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Frequently Asked Questions |
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| Q: | What is FX? |
| A: |
FX is a stand-alone application that provides the special effects component of the WinImages suite. FX is only available as part of WinImages.
FX does not use, or require, that you have any other software. It is not a plug-in. FX allows you to apply effects such as lightning, fire, water effects and more in both still and animated forms. More information on FX is available from the WinImages pages.
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| Q: | What is Morph? |
| A: |
Morph is a stand-alone application that provides the image morphing and wapring component of the WinImages suite. Morph is only available as part of WinImages.
Morph does not use, or require, that you have any other software. It is not a plug-in. More information on Morph is available from the WinImages pages.
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| Q: | What is WinImages? |
| A: |
WinImages is a program suite that contains FX and Morph applications. More information on WinImages is available from our WinImages pages.
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| Q: | What is Easy Morph? |
| A: |
Easy Morph is a very high quality morphing and warping application that has a simplified set of controls; it is specifically designed to be easy to use.
Easy Morph is not a plug-in, it is a stand-alone application. Easy Morph does not require any other application to work. More information on Easy Morph is available from our Easy Morph pages.
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| Q: | What are the System Requirements to Run Easy Morph? |
| A: |
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| Q: | What are the Requirements to Install Easy Morph? |
| A: |
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| Q: | What are the System Requirements to Run WinImages? |
| A: | To see a detailed list, Click Here |
| Q: | Where can I learn cool tricks with WinImages? |
| A: | They have their own page: Click Here |
| Q: | How can I get a Demo Version of WinImages? |
| A: |
Want to try the software? Just Ask us
Also, the entire manual is online and you can read it starting at any of these pages:
Table of Contents The manual contains at least one example image of every effect, lots of tutorials, many animations and much more. It's completely indexed, has a huge table of contents and is fully paginated. It's not PDF, it's HTML, so it is as small and fast as possible. You can page through it just like it was a book - give it a look! |
| Q: | Do you make (whatever) product for the Mac? |
| A: | No. However, you can run our products on your Intel-architecture Mac right now using Bootcamp or Parallels virtualized Windows 98 or Windows XP. Under Parallels, our software will act just like it does on a PC. We do not access system hardware directly in any of our software, and we use the system calls in as "vanilla" a manner as possible; we also generally stay away from the more exotic system functions, preferring to write our own code for that kind of thing. One interesting side-effect of this approach is that the same version of our software will run correctly under all versions of Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000 and XP - as you can see, this means that we really do "toe the line" in using Windows OS system resources. |
| Q: | Are there any tutorials or in-depth review pages online elsewhere? |
| A: | Yes, there is an extensive review of R4 (which was three major releases back, but still makes very interesting reading):
Just Click Here
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| Q: | What platforms is WinImages available for? |
| A: |
WinImages is available for the following Windows configurations:
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| Q:] | How do Easy Morph and the Morph component of WinImages compare? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| A: |
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| Q: | Will installing WinImages impact my other software, like PhotoShop or PSP? |
| A: |
No. Absolutely not. WinImages is extremely careful not to affect to your operating system or your other software.
Want specifics? Here are some of the issues we've been careful of in the design of WinImages and its installation:
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| Q: | How do Opal and the F/X component of WinImages compare? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| A: |
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| Q: | Where can I learn about Black Belt System's Company Policies? |
| A: | They have their own page: Click Here |
Issues and Answers from our Technical Support Group
| Q: | How do I get updates for R7? | ||||||||||||||||
| A: |
ProgramsThe latest downloadable update of the R7 FX.EXE isCheck your version using the Help/Learn About Updates (via Internet) menu item. If there are features or fixes you want in the list, we suggest you download, unzip, and replace your fx.exe file and any other files that are in the updater archive. When you choose to download, you will usually find the files which you need to replace, here... c:\Program Files\Winimage7\ ...if you accepted the installation defaults. If you installed somewhere else, then locate the new fx.exe and any other updated files wherever you put your installation, and replace those files with the new versions from the updated ZIP archive you just downloaded.
