Instructions for making a PicturesToExe Presentation
1 You will find five folders on the CDROM. Copy the Audacity, Express Rip, Lame, and Pictures To Exe folders onto your C:\ drive .
2 Open the Audacity folder on your C:\ drive and copy the icon onto your desktop thus:
3 Place the mouse cursor over the Audacity.exe icon and right click.
4 Left click on Send To .
5 Left click on Desktop (Create shortcut) .
6 The icon should now be on the desktop where you can drag it to a convenient location.
7 Open the Express Rip folder on your C:\ drive. Double click on the ripsetup.exe
icon and follow the instructions. Un-
8 Open the Pictures To Exe v4.48 folder on your C:\ drive. Double click on the Setup.exe icon and follow the instructions. Drag the PicturesToExe icon on the desktop to a suitable location. You will be asked to load your key – instructions tell you how to purchase your key over the internet – it costs about £15.50 for a private licence. You can practise without a licence, however, using up to ten images – so go ahead and try!
9 Do not worry about it at this stage (you will be directed to section below), but
you will find that the first time you try to save an MP3 file in Audacity, a window
will appear asking you for the location of lame_enc.dll -
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Getting Started:
You first have to decide whether you want to put images to music or the other way around. The type of images will decide on the music you choose and the length of the music. Once you have a rough idea you can select about the correct number of images – let us say as an average one slide every 15 seconds.
Music – Express Rip (Figure 4):
1 Music may be downloaded from the net or from CD-
2 Open Express rip and set the CD/DVD drive to the location of your music CDROM.
The tracks should appear as a list in the window below. The track titles will also
appear if you are connected live to the internet. If not you will have identify the
tracks you require from the CD case. Un-
3 Select the Output folder where you want to store the ripped music file/s (usually My Documents\My Music).
4 Click on the Encoder settings button and set Format to PCM.
5 Click on the Name dropdown box and click on CD Quality.
Figure 4
6 Set the Output format to wav (this is the best quality as it is not compressed).
7 Make sure the track/s you want are ticked and the others blank.
8 Click on the RIP button.
Music – Audacity:
You will have to study the Help files to learn how to use Audacity fully, as it is a powerful tool, but I will describe a few of the more useful functions here.
1 Open Audacity and load a wav file you have created above. The screen should look something like Figure 5. The whole music file is depicted with the left and right channels. The top left button (circled) should be pressed. Anywhere you click the mouse on the music channels should leave a vertical cursor line.
Figure5
2 If you now press the green start button , the music should play from the cursor position – press the square, orange stop button to stop playing. Repeat after placing the cursor in a new position.
3 Hold the left mouse button and drag the cursor to the left or right. You should see a shaded section (Figure 6). You can now edit this section in several of the following ways – you may enlarge it, delete it, change the tempo (speed but not the pitch), change the pitch , amplify , fade in , fade out , or insert silence . You can also cut and paste in a small section, to remove a scratch from a vinyl recording.
Figure 6
4 To enlarge the section, click on one of the four magnifying buttons. The first two enlarge or reduce the selected portion of the music tracks, centralising on the position you place the mouse pointer. The third button enlarges the chosen section to the full width of the screen and the RH button resets the screen to show the whole music file.
5 To delete a section, select a small piece as described in 3 above and press the delete key. Place the cursor just before the deleted section and Play. You will clearly hear that a section has been deleted. By enlarging a section, and choosing the part to delete carefully, you can accurately delete part of the music file (therefore shortening the music file), without hearing the change.
6 To change the tempo , pitch , fade in , fade out , or amplify a section, select as in 3 above and then click on Effect on the Menu Bar (the bar running along the top of the screen). Click on the effect that you want, follow instructions and observe the result.
7 To insert an area of silence (often useful at the beginning or end, or between pieces of music), select a section and then click on Generate , and then on Silence . You can specify an exact length, if you wish, or leave the length to the selection you made.
8 Save the file as a wav file , as this in un-
9 Save the file as an MP3 file once you are satisfied with your alterations. This
is a compressed file which is much smaller that the wav file and can be used in Pictures
to exe. You must refer to Loading the Software, Section 9 , the first time you save,
as it requires third-
Images in PicturesToExe:
This is a personal description of how I use the software, and does not by any means use all of the techniques. For that you will have to read the Help notes that come with the software. The setup I use is as shown in Figure 7 and I shall use this in the notes that follow.
