A Video Workaround

[Lin Evans]

Some may have wondered why I posted the little sample butterfly slideshow sequence using an animated GIF (workaround) introduction.

http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=5136

There have been questions about whether the release version of PicturesToExe will support video drop-ins or not, and the answer is not yet clear whether this release will have that feature or even if we really "need" it.

The problem is that software rendering makes it relatively easy to use video because the CPU gets the lions share of the work and the video card does little. Of course the problem is that almost all slideshow software except PicturesToExe uses software rendering and the thing which really sets PicturesToExe apart is the extremely high quality output from hardware rendering and the fact that release 5 will use both the video (Ken Burns Effects - pan, zoom, rotate, etc.) as well as the non-video engine which will support the older computers having less video capability. But with hardware rendering we get into issues of total video memory. Even many of the better video cards which play flawless and butter smooth movement on our beta rendered slideshows only have 128 meg memory and older video cards may be 64 or even 32 meg. If the video AVI or MPEG, etc., is extremely large, there could be issues with running it only via the video card, especially if it's in high resolution rather than standard PAL or NTSC low resolution format.

So for now, I've been testing some possibilities so those who wish to include small AVI or MPEG videos can do so via a work-around. This also apples to animated GIF files.

The "secret" to using a video file whether it be an animated GIF or an AVI, MPEG, WMV, etc., with PTE is to break it down into individual files such as JPG and then play these in sequence with the transition effects turned off and with very fast sequence speeds to emulate 15 to 30 frames per second video.

To break down an animated GIF, one can open it in Image Ready (comes with Photoshop) then export the layers as PNG files. This is what I did with the butterfly in the opening sequence with the white background on the sample linked above. Of course everyone doesn't have Photoshop, so there are other programs which can also do this.

But what about AVI or MPEG, etc.? The answer is a video decompiler. The one I use is $20 U.S. and available from:

http://www.onestopsoft.com/

It's called the OSS (one stop soft) video decompiler. You simply feed it your mpeg, avi, etc., file and tell it to extract all frames and when it's finished you end up with each frame of your AVI, MPEG, etc., made into your choice of bmp, jpeg, etc. The process works very, very well.

When you are finished, you import your jpgs, etc., into PTE, set transitions off, set the per image display time to zero seconds and 33 milliseconds (for about 30 frames per second) and you end up with a short movie wherever you wish in your slideshow. Obviously, it would be good to use some opaque background if you don't want "black" which would be your monitor's default.

I would suggest limiting the time for these small AVI or MPEG clips to around 10-15 seconds because you will be expanding the storage requirement and the size of your slideshow by a considerable amount. For practice I decompiled one of my P2E slideshows from an AVI and each jpg was around 53 K bytes in size. So there will be around 30 images for each second of playback so 10 seconds is around 300 images. I made a quick test and used about 1000 images. It does take a bit of time to create the executable, but the results are very good. If you are using animated GIF files, of course, both the size and speed can be considerably less. Typically an animated GIF might consist of less than 40 total frames and the display speed should usually be around zero seconds and 100 milliseconds per frame depending on the effect you want to achieve.

Just some thoughts for those who want to play around with this.....

Best regards,

Lin

[LumenLux]

So this is what you have been up to ! Just yesterday, I had wondered what you might be working on. Thank you very much for sharing this. Your 'timing" is perfect - as I was also wondering yesterday just how seemlessly I might now be able to import short video segments. Of course I too wonder what Igor might implement. For now, thanks for sharing your exploration and method.

[Lin Evans]

So this is what you have been up to ! Just yesterday, I had wondered what you might be working on. Thank you very much for sharing this. Your 'timing" is perfect - as I was also wondering yesterday just how seemlessly I might now be able to import short video segments. Of course I too wonder what Igor might implement. For now, thanks for sharing your exploration and method.

Yes, just a little fun experiment, but it does indeed work well and with the right software is easily accomplished.

If you do this, be sure after adding your video sequence jpg's to click on the Project Options, Screen Tab and scroll down to Disable Scaling for Existing Images and put a check there as well as clicking on Set for Existing Slides afterward. This prevents the program from sampling the video up to full screen size which usually takes a toll on image quality if your originals were PAL or NTSC sized frames from standard AVI or MPEG sources.

I find that with a couple thousand or more frames, its easier to click on the top (first) image and highlight then scroll to the last and hold down the shift key and click then use "ADD" rather than use the "ADD ALL" which seems to take forever for some reason.

The down side of doing this (using sequenced jpgs, etc.) is that you must then set the display time and effects individually for each subsequent image not in the video show. It's easier to use the automated "Set for Existing Slides" to do the mass then afterward add the individual slides. If inserting a video clip in the middle of a normal sequenced show, it gets tricky to the not mess up the timing, etc., on other slides so it would be much easier to have the video sequence at the beginning rather than in the middle of a show, etc.

Best regards,

Lin

[JohnFeg]

Some may have wondered why I posted the little sample butterfly slideshow sequence using an animated GIF (workaround) introduction.

Lin

Lin,

I tried your workaround and exported the individual layers of an animated GIF (using Image Ready) as PNGs.

Then I hit the buffers!

The animated gif was a fluttering bird. I wanted to make a sequence, using the decompiled gif frames, to represent the bird moving against a sky background -(Project Options > Screen > Tiled Image).

When I played the PTE sequence, the individual bird frames had been automatically resized to "fit screen"

I could not figure out how to constrain the size of the gif.

Is there a means of achieving this?

John

[Lin Evans]

Lin,

I tried your workaround and exported the individual layers of an animated GIF (using Image Ready) as PNGs.

Then I hit the buffers!

The animated gif was a fluttering bird. I wanted to make a sequence, using the decompiled gif frames, to represent the bird moving against a sky background -(Project Options > Screen > Tiled Image).

When I played the PTE sequence, the individual bird frames had been automatically resized to "fit screen"

I could not figure out how to constrain the size of the gif.

Is there a means of achieving this?

John

Hi John,

See my post above (repeated in part below) - the default is to scale images to fit screen so no matter what the original size, they will fill the screen unless resized in Objects and Animations. Read the above post entirely for caveats.

If you do this, be sure after adding your video sequence jpg's to click on the Project Options, Screen Tab and scroll down to Disable Scaling for Existing Images and put a check there as well as clicking on Set for Existing Slides afterward. This prevents the program from sampling the video up to full screen size which usually takes a toll on image quality if your originals were PAL or NTSC sized frames from standard AVI or MPEG sources.

Note - I'll be out of state over the next 5 days so will not have access to web for further replies.

Best regards,

Lin