R7 FX Update HistoryClick on the version of WinImages indicated by your Help/About menu selection
Morph UpdatesThe latest downloadable update of the R7 MORPH.EXE isCheck your version using the Help/About menu item. If your version is less recent (indicated by a smaller number or letter), we strongly suggest you download, unzip, and replace your morph.exe file. When you choose to download, you will usually find morph.exe, which you need to replace, here... c:\Program Files\Winimage7\ ...if you accepted the installation defaults. If you installed somewhere else, then locate the new morph.exe where ever you put it, and replace it with the version from the updated ZIP archive you just downloaded.
R7 Morph Update History
DocumentationThe latest downloadable update of the text of the R7 documentation is available here (about 1.2 megabytes.)Note that this does not include any new images that may be part of the documentation. If you find an area where the images in the documents do not seem up to date, or are missing, you can go to that page on our site and save the image from the online version. We change the text a lot more than we change the images, so don't worry about it too much! Extract the new files directly over the old ones. NOTE: If you're using the docs from the actual CD, rather than from your hard drive, you can't use the update directly. You'll have to copy the documentation to your computer, change where FX looks for the documents (using the dialog just mentioned, above) and then update the files. In that case, you need to copy the html_docs directory and its images and animations subdirectories.
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| Q: | How do I get updates for R6? | ||||||||||
| A: |
ProgramsR6 is no longer available. Upgrade to R7.
R6 FX Update HistoryClick on the version of WinImages indicated by your Help/About menu selection
DocumentationThe latest downloadable update of the R6 documentation is Document Release 6.03 (about 770k.) Check your version by looking at the bottom of any page in the docs other than the table of contents or index. If your version is earlier than this, we suggest you download, unzip, and replace all .html files which you can locate by looking where the Help/Help Location dialog indicates for your system (this is an FX menu command.)Extract the new .HTML files directly over the old ones. NOTE: If you're using the docs from the CD, you can't use the update directly. You'll have to copy the documentation to your computer, change where FX looks for the documents (using the dialog just mentioned, above) and then update the files. In that case, you need to copy the html_docs directory and its images and animations subdirectories.
R6 FX Documentation Update History
R6 Morph Update History
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| Q: | How do I get Technical Support? |
| A: | Details on technical support are here. |
| Q: | I can't seem to download the product ZIP file. What's wrong? |
| A: |
The best way to download any ZIP in an HTTP link as ours are is to right-click on the download link, and select "Save Target As" and then save the file to your hard drive, rather than select "Open from it's current location", using Internet Explorer. However, with some versions of Internet Explorer, sometimes this seems to result in a partially downloaded file, and further attempts to download always fail.
What is happening is that Internet Explorer has "Cached" (that means, saved) a copy of the .ZIP file, which is only partially downloaded, and Internet Explorer is not smart enough to go out and get it again even if you tell it that's what you want. The solution is to go to the tools menu in Internet Explorer and select "Internet Options". On the first TAB of the dialog (General) you'll see a section headlined "Temporary Internet Files". This is where Internet Explorer is keeping the incompletely downloaded copy of the ZIP file. Press the "Delete Files" button, and wait for all temporary files to be deleted. This can take quite a while, especially if you've done a lot of web browsing. 20 minutes is not out of the question. When this operation completes, go back to the Product download page and right-click on the download link again, select "Save Target As" again, and choose to save the file - do not choose "Open File From it's Current Location"! When the download completes, you should be able to unzip the file into a temporary directory and run the installer normally.
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| Q: | Easy Morph won't load some JPEG files. What's going on? |
| A: |
The broad standard for JPEG files is the original JFIF standard. Easy Morph supports this standard.
However, some companies have, for their own reasons, decided to create variants
of standard JPEG, despite the fact that doing this severely inconveniences
users of their products.
