digitalartist
10-12-2004, 03:21 AM
DADPT #5 - Creating a Slideshow with PicturesToExe
At the PMers gathering on 6th December at my house, Jimin showed his Pictures from Afghanistan using Powerpoint, while I showed my images from the Old Silk Road using PicturesToExe (US$24 download from www.wnsoft.com (http://www.wnsoft.com) ). For those who were not able to be present that night, you can download and view a 3 minutes shortened version of my slideshow from HERE (http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/DA-Slideshow-S.zip) It’s a 4.26 MB Zip file and it should take about 2 minutes to download using a Streamyx connection.
The Zip file contains the PicturesToExe self executing Slideshow file. Unzip the file, turn on your speakers, and double click on the DA-Slideshow-S.exe file. When it asks you for a password, enter digitalartist and click OK. The password is case sensitive.
At the opening intro screen, click on the RUN button, sit back, and enjoy a three minutes slideshow with music, created with an excellent, cheap and easy to use software you can buy and download from the internet for only US$24. You can hit the ESC button anytime you want to quit the show. But be forewarned. If you click ESC before the show ends, your computer will self destruct in THREE minutes. Why 3 minutes? To give you time to get away, of course !!
:P
I explained to those who were present that night how I created my slideshow, and since then, I’ve received a number of PM’s urging me to do a short tutorial for the benefit of those who couldn’t attend the talk. I couldn’t play golf today because my usual mates are playing on a golf course somewhere in Indonesia, so I sat down and this is DADPT #5 – How to Create a Slideshow with sound using PicturesToExe . Although its really easy to use PicturesToExe, its quite a complex effort to put it into a tutorial. Dear God! Why do I bother with all this? But like Ted says, I got nothin’ better to do, and I want to give sumthin’ back to society…I hope it’ll help a few people out there. Here’s how you can build a slideshow like mine.
1. You can download PicturesToExe from www.wnsoft.com (http://www.wnsoft.com) and “try before you buy” . Without the registration key however, you will be limited to a slideshow with only 10 images. Its only $24 and you can pay by credit card. I think its really good value for money.
2. To create a slide show, the first thing to do is to prepare your images. Your show will look better if all your pictures are consistent in size. I suggest you resize all your pictures to 1024 x 768 pixels, which should work well on most screens. PicturesToExe requires your images to be in JPG format.
3. When converting and saving your slides, you should select a medium compression setting of about 6. Personally I try to make each of my images not larger than about 100kb to lessen the squeeze on microprocessor resources, and to make the final FicturesToExe file reasonably small for portability. You should number your images sequentially like 001, 002, 003, etc., and save them into a separate folder. Make two blank slides and fill with black to put one at the start of your show, and one at the end. BTW, at the moment, PicturesToExe doesn’t work on Macs.
4. To give your show a professional touch, you should create a sequence of slides for your title images, and a credit sequence for the ending. One slick way to do a title sequence is like what I did for my show. I took an appropriate picture - in my case a picture of Mt Rakaposhi - and I typed in a title (Hunza Valley Pakistan) with some fancy text. I desaturated one exact sized copy to greyscale, and then I let the Program open this greyscale picture after the first black slide. I then faded in the colour slide to create an effect of a B&W to colour sequence. I then faded in another colour slide without the title like this:-
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/001a.jpg
You can see the effect if you download and run my slideshow.
5. If you intend to convert your slideshow into an avi file, or a DVD or VCD file which can be played like a movie on normal TV (yes, PictureToExe can do this for you too), you need to place your title lettering well inside the slide frame, within the so-called “title safe” region – which is about 3 cm inside the boundaries of your pictures.
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/002.jpg
6. The next thing to do is to create an ending sequence in the same way as the starting sequence. My ending sequence is as follows, and it starts and ends with black slides too, so that the last image will fade into black and the last End slide will also fade to black :-
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/003a.jpg
7. Once you’ve created, sized and prepared your titles sequence, your ending sequence, your pictures to be included into your slideshow, and you’ve numbered them sequentially, you should put them all into a separate folder. This isn’t absolutely necessary because you can actually pull pictures into your slideshow from anywhere on your HDD, but putting them into one folder will make it very convenient for you.