1 Make a new folder and copy into it the images you want to use. Reduce all the images to 1024 x 768 pixels and 72dpi . This can be done in Photoshop – See Appendix. You can now remove the high definition images to avoid confusion. As a check, all the images should be under 1MB in size or a little over if they have writing on them.
Figure 7
2 Open PicturesToExe and ensure you are in Horizontal View by clicking on View on the Menu Bar and then on Horizontal View . Open the folder containing your images by clicking C: if that is the directory in which they are stored and then double click to open your folder when it appears in the LH Box. The View in this box can be changed from File Details to Thumbnails by clicking on the small button at the top shown circled.
3 Place the images in the order you want to project them . This is done by double
clicking on the image (where it will appear in the long box at the bottom of the
screen). Alternatively, you can drag the image to the box. You can also re-
4 Click on Project Options and then on the Music tab (See Figure 8). Click on Add and locate your music file and open it. If you add more than one piece of music, note that you can change the order using the up/down buttons. Make sure all the tickboxes are unchecked except for the top one.
Figure 8
5 Click on the Effects tab and uncheck all the boxes in the transition effects window by clicking on the top right button (Figure 9). Tick the Fade in/out checkbox and ensure that the Enable Transition Effects checkbox is ticked. The fade in is set for 1500ms as default and this will apply to every image. For music with a slow tempo you may wish to extend this to 2500ms. Equally for a fast tempo this can be reduced.
Figure 9
6 Click on the Main Tab (Figure 10) and make sure that the When show ends keep last slide on screen Radio button is selected and the synchronise show to music is ticked. This will divide your images evenly throughout the length of the music. Click OK .
7 Save the project by clicking File – Save As . Give the project a name and save in a suitable folder.
8 Create the slideshow by clicking File – Create Slideshow As .
9 Run the slideshow by clicking on Preview .
Advanced Synchronisation of Images using the Timeline
This method is far more sophisticated and allows one to vary the time at which each image is projected and the length of fade in and fade out. Thus the images can be directly related to the music.
1 Click on the Timeline button on the main display. The Customise Synchronisation window will appear (Figure 11). The top line shows seconds and beneath are the images numbered sequentially. Double clicking any of the numbers will bring up the Customise Slide Box for that image and the type of effect and duration can be altered here. The box can also be brought up by pressing the Customise Slide button. The Use Own Transition Effect checkbox has to be ticked first. In the example shown, the default effect is being used, set by me earlier which was the Fade in/out effect. One could alter this for this slide to one of the other effects by pressing the appropriate radio button. Note that the length of the effect has been altered to 3000ms and this appears as an increase in length of the grey line associated with the image number. The length of the effect can also be adjusted by clicking and dragging the RH end of the grey line (see Figure 12).
Figure 11
Figure 12
2 The relationship of each image with the music can be altered by clicking on the image number and dragging it to the left or right. The exact position relative to the music is enhanced by the waveform which runs beneath.
Figure13
3 You can also select a group of images by dragging a box over them (Figure 13). The selected images are highlighted in blue and can be moved or deleted as a group.
4 The easiest method I find to place the images in time to the music is to leave the first image on the timeline but delete all the others. Start the music by clicking on the PLAY button, and play enough of the piece to familiarise yourself with the rhythm. Once you feel comfortable you can then press the New Transition button every time you want a new image to appear. Continue until you have used all the images (hopefully at the end of the music). Adjust each image until you are satisfied and adjust the fade in time as described above where you think it will improve an individual image.
To end, click the OK button. If you find you have too many images, delete a few, and visa versa , add a few.
5 Save your work and Preview it as described above.
Reducing image size in Photoshop
1 Load the image/s.
2 Click on Image in the Menu Bar and then Image Size .
3 Tick all the tickboxes.
4 Change Resolution to 72dpi .
5 For Landscape Format change width to 1024 pixels – leave height.
6 For Portrait Format change height to 768 pixels – leave width.
7 Save As a jpg in the chosen folder.
8 You can do all of this automatically using Action and Batch, but I am not going to discuss this here.
Ed Cloutman
Loading the software:
Figure 10
Appendix
