - a link where you could import the mixed sound track into p2e adjust the slide order and transitions as we do now, then export the audio track back to the audio editor with say a timeline showing the transition points (slide numbers) so that the soundtrack could be retuned to its editor then imported back into p2e for the final output.

Sy(P) has a "Marker editor" that does exactly what RonH is asking for.

Adjust your transitions in PTE and import your project in Sy(P). All your time codes show up.

Open the marker editor and create as many markers as you have slides in your project. Assign each marker a slide; Write in the time-code column of the Markers the corresponding slide's time-code that you can read in the adjacent window, write a "label" name in the "label/comment" column : that's the one you're going to retrieve in Audacity

Export to Audacity. Sy(P) will ask you if you wish to replace existing file; say "yes"!

When you open your sound track in Audacity click "import Label Track" a browser pops up and ask where is the file. Sy(P) did stored it as a (*.text ) file in the same folder as your PTE project (*.pte) is stored; you might have to understand French, because I thing that my good friend Jean Claude forgot to translate "document texte" in English

Wonder what ! Your markers show up as "labels" in Audacity !!!

May I remind you, that Audacity accept only one group of numerical or alphabetical values. Keep it short. Give your markers the same number as the slides you assign them… . I understood you scarcely read help files…that's why I dare give you this advice ! I can understand that you don't care, but Ron does, isn't he ?

[Marcovelo]

Thank you so much Jean-Claude ! and congratulation for this great work !

Sy(P) is a wonderful utility for me, and it helps me very much !

I really appreciate the "Synopsis view", the ability to configure it and print it ! Very nice ! (and I also consider this feature as a real "safe backup" of my work, because nobody knows if my PTE shows (.exe) will work in 10 years: with the print of the synopsis on paper, I know I can even rebuild my show in one hour on future computers plateform and software! ). Very good !

Also, I like the possibility to visualize in list: Picture time, effect duration , comments, and most of all, the slides containing objects !

The most important feature for me is the ability to change all paramaters ON A MULTIPLE SELECTION of slides (including non consecutive ) ! That's very helpful ! And almost in "one-click" !!!

As my friend Granot said : "A MUST for all PTE users !!!" (but may be Sy(p) is more usefull for "advanced" users or, at least, "positive" users ... )

I'm very surprised about negative posts on this thread... It seems some members don't understand it is an external utility, and nobody is forced to use it (especially those who don't need it !!!).

IF YOU DON'T LIKE SY(P), JUST DON'T USE IT ! This is as simple !!!!

(but please don't suggest Sy(p) would be detrimental to PTE: that's false and not respectful regarding Jean-Claude and its ONE YEAR of programming for PTE users ! A GIFT, remember...)

Thank you Jean-Claude, and keep improving your great utility !

Congratulations, Man !

Marco

[Spice]

In this topic, Jgayman put the following question :

Is it possible to change the transition for a group of slides all at once ? Example... I have a slide show with around 300 slides that contains 3 songs. The slides during the first song are fast with no transition, the slides during the second song are slow with a 500ms fade transition and the final segment of slides has a combination of slow and fast transitions.

Once I have everything timed on the timeline, is there any way that I can change the transition type and duration for say 100 contiguous slides at the same time ? Up till now I've had to go through all 300 slides and set the transition for each one. A very time consuming process.

When the answers to this question gave rather complicated ways for doing this, the answer with SY(P) is a straightforward 'YES'.

I've tested it about 1 hour ago, and it works fine once you get used to it - it took me about 20 mins, plus a very quick look at the help file !

[ContaxMan]

I should like to reiterate my appreciation of the work that has gone in to producing such an excellent resource. Like Al's spreadsheet, it is a utility that I will keep and use as and when I feel the need.

If other users don't have a use for this, then that's OK. PTE is a wonderful tool as it is and this community is an excellent vehicle for sharing ideas, expressing appreciation, constructive criticism and hearing about new developments.