8. You should also choose an appropriate piece of music to go with your slideshow. Ideally you should pick a music score which has quite clearly defined beats, which you can use as a cue to time in your slide changes. The trick to producing a slick show is to be clever about selecting those beats, and to carefully time the slide transition. Once you’ve learned the basics, you should know that you can actually record a unique commentary about each picture on a separate sound file, and have PictureToExe play the commentary file while it is displaying your slide, even while the background music is playing.
9. You are now ready to open the PictureToExe program. This is what you will see upon launching the software. Note that I have 7 HDDs on my system. Two of them are removable drawer types, so theorethically my HDD storage options is unlimited. This is because of the low confidence level I have in relying for storage on CDs and DVDs. :D :-
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/004.jpg
10. Clicking the appropriate HDD symbol where you stored your image folder will display all the folders on the HDD. Clicking on the folder with your prepared images will cause the thumbnails of your pictures to appear in the File Panel as follows (For the thumbnails view, you need to select this option from the View menu or by hitting Ctrl+1):-
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/005.jpg
11. You can now select the pictures you need by clicking and dragging them down from the file panel to the Slide List Panel. The first slide should be a blank Black slide. Pictures should be in the sequence you want them to appear in your show. If you had taken the trouble to name your slides with the sequential number in which they are to appear, you can simply press shift and select all slides to be dragged down in a group. Note that you can resize the panels to any combination you like.
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/006.jpg
12. If you highlight a picture from the slide list panel, the picture will appear in the image panel. Selecting Classical view from the View options will open another panel below the slide list where you can enter comments about the picture. You can choose either to have the comments displayed on screen, the file name displayed or you can disable this feature in the Project Options panel. There is also a window where you can select a unique sound file – say, a commentary about each picture – which can then be played when the slide is displayed.
13. Clicking on the Project Options tab will let you select global parameters for your slide show. Global parameters are settings which will be applied to ALL slides. There are numerous choices for Music, Comments, Transition Effects, Screen, Messages, etc. Its best that you play around and explore these choices yourself to see what they can do. I will simply tell you that the choices are surprisingly varied and wide for such a low cost software. Clicking on the Effects Tab for example, will let you choose your transition effects. I personally prefer Fade in/Fade out with a time of 2500 as my default Transition Effect. If I need to shorten or lengthen the transition time for a particular slide to jive it with the music, I can do it simply by double clicking on the slide in the slide panel list which will open the Customize Individual Slide pop-up box. The trick to a good slideshow is NOT to use ALL the 100+ effects which are available. Using an insensitive mixture of transitions is a very visible signal of video immaturity. Its like the newbie with his new digicam shooting home movies and zooming in an out indescriminately.
14. The picture below shows the Add Music option. Clicking on the Music Tab in the Project Options pop up box will allow you to load your choice of music from your HDD. Convert your music score to MP3 format to tighten your slideshow file size.
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/007.jpg
15. The Advanced Tab allows you to password protect your masterpiece. Here you can also enable a time limited viewing of your slideshow. You can use this box to also insert a copyright notice. You can lock your files by preventing viewers from copying your images, and you can also add a customized logo for your slideshow.
16. The Main Tab allows you to automatically create a slide show with a standard transition and a standard time for each slide. It’s the easiest and fastest way to quickly create a (sub-standard) slide show. I reccomend that you work a little harder by ticking the Synchronize Slideshow to Music Duration box, and then hitting the Customize Synchronization bar which will open a Time Line that will allow you to insert slides individually to synchronize with your selected music score.
