Ver. 5 - I have a dream

[stonemason]

Hi Lin downloaded your slideshow which played with no problems on my amd 2.5ghz, 1.25mb ram, and nvidea fx5600 graphics card pc with no problems. However I feel that your excellent images were let down badly by the over use of pan and zoom effects, which re-enforced my own opinion that Igor and the teams time would be better spent improving PTE's ability to produce good quality mpg files without resorting to frameserving to other applications. My opinion is that this would have been of more benifit to the majority of PTE users rather than the effort spent on pan/zoom which seems to have the ability to turn a very good slideshow into a very tedious experiance very quickly.

[davegee]

Hi Lin,

Your show worked OK on my machine but I will test it on my Laptop later - Pro Show normally will not work on my Laptop (no problems with PTE). It will be interesting to see what happens with this one.

In the meantime, please advise: What resolution is the optimum for this show?

Skies are pretty badly pixelated on my 1280x1024 LCD Monitor as though it were a 1024x768 show which has been configured to "fit to screen".

It also appears to me that some of the zooms are "over-cooked"?

By this I mean that, in the zooms, the images seem to be too small to allow zooming in to fill the 1280x1024 screen and then zoom out by a factor of 2 or three. To do this the image would have to be at least 2560 or even 3840 wide to get the same quality throughout the zoom.

Not criticisms - just trying to get a feel for the technology in readiness!

DaveG

[Lin Evans]

Hi Lin,

Your show worked OK on my machine but I will test it on my Laptop later - Pro Show normally will not work on my Laptop (no problems with PTE). It will be interesting to see what happens with this one.

In the meantime, please advise: What resolution is the optimum for this show?

Skies are pretty badly pixelated on my 1280x1024 LCD Monitor as though it were a 1024x768 show which has been configured to "fit to screen".

It also appears to me that some of the zooms are "over-cooked"?

By this I mean that, in the zooms, the images seem to be too small to allow zooming in to fill the 1280x1024 screen and then zoom out by a factor of 2 or three. To do this the image would have to be at least 2560 or even 3840 wide to get the same quality throughout the zoom.

Not criticisms - just trying to get a feel for the technology in readiness!

DaveG

Hi Dave,

The show was optimized for 1024 x 683 pixels (normal dSLR aspect ratio) excepting the pano's which were 683 pixels on the short axis. The images are "fit to screen" so that 1280 x 1024 would be a bit of a stretch. These sizes were chosen so as to not overtax resources on older systems and usually work quite well at 1024x768 screen resolution.

The "average" for our customer's screen resolution seems to be around 1024x768 which is what we generally aim for. High resolution images of over 2 megabytes seem to "tax" ProShow Gold's resources and don't generally operate smoothly on less than optimal resources so we tend to keep the images smaller which has the effect you noticed on higher resolution displays when the display is set to greater than 1024x768.

Best regards,

Lin

[cici]

Hi Lin,

had no problems with my

PIV

WinXP home

2,8 Gz

and just 528Mb Ram

[Lin Evans]

Hi Lin downloaded your slideshow which played with no problems on my amd 2.5ghz, 1.25mb ram, and nvidea fx5600 graphics card pc with no problems. However I feel that your excellent images were let down badly by the over use of pan and zoom effects, which re-enforced my own opinion that Igor and the teams time would be better spent improving PTE's ability to produce good quality mpg files without resorting to frameserving to other applications. My opinion is that this would have been of more benifit to the majority of PTE users rather than the effort spent on pan/zoom which seems to have the ability to turn a very good slideshow into a very tedious experiance very quickly.

The issue of whether to use pan, zoom, rotate, etc., is highly subjective. We've had much more positive feedback than negative feedback so must go with the majority opinion.

The issue is that if P2E doesn't offer what the market wants they will quickly be left behind and soon out of the presentation slideshow business. The market has been quite clear - even from long time P2E users - in asking for the Ken Burns effects. P2E is one of the very few programs with which the developers have offered lifetime free upgrades on, so to maintain any sort of reasonable business model they absolutely must offer what new customers want and that is clearly the direction they have elected to go.

There is no mutual exclusivity concerning the creation of good quality mpg files and producing superior pan, zoom and rotate features. I'm certain that Igor, Alex and Sergey will produce a superior product which serves all our needs. The Ken Burns effects will be there for those who need and want them and for others who prefer a traditional approach they will not drag down resources.

Best regards,

Lin

[alrobin]

Lin,

I enjoyed watching your show very much - the wildlife photographs are superb! You are fortunate to be right in the heartland of such fantastic mountain scenery and with all that wildlife around you.

