harbrimar

I have been away for a few days and very pleased with the response! I will start with what appears to be the easiest option first (last two posts) and work through the suggestions. many thanks to you all and I will let you know of the outcome. Regards Brian

I am working on a sequence which involves the history of a church destroyed in WW2. I have a photo which I recently took and also a photo taken just after the war. Unfortunately because I did not have the old photo in my possession at the time I captured the latest image they do not exactly line up (slightly different view point). I would like to show a ‘now and then’ effect. Slide 1 being ‘now’ and slide 2 being ‘then’. Quite simple so far, but when using a dissolve transition at the ‘in between’ stage I have two church towers which does not look particularly good. I have tried playing around with ‘Objects & Animation’ and superimposed ‘then’ on top of ‘now’ and set keyframes to adjust opacity which works as far as the tower is concerned but as the slides are offset the rest looks quite dreadful! Apart from taking another image which is not possible (in another country), does anyone have any suggestions to minimise the effect caused by offset slides or any other solutions? I have added a couple of screen shots to illustrate the problem.

Hi Lin Thanks for your help and interest. I followed your guide above and created an image with transparent windscreen and it works perfectly; no sign of any partial transparency and clearly I did not need to go down the mask route. I am still experimenting with PTE and although it seems to be more difficult to use than PSG the quality of the projected images are far better with PTE. Regards Brian

Great effect Spock, I can see that I need a lot more practice. In so far as Lin's post is concerned I do not know how the partial transparency was achieved and put it down to the fact that the PTE mask has to be black. I made the mask windscreen image in Photoshop Elements 9 using Image/Magic Extractor (to create a transparent windscreen)and then saved the image as a PNG. The windscreen image and the background worked fine in PSG and no black mask was needed.I was confused by the masking process in PTE and had I just stuck with the same method I used in PS Gold i.e. using the windscreen image as a layer it would have been fine (apart from the semi transparency problem). If there is a simpler way of achieving the windscreen layer in PTE without using a black mask between it and the background I am open to suggestions. Thanks again for your interest Brian

Hi Xaver Tried your suggestion as well and it also works perfectly Many thanks Brian

Many thanks to you all for your help. Ian's suggestion works perfectly Regards Brian

Thanks again for the response. Hopefully the attachment will work. I have produced a very simple slide to illustrate the problem (not the finished product!). I would prefer not to convert the mask to B&W as I don't think it would look right. Thanks Brian car.zip

Thanks Peter but in the new features for v7 the spiel states " Mask object can use a color 32-bit PNG image file with an alpha channel for special visual effects". I am not sure what this means or how you can produce a 32 bit PNG image file. Your help would be appreciated Regards Brian

Thanks Peter and Xaver, now achieved the zoom effect on the background image. I think the problem was that when I clicked on 'Mask' the background image had the green square around it. But I now have a problem with the mask. It is a PNG file which is in colour. The area that should be transparent to enable view of the background is hatched in grey and white squares as is normal and works fine. However the background image can also be seen through the areas that are not pure black in the mask. The mask works perfectly in Photoshop Elements and also ProShow Gold, any suggestions please?

Hi My first post so please go easy on me!! I have searched through the forum and looked at the manual but I am still flummoxed. I have downloaded v7 trial version of PTE and have been experimenting. I want to achieve an animation effect of the view through a car windscreen and the scenery zooming slowly in to create an illusion of movement. I have managed to create a zoom effect on the scenery slide and I have also created a mask PNG file with a transparent windscreen. However when I go through the process of putting scenery and mask together, I can see the scenery through my windscreen but the zoom effects the mask as well, so in effect cancelling out the illusion of movement. Any suggestions please?