V5 Pan and Scan

[googull]

I came back after many year absence to look for pan and scan capability in pic2exe - what a great surprise to see V5 B11A. Most of the feature set looks complete - my tests though found images to skip and jitter at the beginning usually get smoother by midsection then jitter again especially a fade transition is used to next image which might also be panning. My PC is quite performance capable as I do all my video editing on it, 2GB RAM etc. I've tried using the various motion controls (linear, accel, etc) but not resolve. Even downloaded sample slideshow exhibited the same jitter - I am running Matrox APVe Card with Dual DVI 1600X1200X 32 - Is the issue I am experiencing related to video or is the product still be polished on this front?

[Lin Evans]

It's most likely related to either a driver, a sound card conflict with video or the video card itself. One of the very great things about version 5 is the absolutely butter smooth pan, zoom, scroll and rotate. I'm sure Igor will be able to help sort it out for you. The new graphical engine uses almost entirely the video power as opposed to computer processing power for video animation.

In some cases, as strange as it may seem there have been a very few conflicts with sound cards causing some jitter in video movement. My own computer had this issue but it has been resolved perfectly in Beta 11A. A very easy way to eliminate the sound card as a possible factor is to go into the Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager and temporarily disable the sound card. Try again and if you still have the same problem you can eliminate the sound card as a factor.

Best regards,

Lin

I came back after many year absence to look for pan and scan capability in pic2exe - what a great surprise to see V5 B11A. Most of the feature set looks complete - my tests though found images to skip and jitter at the beginning usually get smoother by midsection then jitter again especially a fade transition is used to next image which might also be panning. My PC is quite performance capable as I do all my video editing on it, 2GB RAM etc. I've tried using the various motion controls (linear, accel, etc) but not resolve. Even downloaded sample slideshow exhibited the same jitter - I am running Matrox APVe Card with Dual DVI 1600X1200X 32 - Is the issue I am experiencing related to video or is the product still be polished on this front?

[ADB]

I've found that overly large files can also cause you problems so resize your images to the maximum screen resolution you think your show will be viewed under. I'm current using a default screen size of 1280 x 1024 so my images (except Panos) are no wider than 1280 or higher than 853 pixels (I crop my screen to fit traditional 35mm frame format 15:10 Ratio this leaves black bars at the top and bottom of the screen) Also keeping all this in mind if you are planning to start a slide zoomed in and then zoom out you are going to need higher resolution for optimal qaulity.

I can't confirm this but if you have multiple sound files as your background music don't start any complex animations or transitions close to the change in the music, I did notice a increased smoothness when I did this but it may have been coincidental.

All that aside I reiterate Lins comments, this latest beta is capable of very smooth Pans and Zooms unequalled in the EXE Presentation market.

Cheers

Andrew

[alrobin]

Googull,

Welcome back to the Forum!

I've found that for me the biggest culprits in stuttering sequences with PTE are having monitor resolution set too high, and other processes running in the background.

If my monitor resolution is set higher than 1280x768 (it's wide-screen), there is stuttering whenever one of the main slide transitions is in process, and then this smooths out for the rest of the duration of the image, until the start of the transition to the next slide.

To eliminate other processes, I use "Enditall" to close down all non-essential programs. Nowdays there are a lot more of these than one realizes.

Of course, there are many other potential causes, but in my case these are the two main ones.

[Igor]

Matrox video card far not so fast as NVIDIA or ATI. Matrox good in 2D, but work in 3D mode is very slow. And large 1600x1200 screen resolution too difficult for slide show with Pan/Zoom effects.

[googull]

Thanks for the feedback guys. The Matrox APVe professional card for Video Editing and performs amazingly smooth HD resolution editing work as well as composite animate in Adobe After Effects. True it is not the highest performing gamers 3D card on the market but it's stats are impressive and ability to rotate true 3D elements with and without the the OPENGL library enabled are amazing. Issue is that most of the people I will send pic2exe presentations to don't have hardware anywhere near mine. Also pan and scan really isn't a 3D transform operation. I do have a number of background tasks running and I just took time to cancel and pause the non-critical items but really none of the them are what can be measured as "busy" by any standard. But also I can't expect my viewers to do this either when they run a show so perhaps it is possible that V5 should run at higher priority or some way handle this to ensure it doesn't get interrupted. Before worrying about my own authoring results I think it is best to stick to testing compiled shows by others that people all agree really run well. I just downloaded Showcase_Remarkables10.zip and reviewed the results. It jitters on pan and scan only when there is a transition in effect and once the transition finishes the scrolling literally pops a head a bit and gets really smooth. Almost like it gets "behind" during transitions. (Beautiful photography and photoshop work in the presentation by the way. ) - I thought this was just a case of resolution so I ran the remarkables at 1600X1200 1280X1024 and 1024X768 - my display is a DVI with native at 1600X1200 so the lower resolutions are not really usable but it was interesting to discover that even at 1024X768 I still got jitter and skipping activity and it was at the same places though slightly less pronounced. I know that rendering transitions on top of pans is computationally intense which is why video systems render a new frame for each blend to ensure smooth playback independent of the environment. How does V5 attempt to accomplish this?