In general I like the pan and zoom effects, especially where they contribute to a sense of motion in a slideshow. They can be used very effectively to convey the feeling of moving into or out of a scene, and also where one wishes to indicate lateral direction of movement from one scene to another. However, as a continuous effect throughout the entire show, I'm afraid that I, personally, would prefer to be able to just sit back and admire a gorgeous scene or a beautiful wildlife photo. I find (and again it's just a personal thing) that I have more difficulty concentrating on an image if it is in motion than if it is still. When the motion stops, then I feel that I have more freedom to let my eye roam around the image and admire all the little details that I seem to miss when it is motion. And some of your images deserve to be admired for a long time.

As for shimmer, the show runs flawlessly on both my desktop (2.8 MHz) and my new HP laptop (3.2 MHz), both with top of the line ATI video cards. However, at times there was a slight shimmer of Moire patterns in the very fine detailed textures during the pans and zooms.

At the SuperCircuit I had some difficulty with some of the ProShow shows, as the pans seemed to be a little jerky, but this was entirely absent with your show. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was running a projector and laptop screen simultaneously. Another idiosynchrasy I found with the ProShow entries was that whenever I showed a ProShow slideshow, I had to exit from my PTE "intro" slide back to the desktop and start over with the introduction screen, as the objects in PTE seemed to seize up.

One thing that's interesting with shows utilizing the Ken Burns effects is that one seems to be able to make a longer show with fewer images, as one's attention is taken up with anticipating what is coming "around the corner" and so the images can be left on-screen for a longer time.

On a final note, I found the background sounds a little monotonous. Again, just a personal observation and preference. I like the idea of background sounds, as they give presence to the show, but maybe they could be a little more varied, and spaced out a bit more.

Overall, though, I thought it was an excellent production, and one that I will definitely watch over again. Thanks for posting it!

[Igor]

These HD video samples have some problems.

- It requires much more powerful CPU and video card than future PTE v5.00

- I found that WMV video narrows color gamma. You can see this unplesant moment experimenting with Media Encoder 9.

- Large size of the WMV file.

- Defects of video compression.

- Moire effects in some scenes.

[Ken Cox]

Igor

are you saying that the clips at

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsme...ase.aspx#sysreq

require more power than ver 5

ken

[dadou]

- It requires much more powerful CPU and video card than future PTE v5.00

Very good news, Igor !

[Igor]

Yes, HD video requires much more modern PC (especially CPU and video card) than PTE v5.00

[Lin Evans]

Lin,

I enjoyed watching your show very much - the wildlife photographs are superb! You are fortunate to be right in the heartland of such fantastic mountain scenery and with all that wildlife around you.

In general I like the pan and zoom effects, especially where they contribute to a sense of motion in a slideshow. They can be used very effectively to convey the feeling of moving into or out of a scene, and also where one wishes to indicate lateral direction of movement from one scene to another. However, as a continuous effect throughout the entire show, I'm afraid that I, personally, would prefer to be able to just sit back and admire a gorgeous scene or a beautiful wildlife photo. I find (and again it's just a personal thing) that I have more difficulty concentrating on an image if it is in motion than if it is still. When the motion stops, then I feel that I have more freedom to let my eye roam around the image and admire all the little details that I seem to miss when it is motion. And some of your images deserve to be admired for a long time.

As for shimmer, the show runs flawlessly on both my desktop (2.8 MHz) and my new HP laptop (3.2 MHz), both with top of the line ATI video cards. However, at times there was a slight shimmer of Moire patterns in the very fine detailed textures during the pans and zooms.

At the SuperCircuit I had some difficulty with some of the ProShow shows, as the pans seemed to be a little jerky, but this was entirely absent with your show. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was running a projector and laptop screen simultaneously. Another idiosynchrasy I found with the ProShow entries was that whenever I showed a ProShow slideshow, I had to exit from my PTE "intro" slide back to the desktop and start over with the introduction screen, as the objects in PTE seemed to seize up.

One thing that's interesting with shows utilizing the Ken Burns effects is that one seems to be able to make a longer show with fewer images, as one's attention is taken up with anticipating what is coming "around the corner" and so the images can be left on-screen for a longer time.

On a final note, I found the background sounds a little monotonous. Again, just a personal observation and preference. I like the idea of background sounds, as they give presence to the show, but maybe they could be a little more varied, and spaced out a bit more.

Overall, though, I thought it was an excellent production, and one that I will definitely watch over again. Thanks for posting it!

