PicturesToExe v5.00 beta #1

[Lin Evans]

Hi Robert,

I think you might do this by loading the individual slide with it's animations on each successive frame. There is a copy/paste capability with p2E, also a Keypoint copy, and though I've not attempted to do what you describe maybe if I get some time tomorrow I'll give it a shot. The transparency is no problem because you can control the opacity of any object and change it across real time. I've not had time to totally digest the possibilities yet and there are a few "features" which have not yet been implemented. The only down side I see with having to do this on a "repeat" basis is that the position of the moving objects when the transitions happen would need to be synchronized so that the object moving across the plane of each slide appears to stay in the same relative position or the position it "would" have been in considering the trajectory and speed had the previous slide still been playing.

ProShow and Producer have a feature which Igor may eventually want to implement where it's easy to match the position in terms of zoom, pan, etc., of a previous or "next" slide. What it essentially does is copy the "numbers" representing the percentage of zoom and the position of scroll, etc., from one slide to the next. Of course one could simply copy down the "numbers" from the display and match them manually, but it would be nice to just click on a choice and have that as an option. I would also like to see an optional grid so I can more easily match positions on subjects from one slide to another. One of my favorite techniques for wildlife shots is to zoom tight in on the eye of say a mountain goat mother and with a fade out followed by an overlapping fade on the following slide begin with an already zoomed in tight close up of the eye of her lamb which then zooms slowly out to the full frame. This is facilitated by having a grid with which to more easily match the precise positions. Of course it's possible to use the "center" dot on the green rectangle as a position marker with P2E beta 5, but then that forces me to have the eye in the very center of the frame which is not always the most pleasing aesthetic.

As this product evolves, I'm sure Igor and his development team will make adjustment to make things work in the most efficient way. i'm just blown away at how good this beta is and the incredible power of the new graphical engine.

Best regards,

Lin

Robert,

I created a little sample of what I believe you were asking for. This sample is a two slide example with two additional smaller slides set to slightly different transparencies. The transparencies can be consistent or can change as you need over the progress of their motion. You only need to set additional keypoints should you want them to become opaque for a short period or even totally transparent as if they were passing "behind" some barrier. For example you might have a tree or a boulder or house or something and could make the moving slide completely transparent during the time it passed the obstacle which would have the effect of making it look like it passed "behind" the obstacle.

In this example I have some mountain vegetation at 14,200 feet elevation and a couple small images of Rocky Mountain Goat Kids. One passes from left to right at the top of the screen and continues it's course on the following slide. I only used two slides, but it would be just as easy to continue this for any portion of the slide show. The second image of the goat kids passes from right to left at the bottom of the screen and continues the motion across the next slide. I think this was the effect you asked about.

There really is very little you "can't" do with this program. It's a "nuts and bolts" approach which gives the user lots of low level control. Let me know if this was what you had in mind.

Link below

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

Best regards,

Lin

[Adda]

Hi all!

One Question:

Schould "display slides in random order" work in Beta 1??

On my computer it does not work.

Best regards

Adda

[mcarthur]

Robert,

...

Thanks Igor. It's a wonderful breakthrough for PTE and I know I'm going to enjoy using it immensely!

Robert

I think you might do this by loading the individual slide with it's animations on each successive frame. There is a copy/paste capability with p2E, also a Keypoint copy, and though I've not attempted to do what you describe maybe if I get some time tomorrow I'll give it a shot. The transparency is no problem because you can control the opacity of any object and change it across real time. I've not had time to totally digest the possibilities yet and there are a few "features" which have not yet been implemented. The only down side I see with having to do this on a "repeat" basis is that the position of the moving objects when the transitions happen would need to be synchronized so that the object moving across the plane of each slide appears to stay in the same relative position or the position it "would" have been in considering the trajectory and speed had the previous slide still been playing.

...

Good idea Lin. That will certainly work (with some elbow grease) in that situation. I'm really looking forward to trying things out a lot. Of course the caveat is to use the wonderful new animation features appropriately - I've seen some truly terrible shows where every conceivable transition was used and some sea-sickenly bizarre animations :-)

Thanks again,

Robert

[Lin Evans]

Thanks Igor. It's a wonderful breakthrough for PTE and I know I'm going to enjoy using it immensely!

Robert

Good idea Lin. That will certainly work (with some elbow grease) in that situation. I'm really looking forward to trying things out a lot. Of course the caveat is to use the wonderful new animation features appropriately - I've seen some truly terrible shows where every conceivable transition was used and some sea-sickenly bizarre animations :-)

Thanks again,

Robert

Hi Robert,

I made a little sample of this for you (couple thread up here) and it worked fine. I didn't take out the background and use transparent PNG's just put a couple jpgs in to test the theory.