Easy Morph, like many other applications, is unable to load these files. Possible solutions for loading non-JFIF JPEG files, or non-standard JFIF files:
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| Q: | I'm having trouble controlling morphs or warps in Easy Morph |
| A: |
See This page for a tutorial on creating a morph (do this tutorial first.) See This page for a tutorial on creating a warp (do this tutorial second.) |
| Q: | I'm having trouble saving my work in Morph |
| A: | Morph handles files in a very flexible way that can be confusing if you don't take a few minutes to study how the project and object files work. Everything you need to know can be found here. |
| Q: | My downloaded R6 installation complains that the "CD is Corrupted" - What's wrong? |
| A: |
The ZIP archive must extracted to the root of a drive (for instance,
C:\
or some other filesystem device.) If you extract it into a subdirectory (as WinZip's "Wizard Mode" will do if it is allowed to manage the extraction and/or execution of the archive) then the installation will not work.
To resolve this problem, delete the first extraction and re-extract directly to the root of the drive, then run the setup.exe again from the root as required. The installation should run without any errors at this point.
Example 1The resulting extraction must produce the following structure, assuming C:\ is the drive chosen:
C:\setup.exe
Example 2If you used another hard drive, perhaps called D:\ then extracting to D:\ to the result would be:
D:\setup.exe
When the installation (which you start by running setup.exe ) is complete, you may delete these four files and the nt9895 directory and all it's contents. We do recommend you archive the .ZIP file on your hard drive or on a CD-R for quick access in case of system problems.
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| Q: | Some paths don't seem to work for saving particle systems? |
| A: | Don't use spaces in path names. This is generally a good practice anyway, as many other applications don't handle spaces in paths or filenames either. Using spaces in path names and/or filenames can cause many applications to be unable to process those files - it is one of the very bad problems that the Windows filesystem has. Windows itself can fail to properly handle filenames with spaces in many cases. |
| Q: | Why are the RISC versions (Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC) still at the R4 level? |
| A: | Details on RISC versions are here. |
| Q: | Ellipse to Australia Tutorial section unexpectedly fades ellipse to upper left |
| A: | Bug in FX: We have a workaround for this:
When the details dialog is open, instead of setting the transparency for the Australia IShape to 0, press the TR button next to it. Set the trend to a Max-to-Min slope using the icon with the slope on it (\) in the trend dialog. This will have the effect described in the tutorial, and further offers a more powerful and general way of setting transparency. |
| Q: | How do I use the Timeline to operate on multiple image files? |
| A: | See this Quick Tutorial page. |
| Q: | What about Photoshop compatible "Plug-ins"? |
| A: | Photoshop plug-ins have a number of limitations,
among which is one very serious problem as far as the WinImages suite goes:
Photoshop plug-ins are not designed to be used in an animated manner. They require user interaction for every frame, which pretty well makes them useless to implement in WinImages, which has to be able to process frames in large groups and sequences, as well as one at a time. Since Photoshop plug-ins are unworkable, we offer a more advanced plug-in design that takes animation into account, is completely scriptable by the end-user, is far easier for developers to create plug-ins with, and is a free and completely open standard that developers can implement without fee or obligation. Developers can learn about the new plug-in standard here. |
| Q: | What display card will WinImages perform best with? |
| A: |
WinImages has some of the best display technology in any software
for windows.
It has a display menu that allows you to select the type of display mode you are using (24 bit, 256 color, LCD gray scale, 16-bit, etc.) and it then uses a special set of drivers to generate at the highest speed possible for that environment. So for any display card, in any display mode, you'll get optimized performance; We'll get the best performance out of it that it is possible to get for those conditions. Still, there is a "best of the best" situation. For editing images, a display card with 32 or 24 bit display is what we recommend. There are two reasons for this. First, since WinImages' job is reduced to simply moving the image from memory to the display, this is the fastest display mode to update (all images are kept in 32-bits internally, which is actually 24-bit mode plus an alpha channel). Secondly, this allows you to see the image without dither or other elements which a display driver must introduce to improve the apparent fidelity of the image for the observer when less than 24-bit display modes are used. A good question to ask when choosing a display card to work with WinImages is:
What is the display card with the highest 24 bit resolution, coupled with the fastest 2-d performance, that will work with your computer? When you pick that card, you'll enjoy the best display fidelity and performance, period. |
| Q: | What CODECs is WinImages compatible with? |
| A: |
WinImages uses Windows 32-bit CODEC interface. WinImages can not use 16-bit CODECs from the Windows 3.1 era.