[Lin Evans]

Actually, After Effects and other video oriented programs software render at DVD resolutions then interpolate to get to display resolutions above about 800x600 so that the actual images are quite different than PTE images which are hardware rendered at the input resolution. I use After Effects and Vegas Video also to create animation and it will run smoothly but with much lower true resolution and much less image quality.

There is something in your system itself which is likely causing this issue. If you are having problems running at 1024 x 768 and especially if with other shows which have already been tested on multiple systems then it's not an issue of too large files sizes, etc., but rather something unique to your own system. To test this, first eliminate the sound card by doing as suggested earlier. If that makes no difference the enable it again and kill all virus protection for a test and try again. If this doesn't help, then see if you have the latest video drivers and the latest Direct X implementation. The probability is quite high that your customers will have no problems. I have around a hundred clients who have run my slideshows created with the PTE betas. Their systems run from quite ordinary to extremely high end and so far I've only had one which had issues. As it turned out they had an on-board Intel based graphics and a change to a dedicated medium quality graphics card solved the problem.

The vast majority of users in the U.S. get butter smooth results with pan, zoom and rotate in PTE but there are a few who have difficulties caused by a variety of issues which can be as simple as a anti-virus program running in the background. Some, in Europe and especially France have older graphics cards such as 32 meg or 64 meg cards, but the majority in the U.S. and Canada have sufficient graphics power to run these PTE beta created files smoothly.

I have a couple test files which will tell us something about your environment. I'll provide links below. Both are a simple puzzle which uses 32 objects on 32 layers. They look very similar and are almost identical in file size but in reality are very, very different. The first (PuzzleamallRAM) has tiny PNG files which run smoothly on even 32 meg video cards. If this one doesn't run smoothly on your system, then we can pretty much rule out the video card as the culprit and look for drivers or conflicting software, etc., The second (puzzle.zip) is tough on even the most powerful graphics cards. It has large PNG files and uses at least 128 meg of video ram. People who can run this one smoothly can run about any PTE created show, even those which push the envelope or video RAM or file size. Both these use a midi sound track and if you don't have midi enabled you won't hear sound. Press ESC to end either of these shows...

The large RAM version (puzzle.zip) has a normal delay of about seven seconds before starting. The small RAM version (puzzlesmallRAM.zip) starts the sound nearly immediately.

Finally I'm linking to a show which has "medium" intense video. There are four "snow" animations, each with different types and consistency of "snow-fall" Systems which hesitate on the smoothness of the snowfall usually have video cards which are "marginal". Even some of the new Vista cards are not fully optimized for running some intensive graphics which is why I recommend people buying a new laptop with Vista take the two puzzle slideshows along on a USB flash card. If the system runs both smoothly it will run about any 2D or 3D program satisfactorily.

Here are the links:

http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/puzzlesmallRAM.zip

http://www.lin-evans.net/p2e/puzzle.zip

http://www.lin-evans.net/pte/rockymtnspringmenu.zip

Lin

Thanks for the feedback guys. The Matrox APVe professional card for Video Editing and performs amazingly smooth HD resolution editing work as well as composite animate in Adobe After Effects. True it is not the highest performing gamers 3D card on the market but it's stats are impressive and ability to rotate true 3D elements with and without the the OPENGL library enabled are amazing. Issue is that most of the people I will send pic2exe presentations to don't have hardware anywhere near mine. Also pan and scan really isn't a 3D transform operation. I do have a number of background tasks running and I just took time to cancel and pause the non-critical items but really none of the them are what can be measured as "busy" by any standard. But also I can't expect my viewers to do this either when they run a show so perhaps it is possible that V5 should run at higher priority or some way handle this to ensure it doesn't get interrupted. Before worrying about my own authoring results I think it is best to stick to testing compiled shows by others that people all agree really run well. I just downloaded Showcase_Remarkables10.zip and reviewed the results. It jitters on pan and scan only when there is a transition in effect and once the transition finishes the scrolling literally pops a head a bit and gets really smooth. Almost like it gets "behind" during transitions. (Beautiful photography and photoshop work in the presentation by the way. ) - I thought this was just a case of resolution so I ran the remarkables at 1600X1200 1280X1024 and 1024X768 - my display is a DVI with native at 1600X1200 so the lower resolutions are not really usable but it was interesting to discover that even at 1024X768 I still got jitter and skipping activity and it was at the same places though slightly less pronounced. I know that rendering transitions on top of pans is computationally intense which is why video systems render a new frame for each blend to ensure smooth playback independent of the environment. How does V5 attempt to accomplish this?

[googull]

thanks Lin for these tests and your analysis.

for my case.

Smallpuzzle - ran great.

Puzzle - huge skips and jitter.

Rockymntspring - great snow performance - only hesitated during image transitions.

I suppose this means my HW is good for in slide animation provided it doesn't get too intense - an lousy on slide transitions. I can't move from this card as it is the only one I've found that supports dual independent ICC profiles. Yes I know that DVD video is lower res - but I also author large res non-interlaced in WMV for PC display only - runs very smooth even at resolutions above 1200 but again, every frame has been prerendered.

I'll look for display updates.

Thanks Again for your reply.

Carl