17. With the Customize Synchronization time line open, clicking on the Waveform button, will present you with a wave diagram of your selected music score, which illustrates clearly your best possible slide “entry” and exit points:-
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/008.jpg
18. Now all you do is turn on your speakers, click Play, and at each “Waveform Beat” , hit the “New Transition” Button to insert a slide from your Slide List Panel, at your selected Beat point on a crest of a wave. You can see a miniature actual slideshow, and the transition effect in a window to the right of your Customize Synchronization window. In the diagram above you can see where I’ve inserted my slides. The length of the bar is the time of each transition. You can click Pause to manually fine tune the entry and end points of each slide and also its transition time and for how long it will be displayed. Clicking on the slide number will allow you to drag the slide entry point up or down the time line. The length of time the slide will be on screen can be seen from the time-line, and can be adjusted by moving the next slide nearer or further away from a slide. Double clicking on the slide number will open a window which will allow you to customize the characteristics of that slide. Close the Customize Slide pop up box when you are done. Then click Play, New Transition and Pause again, to continue inserting the next slide and working on its characteristics.
19. When you are done inserting all your slides, and you’ve fine tuned the entry and end points of each slide, click the Update button. You can then preview your slide show by hitting the preview button. When you are satisfied and you have finished fine tuning the show, simply click OK, save the Project by giving it a file name, and then Create and save the slideshow by also giving it a name. Hitting create will automatically create an executable icon of the PicturetoExe EXE slideshow file which will contain all your slides, your music and your transition effects in one compact executable file which can be transported and played on any PC. If you need to, you can always come back to the project file later to add more slides, more music, or to update and amend your slideshow.
20. That’s it !! You’re done. There is a Tab below the Slide List Panel which will let you create a DVD or VCD, or AVI file for burning to Disk.
21. This tutorial may make the creation process appear more complicated than it actually is. The trick is to actually open the program and muddle through by yourself. Play around and work with only ten slides to get a feel of what each tab or button does. I find the program quite intuitive and very simple to master. The program’s Help File and FAQ are also very good.
Try PictureToExe. I guarantee you’ll be pleased with it.
At the PMers gathering on 6th December at my house, Jimin showed his Pictures from Afghanistan using Powerpoint, while I showed my images from the Old Silk Road using PicturesToExe (US$24 download from www.wnsoft.com (http://www.wnsoft.com) ). For those who were not able to be present that night, you can download and view a 3 minutes shortened version of my slideshow from HERE (http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/DA-Slideshow-S.zip) It’s a 4.26 MB Zip file and it should take about 2 minutes to download using a Streamyx connection.
The Zip file contains the PicturesToExe self executing Slideshow file. Unzip the file, turn on your speakers, and double click on the DA-Slideshow-S.exe file. When it asks you for a password, enter digitalartist and click OK. The password is case sensitive.
At the opening intro screen, click on the RUN button, sit back, and enjoy a three minutes slideshow with music, created with an excellent, cheap and easy to use software you can buy and download from the internet for only US$24. You can hit the ESC button anytime you want to quit the show. But be forewarned. If you click ESC before the show ends, your computer will self destruct in THREE minutes. Why 3 minutes? To give you time to get away, of course !!
:P
I explained to those who were present that night how I created my slideshow, and since then, I’ve received a number of PM’s urging me to do a short tutorial for the benefit of those who couldn’t attend the talk. I couldn’t play golf today because my usual mates are playing on a golf course somewhere in Indonesia, so I sat down and this is DADPT #5 – How to Create a Slideshow with sound using PicturesToExe . Although its really easy to use PicturesToExe, its quite a complex effort to put it into a tutorial. Dear God! Why do I bother with all this? But like Ted says, I got nothin’ better to do, and I want to give sumthin’ back to society…I hope it’ll help a few people out there. Here’s how you can build a slideshow like mine.
1. You can download PicturesToExe from www.wnsoft.com (http://www.wnsoft.com) and “try before you buy” . Without the registration key however, you will be limited to a slideshow with only 10 images. Its only $24 and you can pay by credit card. I think its really good value for money.
