wa3pyi

Hello, Although I have had PTE since version 5, I rarely used it and never really took the time to master some of the advanced features until a month or so ago. From a beginners perspective, PTE is fairly intuitive for throwing together a basic slideshow - drag individual pictures to separate slides in the order you want them shown, use default transition effects or check them all and let them come up randomly, add some music in the music tab, check the "Auto spread slides along music" box and voila! - a nice basic slideshow. But the really powerful features seem to reside in the Objects & Animation area and this is always where things became intimidating and frustrating for me. I've downloaded and watched some of the different slideshows that some of you have posted and marveled at the beautiful animation in many of them. But the learning curve for mastering PZR, masks, and the other fascinating animation features just seemed too steep. Last month, with a deadline facing me, I finally sat down and worked my way through understanding some of the basics of the animation features. The opening sequence on my show was 42 seconds long and it took me over 5 hours to create it! But it was worth it because I now feel like I have a basic idea how to use keypoints, PZR & masks. This brings me to my feature request from a beginner. Although I believe almost any type of animation can be created with the existing tools in the O&A area, it would be a whole lot easier for beginners if pre-built animations were available. I'm thinking about all the transition effects that are available for moving between slides. Would it be possible to have these transition effects available in the O&A area to apply as either a entrance or an exit effect to each object? This would allow beginners who do not yet understand how to use all the pieces of the PZR, mask, 3D and other features to at least apply some basic (and some complex) animations to their objects. Please excuse my ignorance if this is already built-in and I just haven't found it. Thanks for a really great product! Lee

Lin, Thank you so much for taking the time to do that! I can now study how you did everything which will help me understand what is going on. One of the ways I learn the best is by "taking apart" other presentations to figure out how another person did something and this is the perfect opportunity to do just that. The fact that you did this fairly quickly confirms my belief that PTE can easily do WAY more than Powerpoint once I take the time to really start learning how to do things - and un-learning Powerpoint. I'll check out some of the tutorials too... Thanks again, Lee

Thanks everyone for your quick replys - especially to a newbee. DaveG, I'll give those steps a try - although I am not quite understanding them until I get home and have PTE open in front of me. Lin, Here is a link to a .mp4 piece of a PPT show I did last year for our graduates. It's about 8.6MB & takes a few minutes to load. It includes the opening sequence and a sequence of the the twins that graduated last year. Everything is on 9 Powerpoint slides. I captured it with Camtasia Studio - and many of the pictures were older scanned photos from the parents so the quality is not the best. Barry, I've looked at some of the shows on your website - some of the effects are just amazing! But, I realize that learning to do effects like those takes some time & learning. I also started back in the days when my only tools were dual slide projectors, a dissolve unit and a 4 track tape recorder. When I started with Powerpoint my goal was to reproduce those kind of shows. I wish I had found PTE sooner! I am sure that PTE is a far superior slideshow program than Powerpoint. I just need to learn how to use it - and learning it when there is not the pressure of a deadline would probably be better. Lee

Hello everyone, I have had PTE for a number of years now but only use it on rare occasions when I need to create a quick slideshow. I have used Powerpoint since 2003 to create slideshows. I had never used Powerpoint before this but I had just returned from a trip to Ecuador and I needed to put something together for our church. I struggled for days getting nowhere until I discovered the Custom Animation section & activated the Advanced Timeline. I could now insert any picture or graphic and have full control over the entrance effect and the exit effect including the timing. It was still slow going, especially getting music & narration synchronized but after a few weeks I had a very nice slideshow complete with narration and music that ran “hands off” from beginning to end. Over the years I’ve created many other slideshows in this manner using Powerpoint. It’s slow and cumbersome but it get’s the job done. Ever since I discovered PTE 5.0 a number of years ago I had wanted to do the same thing with it that I had used PPT to do, but whenever I would try to create a similar slideshow with multiple pictures on a slide and full control of the entrance & exit of each picture like I had created with PPT I never seemed to get very far with PTE. I’ve since tried version 6.5 and just downloaded version 7. It seems that I always end up going back to Powerpoint to create a complex slideshow. I know that PTE has a number of features that PPT does not and the pictures on PTE are so much cleaner looking. But will PTE allow me to put 2, 3, or 4 pictures on a slide and control the entrance & exit effects independently? I often would have a dozen or more pictures on one PPT slide – Two may come in with separate effects and after a few seconds fade out while maybe 4 more would come in with different effects, stay for a few seconds then exit with different effects while 1 picture enters the screen with an effect – and on it goes. I would try to fit as many pictures as I could onto one slide because in PPT, transitioning from one slide to the next didn’t give you as many effect options so I would try to stuff as many pictures as I could onto one slide since I could control each pictures entrance & exit effect on the Advanced Timeline. Will PTE easily allow multiple pictures on a single slide with independently control over the entrance & exit effects of each? Or is it more difficult to do this than in PPT? Maybe I need to forget what I’ve learned to do in Powerpoint and think about this a whole new way? Right now I have to put together a slideshow presentation consisting of 30-40 photos each from 8 seniors who will be graduating from school this year – with music & perhaps some narration. I’ve always done this in the past with Powerpoint although I’ve tried a few times to do it with PTE but became frustrated. Can it be done? And can it be done easier than Powerpoint? Maybe someone could point me to some good tutorials about how to do this. Thanks! Lee