Of course you're absolutely right about the over use of effects. They can be delightful with done with taste and garish when they take the place of the actual purpose of the show.

I lost my broadband earlier today and had to quickly sign up on Earthlink for dial up (24 k) and I can't upload or download any data. I'm going to replace my wireless broadband provider tomorrow I hope, but for now I'm stuck at the relative speed of a tortoise - LOL.

Best regards,

Lin

[keffs]

I have just run the examle show, and although it ran very well indeed, when the show finished, it left the colour balance on the screen wrong. The colours are very blue, and the only way I have so far figured to get it back is to reboot.

I use Optical to adjust my monitor, and have a Radeon 9800 Pro woth 256MB.

Steve

PS

I have now also run the flowers example, and this one did not mess up the colours.

[Igor]

Steve,

Please download and try this slide-show

http://www.wnsoft.com/test/LeaksTest.exe

Will colors right after closing of slide-show?

[alrobin]

Igor,

Something else to fix in Beta 2:

When I start a new slideshow, set the list of effects possible to "fade" only, add some slides and music, select synch show, then change the transition timing on the timeline, the "Customize slide" menu for the images modified switches to "Effect / Use own transition effect" and "Use default effect but with own duration". However, when I then run "Preview", all the transitions are now "Circle (from centre)" instead of "Fade".

I can force the "Fade" by entering "Customize slide" for each of the slides modified, and setting the effect to "Fade".

[LumenLux]

For any of you that can handle a 106 mb download, my first "production" with 5.0 Beta is available at

Spirits in the Sky

When I can make time I will try to reduce photo file sizes and repost. But don't hold your breath. As for now, I wanted to keep photos full size so as to not add an unknown variable in trying out the zoom and pan capabilities of PTE 5.0

Comments of course are welcome!

[JPD]

Sorry, Richard, it's too heavy for my PC, I had during five seconds a black screen and most of the others transitions jump.

The photographhies are nice but I can't enjoy them :-(((

[LumenLux]

I'm sorry Jean-Pierre, if I can make a "lite" version without compromising photo quality, we will see if that makes a difference.

Two "warnings" I should share from my constructing the sequence.

1. This 5.00 version is going to have most of us using "objects" much more than previous versions. This Spirits sequence of course involved the object screen on many slides. The management problem I ran into was that I was using a few photos as both "slide"and "object." PTE handled it just fine in the sequence but when I tried to make the final template, I would receive very helpful error messages. (Thank you Igor for designing in so many smart ideas. I don't know how you or anyone can think of so many of the potential pitfalls!) The problem was that as I had gone along, I had earlier created two templates with different names. Then during the rest of the construction I would pull object files from whichever template caught my fancy. But this is a "no no" because the files themselves had identical names other than the paths. So I had for instance, PicFile1776 as a slide or a couple of slides and then PicFile1776 with a different path for the object use. Then if I tried to make a new template possible by changing file names or path names, PTE could not make a project because it could not find the files. So at that point it was Show (Project) vs. Template. Ultimately the only solution I found was to edit the project.pte txt file. So, if you can follow this lengthy account, you may avoid the mess.

2. Igor, you may want to check this one out, or may already know. The project background selection will only accept colors, solid or graduated. If I tried project background as image, tiled, or fit screen, error messages and crash. Re-starting PTE would not bring back any picture. "Preview" would only play sound unless I rebooted. If you need the actuall error messages I will dig them up for you. (It may have been the "PreView3 ...Alpha" error that has cropped in earlier messages.)

[Igor]

Textured background will be in next betas, very soon.

Tomorrow we'll publish beta #2 with fixing of known problems.

p.s. please don't use too large images in slide-shows. I even heard today about one slide-show with slide 10500 x 8500 image (90 MB of JPEG file) It takes about 375 MB in memory of video card. Although we created absolutely not-limited size of images system, it may require video card with 256 MB of memory and long loading.

I consider that usually enough 2400x1500 for Zoom effect and 9000 x 1024 for 360" panoramas.

It will work fine on most of video cards.

[bharkins]

Thank you Igor for that data on image size. That is exactly what I have been looking for as a guide since the original 1024 X 768 doesn't do well with pan & Zoom.

Bill

[alrobin]

Igor,

Two design requests for whenever you have time to consider them, if I may:

1. It would be nice to have the capability to rename the "object tag" under "Objects" in the "Object & Animation" window. Once you have half a dozen images flying around the screen, it is hard to remember which is which.

2. It would be nice to have the "object tag" highlighted whenever one clicks on the object. The reverse is already true - when one clicks on the tag, the object "timeline" points are highlighted.