Using Windows 32-bit CODEC mechanism means that Windows actually handles the CODECs themselves; they are not handled by WinImages. WinImages just hands basic images back and forth between it and Windows one after another, until the entire animated image stream is complete. For loading AVI files into the timeline, or for loading individual frames from an AVI, this approach is almost transparent to the user. Because WinImages does not know what kind of AVI is being handled, nor does it need to know this. It's simple: If the proper 32-bit CODEC is present in the system, Windows will fetch it, use it to decode the AVI data, and then give the AVI data to WinImages. Since WinImages can load images of any size and bit depth, there are rarely any compatibility issues with loading AVI data as long as the right CODEC is in-system. For saving AVI data using a particular CODEC, things generally also work transparently, unless the CODEC has specific requirements about the type of image(s) that are to be fed to it. For instance, a CODEC that creates animations intended to run on your computer desktop, or on a web page, will generally write animations of any size. However, a CODEC that is intended to create video for output to video tape may require that the images be a specific size - NTSC might be 768x482, for instance - and if you don't provide it with images of that size, it simply won't work. Since WinImages does not actually handle the CODECs, but rather simply sends data to Windows to put into one by name, or asks Windows for data that came out of one, again by name, we generally can't do anything about CODEC compatibility. The people to ask about any particular CODEC are the people who wrote it. For instance, if you're using Pinnacle video software, and a Pinnacle video CODEC, then you'd want to talk to Pinnacle about the requirements for images that are sent to their CODEC, and so on. As of 2002, we know that some fairly exotic CODECs do work fine, such as the Video Toaster CODEC; we also know that many of the standard CODECs work fine as well. If you use a particular CODEC and you find that you need to make images of a particular size, or make images meet some other requirement in order to make a CODEC work, we would appreciate it if you'd let us know what you've found out. We'll place that information here in the FAQ for all to benefit.
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| Q: | How do I operate on batches of files? |
| A: | See this Quick Tutorial page. |
| Q: | How do I turn on the GIF and TIFF file capabilities in R4? |
| A: | Edit the .INI files winfx.ini and morph.ini
Add the following line to these files with a text editor: ChopMem=1 |
| Q: | I can't load a different end frame if Distortion Morph is selected: Transition Morph works fine! Is this a bug or a feature? |
| A: |
It's a feature. The idea is, if you're doing a distortion morph,
often known simply as a a "warp", your intent is to distort the
original image. So you use the original to place the start objects,
then the end image is the same as the source so you can see how
far away an object is positioned, or in other words, the linear
amount of the warp.
If you're trying to create a distortion morph, or warp, from one set of features to another, the way you want to do that is using the transition morph, with the "normal" transparency curve set flat.