2. To create a slide show, the first thing to do is to prepare your images. Your show will look better if all your pictures are consistent in size. I suggest you resize all your pictures to 1024 x 768 pixels, which should work well on most screens. PicturesToExe requires your images to be in JPG format.
3. When converting and saving your slides, you should select a medium compression setting of about 6. Personally I try to make each of my images not larger than about 100kb to lessen the squeeze on microprocessor resources, and to make the final FicturesToExe file reasonably small for portability. You should number your images sequentially like 001, 002, 003, etc., and save them into a separate folder. Make two blank slides and fill with black to put one at the start of your show, and one at the end. BTW, at the moment, PicturesToExe doesn’t work on Macs.
4. To give your show a professional touch, you should create a sequence of slides for your title images, and a credit sequence for the ending. One slick way to do a title sequence is like what I did for my show. I took an appropriate picture - in my case a picture of Mt Rakaposhi - and I typed in a title (Hunza Valley Pakistan) with some fancy text. I desaturated one exact sized copy to greyscale, and then I let the Program open this greyscale picture after the first black slide. I then faded in the colour slide to create an effect of a B&W to colour sequence. I then faded in another colour slide without the title like this:-
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/001a.jpg
You can see the effect if you download and run my slideshow.
5. If you intend to convert your slideshow into an avi file, or a DVD or VCD file which can be played like a movie on normal TV (yes, PictureToExe can do this for you too), you need to place your title lettering well inside the slide frame, within the so-called “title safe” region – which is about 3 cm inside the boundaries of your pictures.
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/002.jpg
6. The next thing to do is to create an ending sequence in the same way as the starting sequence. My ending sequence is as follows, and it starts and ends with black slides too, so that the last image will fade into black and the last End slide will also fade to black :-
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/003a.jpg
7. Once you’ve created, sized and prepared your titles sequence, your ending sequence, your pictures to be included into your slideshow, and you’ve numbered them sequentially, you should put them all into a separate folder. This isn’t absolutely necessary because you can actually pull pictures into your slideshow from anywhere on your HDD, but putting them into one folder will make it very convenient for you.
8. You should also choose an appropriate piece of music to go with your slideshow. Ideally you should pick a music score which has quite clearly defined beats, which you can use as a cue to time in your slide changes. The trick to producing a slick show is to be clever about selecting those beats, and to carefully time the slide transition. Once you’ve learned the basics, you should know that you can actually record a unique commentary about each picture on a separate sound file, and have PictureToExe play the commentary file while it is displaying your slide, even while the background music is playing.
9. You are now ready to open the PictureToExe program. This is what you will see upon launching the software. Note that I have 7 HDDs on my system. Two of them are removable drawer types, so theorethically my HDD storage options is unlimited. This is because of the low confidence level I have in relying for storage on CDs and DVDs. :D :-
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/004.jpg
10. Clicking the appropriate HDD symbol where you stored your image folder will display all the folders on the HDD. Clicking on the folder with your prepared images will cause the thumbnails of your pictures to appear in the File Panel as follows (For the thumbnails view, you need to select this option from the View menu or by hitting Ctrl+1):-
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/005.jpg
11. You can now select the pictures you need by clicking and dragging them down from the file panel to the Slide List Panel. The first slide should be a blank Black slide. Pictures should be in the sequence you want them to appear in your show. If you had taken the trouble to name your slides with the sequential number in which they are to appear, you can simply press shift and select all slides to be dragged down in a group. Note that you can resize the panels to any combination you like.
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/006.jpg
12. If you highlight a picture from the slide list panel, the picture will appear in the image panel. Selecting Classical view from the View options will open another panel below the slide list where you can enter comments about the picture. You can choose either to have the comments displayed on screen, the file name displayed or you can disable this feature in the Project Options panel. There is also a window where you can select a unique sound file – say, a commentary about each picture – which can then be played when the slide is displayed.