I must say that after some initial frustration while becoming familiar with the program, it now seems very stable, and predictable, and also quite user-friendly. It is complicated, though, and not for the "faint-at-heart". Some of the design features are similar to those found in certain "timeline"-based graphics design and animation programs, but are much easier to follow and implement than in these other programs.

[LumenLux]

I agree with you Al - I think on all counts here. The portion of the power that I have used is mostly quite understandable. But it is one of those "the more I learn, the more I realize I don't know." But the program is very powerful whether we understand it or not.

On the object tag ideas - My experience was that I would find that the "run" of the objects would often include something different than I expected. If there are multiple object points on the horizontal line, they are often very close together and hard to move a particular one without knowing which one it even is. It is nice that you can reposition the object points - slide one over the other - but then the "time sign" changes to it's position and again it is very hard to know which point is which. BUT, maybe there are other helps that I am not utilizing yet. I found the "tree" of object/image heirarchy in the lower right is useful but I still don't have it all clear. I would have "trouble" trying to deal with a certain single image because I had apparently "grouped" the images - probably by as you said, setting up sub-images. I have not thought about it yet, but Igor's demo "Fractals" - would that have been done with the layered nesting/multi levels of sub images?

[JPD]

Bonjour Igor,

In the V5 beta#1 does the two transitions Fade in/out and Circle are also made with the graphic card.

Thank you

[Igor]

Yes, video card shows Fade in/out and Circle effects. But for Circle effect we also use CPU for some calculations (with low loading of CPU resources).

[Ian]

Al - you can already give each object its own name. When working on an object, click the Properties tag and re-name it to something more useful. Occasionally it doesn't bring the name through to the object list, but if you temporarily tick the "main image" checkbox it seems to force it through.

If you leave the checkbox ticked (as I discovered...) the individual object is displayed in the slide list instead of the original background image.

Ian

[Cèlou]

Hi Igor,

Several interrogations arrive with some tests.

First of all the format of the window of positioning inside “insertion of objects” (the black one) Format 963 X 722

Then I took an image 1024 X 768 which I divided into four equal parts 4 X 512 x384.

When I want to insert them to do for example one burst, format of 512 X 384 is transformed into a format of 576 X 433 and if I start from my not burst original image to the format of 1024 X 768 and that I want to insert there part of this image (512 X 384) the latter is approximately with the same format as the starting image to thus knowing 963 X 722 as garnde as the original image.

Another thing, by imagining for example that with Photoshop I reduce an image in a given format: 650 x432, when I it insére, the image with changed format and passes to: 771 X 512.

This level thus it will be impossible to make a perfect Homothety.

On the other hand if I record these images in an album, they all are with the original format.

Have a response on this subject.

Thank you

[JPD]

I even heard today about one slide-show with slide 10500 x 8500 image (90 MB of JPEG file)

I tried it and have an error message :

"Asseertion with message: 'Error: Multi Textures Count = '1(E:\Work\Wnsoft.PteCommonLib\D3D\D3DExt3.pas, line: 402)"

My PC didn't like this test, but the person who created this test did it to compare with two others products, and PTE seems have the best result on his PC.

PS Thanks Igor for your answer

[keffs]

Steve,

Please download and try this slide-show

http://www.wnsoft.com/test/LeaksTest.exe

Will colors right after closing of slide-show?

Igor,

That one is fine. Colours are unchanged adter exiting.

Steve

[alrobin]

... When working on an object, click the Properties tag and re-name it to something more useful. Ian

Thanks, Ian.

Igor is one step ahead of us. That is so cool!

One thing I notice about the display in the object editor is that when working with aspect ratio 15:9 the image size for the added wide-screen objects (in my case 1280x768) isn't exactly the same as the displayed portion of the image I'm panning.

So, when the show plays, I get two narrow bands of the panning image moving above and below the full-size image that I'm displaying over the panned image. 15:9 and 1280x768 should be exactly the same size.

[Igor]

Steve,

OK! We solved this problem with gamma in newest beta #2

Al,

Thank you! You're right, it's my mistake - I'll fix it in beta #3

As temporal solution please choose "Custom" aspect ratio and type "1.6666"

(Because coefficient for 15 : 9 = 1.666666666666668)

p.s. I just uploaded new beta #2. Please reply in that new topic.

[Guest damor]

Hello eveyone

After so many personal medical and computor probs I am finaly back.

Have been playing with "5" and don't seem to have any software probs, or any other at tihis point.

I'm just getting to grips with v4 etc and up pops this little baby! I cant stay away from the pan and zoom.

Its amazing. Have also looked at some examples and your all well in front of me. catch up soon I hope.

Dave

[alrobin]

... Thank you! You're right, it's my mistake - I'll fix it in beta #3

As temporal solution please choose "Custom" aspect ratio and type "1.6666" ...

Many thanks, Igor! Will check it out in version 2.