[Haddock]

May I suggest that those who are interested with Sy(P) and wish to raise questions about it, primarily use this thread to report bugs or suggest modifications. I'm sure Jean Claude will keep improving this utility. It may save time to Igor's team in some next future. I trust them for wisely picking up only the best features. The more we contribute on this thread, the easiest it will be for Igor to see which points people are interested with and worth integrating in PTE.

I would personally favour a direct access to the "parameter editor" like Jean Claude did for the "markers editor"… This feature is flexible enough to move to any image or block of images one wants to modify without the need to go through a selection. May be , if it were too much work, could it be useful then to modify the pop-up menu label "modify images xxxjpeg" by "access parameter editor" to ease user's access to the parameter editor.

[Marcovelo]

I would like to mention that I have no interest at all to "protect" Sy(P) in anyway, but just share informations and tips with others users of PTE.

For example, we can read in Igor's thread Suggestions for the next version that several members requested the ability to move/adjust/shift/modify blocks of slides at once along the timeline. I really hope Igor will add this feature inside PTE (and in an easy way) in future versions, and it will be very great and usefull !

In the meantime, one can already enjoy this feature using Sy(P). I think this is especially interesting when working on long shows (more than 100 slides).

From Light Table or Spreadsheet view, left-click on first slide then Shift + right-click on last slide of your block, choose "Modify block" in the pop-up menu, and adjust parameters the way you want. Save. That's all. In this example, it is not really necessary to read the Help file (just read the Dialog box options), and just playing few minutes with it was enough for me to have full control on blocks of slides.

Personnally, I use this feature only to "fine tune" my show, usually on a final step.

Marco

[jgayman]

Sy(p) looks very interesting. There is ONE missing feature I need in PTE that I was hoping Sy(p) could do. That is, go to my show and adjust the transition timings of multiple slides at the same time. Sy(p) allows me to select multiple images from the list but upon right-clicking it only allows one image to be changed.

Does Sy(p) have this ability and I'm just not finding it ? Example, I have 300 slides in a show and I need to go in and change the transition duration (or type) for slides 150 thru 200.

Currently I have to do this one slide at a time in PTE and it takes foreever.

Thanks !

[Haddock]

Hi jgayman,

Be careful with the use of the "right click" with Sy(P). When you want to select a block of pictures, click the first one and then hold down SHIFT or CTRL keys and right click directly. Otherwise you deselect your previous selection and your right click adress only to the picture overhead which you're. If you want to proceed as you're used to. Select your block and hold down Ctrl or Shift keys when right clicking...

[Marcovelo]

Hi jgayman !

As Haddock wrote, of course it's possible with Sy(p):

From LightTable or Spreadsheet view: left click on first slide (slide 150 in your case), then hold SHIFT key and RIGHT click on slide 200. A pop up menu appears, choose "Modify # pictures..." and a Dialog box will appear (Parameters editor). In teh "effect area", simply change duration and click on "Apply" button. Then, menu File/Save PTE project. That's all.

Tell us how it goes.

Marco

[jgayman]

Marcovelo - thank you VERY much for the reply. I had originally tried that and it didn't work. BUT - what I had failed to do is CONTINUE to hold the shift key while right-clicking. Also, I was initially using the normal Windows sequence. That is, left-click first item, SHIFT left-click the last item to mark the entire range.

Haddock also mentioned what I was initially doing.

Bottom line - Sys(p) works and this ONE feature alone will be a great time saver for me. And to think - I was looking at Pro Show Gold. :-)

Thanks !!!!!

[Maureen]

Brilliant !

That is exactly what I need too !

Merci Jean-Claude !

I hope you don't mind but I have added a link to your download on www.digital-av.co.uk which I have been updating today

and when I have played with it a little while longer,

I will try to do a write up in the AV World magazine.

Thank you for all your hard work it is very much appreciated in England (by the Welsh !!)

An enthusiastic convert to Sy(P)

Best Wishes

Maureen