Hi Al,

Having the KB effects do allow a longer presentation with fewer slides because it does cause the viewer to "anticipate" what will happen next rather than just stare at a still image. I think perhaps it would be nice to pause on the stills which are not panoramas once the movement has finished rather than immediately fading to the next slide. It's not convenient in ProShow Gold to do because you must insert multiple copies of the slide - that is there is no provision for holding a particular frame once the effect has ended to to achieve that we must insert another and use a fade into it which has the effect of simply holding the last frame for whatever prescribed time.

Unfortunately, I have no control over the background sounds which are an integral part of this particular music. If I were mixing background sounds with the music I would have done it a bit differently.

When the P2E beta is released I will attempt to duplicate this show and post both so a comparison can be made between the two for file size, smoothness of transitions and effects, etc. It will be nice to see the P2E approach versus the ProShow Gold approach to a similar result.

Best regards,

Lin

[Lin Evans]

Very nice slide show Lin.

Sometime during the first 5 minutes of the show my sygate software firewall popped up a message that pxplay.exe (parent process rockymnt.exe) wanted to send an ARP packet to a local server. I have no idea why pxplay.exe would need to access the network. This may be normal for pxplay.exe. I just denied the request and the show kept on playing. Probably not a big deal.

I have an old test computer (500 Mhz dual processor Dell running XP SP2) that I was using to run the show. The slow fades were flickering. It seems like they flickered even more if a pan was taking place at the same time. This same computer does not flicker on P2E during slow fades. It will be interesting to try a v. 5 beta on this old computer to get an idea of performance optimization.

thanks,

tom

Hi Tom,

That is rather strange - perhaps something which PhotoDex has embedded to get a handle on how their slideshows are being used - I wasn't aware of this but it's interesting to know about it.

I suspect there are a couple things going on with the fades, especially when there is a zoom in or out happening simultaneously. Since zooms are constructed from multiple frames of incrementally different interpolations it makes sense that at some point there would be an interaction between the host computer's native display size and a particular zoom or "crop" ratio. As you know when we take a starting resolution and take increments such a 50%, 25%, etc., we have much less screen aliasing than when interpolating to odd values. Since during the process of zooming we must pass through these odd values it stands to reason that we would see some moire and artifacting. Since the frame rate is probably 30 frames per second or so, these effects would be seen more obviously in scenes where there was continuity of smooth backgrounds such as with water, etc., than where the backdrop consisted of vegetation which could act somewhat as camouflage. Perhaps I've way off base with this line of thinking, but it seems logical.

Best regards,

Lin

[stonemason]

Hi Lin

I hope I did not cause you any offence with my previous reply, it was not my intention and I apologise if I have, reading my comments again they were worded in a way that could easily be misunderstood. I have always thought that getting slideshows onto disc (DVD, SVCD, or VCD) is the one great weakness in an otherwise superb piece of software, and I confess to taking every opportunity to bring this to people's minds.

I thought that the images in your presentation were first class.

Regards

Stonemason

[Lin Evans]

Hi Lin

I hope I did not cause you any offence with my previous reply, it was not my intention and I apologise if I have, reading my comments again they were worded in a way that could easily be misunderstood. I have always thought that getting slideshows onto disc (DVD, SVCD, or VCD) is the one great weakness in an otherwise superb piece of software, and I confess to taking every opportunity to bring this to people's minds.

I thought that the images in your presentation were first class.

Regards

Stonemason

No, no offense, not at all. I agree that it's imperative to find optimal solutions for quality DVD, etc., presentations. There are issues, however, as Photodex has found out with ProShow. The compatibility issues and interference from already installed burn engines which are incompatible with ProShow's own engine have caused them many difficult moments. It's difficult to say which is the better approach - that is to embed the code in P2E or allow the user to use external solutions to burn from the AVI template as is done presently. Perhaps a way to do either might be a solution but Photodex has had a nightmare of compatibility issues which has turned many away from an otherwise decent program. The answer isn't easy because of all the different equipment out there. When ProShow can burn a DVD the quality is excellent - actually in my experience much better than what we get by using Ulead, but there is a sizable percentage of users who have been totally frustrated trying to get it to work with their own hardware.

Here's a link to a typical "situation" which is ongoing on dPReview where seemingly a conflict between Nero and

Roxio burn engines are stopping the user from being able to burn a ProShow slideshow:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp...essage=15867535

Best regards,

Lin

[Ken Cox]

Yes, HD video requires much more modern PC (especially CPU and video card) than PTE v5.00

Igor Kokarev

therefore if your system will play the MS clips you should have no problem with version 5

ken