13. Clicking on the Project Options tab will let you select global parameters for your slide show. Global parameters are settings which will be applied to ALL slides. There are numerous choices for Music, Comments, Transition Effects, Screen, Messages, etc. Its best that you play around and explore these choices yourself to see what they can do. I will simply tell you that the choices are surprisingly varied and wide for such a low cost software. Clicking on the Effects Tab for example, will let you choose your transition effects. I personally prefer Fade in/Fade out with a time of 2500 as my default Transition Effect. If I need to shorten or lengthen the transition time for a particular slide to jive it with the music, I can do it simply by double clicking on the slide in the slide panel list which will open the Customize Individual Slide pop-up box. The trick to a good slideshow is NOT to use ALL the 100+ effects which are available. Using an insensitive mixture of transitions is a very visible signal of video immaturity. Its like the newbie with his new digicam shooting home movies and zooming in an out indescriminately.
14. The picture below shows the Add Music option. Clicking on the Music Tab in the Project Options pop up box will allow you to load your choice of music from your HDD. Convert your music score to MP3 format to tighten your slideshow file size.
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/007.jpg
15. The Advanced Tab allows you to password protect your masterpiece. Here you can also enable a time limited viewing of your slideshow. You can use this box to also insert a copyright notice. You can lock your files by preventing viewers from copying your images, and you can also add a customized logo for your slideshow.
16. The Main Tab allows you to automatically create a slide show with a standard transition and a standard time for each slide. It’s the easiest and fastest way to quickly create a (sub-standard) slide show. I reccomend that you work a little harder by ticking the Synchronize Slideshow to Music Duration box, and then hitting the Customize Synchronization bar which will open a Time Line that will allow you to insert slides individually to synchronize with your selected music score.
17. With the Customize Synchronization time line open, clicking on the Waveform button, will present you with a wave diagram of your selected music score, which illustrates clearly your best possible slide “entry” and exit points:-
http://imagebank.digitalartist.com.my/Pic2Exe/008.jpg
18. Now all you do is turn on your speakers, click Play, and at each “Waveform Beat” , hit the “New Transition” Button to insert a slide from your Slide List Panel, at your selected Beat point on a crest of a wave. You can see a miniature actual slideshow, and the transition effect in a window to the right of your Customize Synchronization window. In the diagram above you can see where I’ve inserted my slides. The length of the bar is the time of each transition. You can click Pause to manually fine tune the entry and end points of each slide and also its transition time and for how long it will be displayed. Clicking on the slide number will allow you to drag the slide entry point up or down the time line. The length of time the slide will be on screen can be seen from the time-line, and can be adjusted by moving the next slide nearer or further away from a slide. Double clicking on the slide number will open a window which will allow you to customize the characteristics of that slide. Close the Customize Slide pop up box when you are done. Then click Play, New Transition and Pause again, to continue inserting the next slide and working on its characteristics.
19. When you are done inserting all your slides, and you’ve fine tuned the entry and end points of each slide, click the Update button. You can then preview your slide show by hitting the preview button. When you are satisfied and you have finished fine tuning the show, simply click OK, save the Project by giving it a file name, and then Create and save the slideshow by also giving it a name. Hitting create will automatically create an executable icon of the PicturetoExe EXE slideshow file which will contain all your slides, your music and your transition effects in one compact executable file which can be transported and played on any PC. If you need to, you can always come back to the project file later to add more slides, more music, or to update and amend your slideshow.
20. That’s it !! You’re done. There is a Tab below the Slide List Panel which will let you create a DVD or VCD, or AVI file for burning to Disk.
21. This tutorial may make the creation process appear more complicated than it actually is. The trick is to actually open the program and muddle through by yourself. Play around and work with only ten slides to get a feel of what each tab or button does. I find the program quite intuitive and very simple to master. The program’s Help File and FAQ are also very good.
Try PictureToExe. I guarantee you’ll be pleased with it.