Hi I’m completely new to AV; my experience is watching a few presentations, for the first time, at my camera club the other day and finding this web site. It has led me to think that an AV presentation based on “PicturesToExe” may be a solution to something I’m working on. I have not bought PTE as yet because I’m still thinking about how to implement my ideas (e.g. I am familiar with Microsoft PowerPoint and I know it would do some things, but not others). Will PTE do everything I need? What I want to be able to do is: 1. Create a user interactive “slide show”; 2. The show to run on a laptop PC, or possibly an iPad; 3. For pictures to fade from one to another; e.g. start with a colour picture of many items then fade all but one item to B&W (I could create a few pictures in Photoshop and fade from one to another in PTE, but perhaps PTE has a masking feature so a single colour picture could fade to B&W?); 4. To zoom into the single colour item (what is the zoom range? Can it be programmed to different values?). Also, to zoom back out again; 5. To be able to program the timing of all effects (what is the range of times available?); 6. To add text and user “interaction areas”; i.e. you could have a red object and a green object (either as a button, or simply an area on the picture). The text asks a question and the user has to choose whether to press red or green. Each interaction then jumps to a new section in the AV presentation. Each new area also will have “jump” sections. Eventually, the user will end up in a common ending. How many “jumps” can PTE keep track of? Can you set up a “back button” (i.e. like using a web browser)? When you press a “button”, the software counts the number of button presses in a user defined variable. At the end, the value of each variable can be displayed (i.e. “You pressed red 4 times and green 6 times”). 7. When using an iPad, for all interactions to be touch screen compatible (I’ve never used an iPad, let alone written a program for one so I’m not sure how this works…yet!); 8. To have some sort of index (either text based, or miniature versions of each picture, or both), permanently visible, so a user can easily click (touch!) on an item and be taken straight to that section of the presentation. Then be able to move backwards and forwards from that point. I’m sure that PTE can do some of the above, but I would be most grateful to anyone who could confirm if it can do ALL of the above. Also, can you give me an idea of what the learning curve is like? Is access to any “coding” areas simple; e.g. in Microsoft Office, using “Record macro” can get you doing simple tasks in seconds. Thanks for your help. Wal