The benefit of this technique is it allows you to use a second image as a "guide" for point setting in a distortion morph. Note that you can restore the original "Normal" transparency curve by selecting Set Transparency in the Settings menu, and pressing the upper left button to reset the normal ramp. |
| Q: | Sometimes when I load images, the shape is distorted. What's wrong? |
| A: | WinImages is an aspect-correct program. It reads the DPI (dots-per-inch) settings from an image file and uses them to set the ratio of width to height for display. Some programs do not set these values in the image file correctly, and as a result, the image will appear distorted. The solution is to select "Change Image Info" from the menus and edit the DPI setting. If you want the change to be permanent, you'll need to re-save the image. Keep in mind that with JPEG images, each time you save the image, it loses quality. |
| Q: | In R4 FX or Morph, when I save, it seems to be the wrong type of file. What's wrong? |
| A: | This problem occasionally surfaces; when it does, you should download the update for Morph or FX (or both), whichever one(s) that you are having the problem with. In the meantime, you can usually work around the problem by selecting the file type that is one away in the types list. In other words, a file type that is next to the one you want in the list. |
| Q: | Other applications complain about no "stripbytecount" when I save TIFF. |
| A: | For example, PageStream presents this complaint. FX does not put the "stripbytecount" tag in uncompressed TIFF files. Save compressed TIFF files instead. FX does put the "stripbytecount" tag in compressed TIFF files. |
| Q: | I can't load certain JPEG files with FX. |
| A: |
FX 7.01[o] and previous had a bug that required you to "refresh" the importer list before the program could read progressive JPEGs if your importers were placed anywhere but the default location, which was "c:\data\plugins". This was fixed in 7.01[p].
Versions of FX earlier than release 7 cannot read progressive JPEG files at all. To work around this, load the progressive JPEG file in another application and re-save it as a non-progressive JPEG. Some general information about progressive JPEGS: Progressive JPEG files have little utility at this time, as few applications support the progressive decoding sequence properly. The intent of a progressive JPEG is to have a file that can be displayed progressively as it is received online (for instance, in a web browser), with detail and resolution improving as more and more of the file comes in. Internet Explorer 5 actually behaves worse with progressives; with a normal JPEG, you can see the file line by line as it comes in. With a progressive, nothing at all is visible until the entire file has been received. Leave it to the experts at Microsoft to make something good, into something terrible. :) |
| Q: | My Timeline area selections don't work - what's wrong? |
| A: | Look at the left edge of the timeline. For each action, there should be a "level" indication. For any action, they should be the same. If they are not, you need to rebuild the timeline. Simply drop actions, area selects and so forth on top of each other and they will end up in the same level, which will eliminate this type of problem. |
| Q: | How do I get updates for R4? | ||||||||||||||||||
| A: | Select the appropriate file set from the following groups:
NOTE: These files are ZIP files that have been compressed with different passwords. In order to extract the files, you must have the correct passwords. Registered users can get these by e-mailing us at sales@blackbeltsystems.com.
When you e-mail us, make sure you tell us what version (Win95, etc.) of the update you wish to receive a password for, as they are all different. Also be certain to tell us the name that you wrote on the registration you mailed in to us, or we won't be able to locate your registration and so be unable to provide you with the password. Please note that our FTP server is extremely busy, and you may have difficulty if you attempt these downloads during business hours. Your best bet is to try late in the evening. All files are online and available to download.
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| Q: | FX's main window acts oddly after window resize |
| A: | Bug in R4 FX: We have a workaround for this in R4; fixed in R5 and later
To get around this problem, size the window to the size you want, then quit FX. Restart the program, and the window will open at the new size without problems. |
| Q: | FX 4.x "GPF"'s on Exit with Timeline open |
| A: | Bug in R4 FX: We have a workaround for this; fixed in R5 and later
To prevent this problem, close the timeline window manually using the "close box" at the upper right of the timeline window before exiting the main FX program. |
| Q: | FX 4.x "GPF"'s the first time anything is clicked on after being started |
| A: | Bug in FX: We have a workaround for this; fixed in R5 and later
This problem is caused by having DPI open when you quit FX. FX cannot restart properly if it tries to open DPI on startup. To fix the problem, open the FX .ini file named WINFX.INI, usually located in c:\windows. Find the line that says Operation= and delete only that line. Save the WINFX.INI file back. FX should now start normally. To avoid this problem, select another operation prior to exiting FX. |
| Q: | My image manager thumbnails are "squished" |
| A: |
The Image Load dialog has a checkbox called "proportional".
This type of thumbnail is generated when that checkbox is not checked. Solution: Select File/Load Image and check the proportional option, then cancel the dialog (or load an image, it'll work either way.) The setting will be saved when you next quit FX. |