mhwarner

Just for the record, I have been playing with the video editing capabilities of the new Photoshop CS6. While probably not as sophisticated as something like Adobe Premier (don't know about it, haven't tried it), they are quite easy to master and splitting clips is a piece of cake. It certainly isn't worth paying $699 US (or whatever the full price is), but if you are considering the upgrade from CS5 and you are getting into video, it would be worth your time to look at it. There is probably nothing there that you couldn't do with PTE, but it sure is a lot easier and more intuitive (your clips come in as layers and you can rearrange them by rearranging the layers) and you can then export the finished clip/movie for use with PTE. You can insert fades and cross-fades and trim and you can even add and edit a soundtrack. Oh, and you can even apply adjustments (curves, levels, etc.) and layer styles to your clips. You can also add stills to the mix and there is some limited key framing to add pan and zoom to the stills. Very cool and way easier than some of the other video editing programs I have tried. If you are at all interested, there are several videos on youTube that demonstrate the capabilities:

Paul, What a lovely location. Very nice photography. Would love to visit there some day. Thanks for sharing!

Maureen, What can I add to all the compliments that have already been given? This -- and the first Venice show -- were well done and most enjoyable. Each had it's own merits and I loved them both. I especially loved the music in this latest show, though. Your photography is stunning and you have become a master at selecting images and putting them together. Thanks once again for sharing them with us!

Jean-Charles, Another fantastic show! Thank you for sharing it. Outstanding photography, appropriate music and a well put-together show. I had never heard of this area and had to go look it up on Google. How lucky you are to have been able to visit such an amazing place. This is another show I will keep and add to my collection of shows created by you. I look at all of them periodically for inspiration.

Gary, What a huge mistake! I watched this video before lunch while I was hungry and by the time it was over, I was drooling and felt like I was starving. Seriously, though, great job. I really liked the concept of the overlayed videos. Any chance you would share the PTE file minus the videos? I'm thinking I could use something similar for my rafting videos. Also, just wondering ... do you buy the food there to take home and cook or do they cook it for you and you eat it on the spot? I did try not to think too much about what our local health departments might think of the operation. Anyway, thanks for sharing.

Although I expect Ken will probably move this since he doesn't understand or chooses to ignore the difference between importing video clips and outputting video movies of various sorts, my question is related to getting video clips into PTE. I have about 40 short AVCHD clips from a Panasonic TS3 that I took on a Grand Canyon rafting trip. The file extension is MTS. PTE doesn't seem to be able to read them. They are pixelated and have strange looking gray blobs when viewed. Using the video converter doesn't seem to help. Yet I have several other AVCHD clips from a Panasonic DMC-ZS3 that seem to work fine. The software which came with the camera allows me to convert them to MPeg2, but that sort of defeats the purpose of capturing HD. Assuming it is just a problem with PTE not supporting the file type (why does it support one and not the other), I would appreciate it if anyone could suggest a free or relatively low cost coversion or video editing program that would allow me to get these clips into a format which PTE actually understands. I am attaching a very small clip (actually one I plan to trash)in the hopes that one of you video experts might have a suggestion for converting it to something useable00028.zip. Thanks in advance.

Wow! It's so hard to pick. There have been so many great ones -- Maureen Platt's shows, those by Patrick Bantzhaff, the American Southwest shows by Cagney and the narrated Norway costal voyage by Mark Allen, to recall a few of my favorites. This one, however, made a big impression the first time I watched it and it is one I have gone back to from time to time for inspiration. I can't even imagine the amount of work that went into putting it together. La Creation by Jean-Charles Pizolatto: http://diapositif.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=32386 (click on the "Telecharger" button to download).

I would agree. Either the author of the show's description is intriguing enough to make you download it, or it's not or not. When you start the download, it tells you how big it is. If you're now willing to download a show that big, stop the download. I admit to stopping most downloads above about 70MB unless I have previously downloaded shows that I like from the author or unless it sounds like a really interesting show. If the slideshow is great, I could care less about the details other than where it was taken. My two cents, but I really think some of you folks need to get a life. And Ken, you really need to quit shouting. I thought this was a civilized forum.

And I would like to point out that if you use Bill's site at all (posting or downloading), there is a button at the top which allows you to easily make a donation of any size via Pay Pal for the maintenance and upkeep of the site. If you haven't ever contributed, think about doing so. We would hate to ever lose this excellent resource! Thanks again Bill for keeping it going!

Hi Dom, I enjoyed your show and I really liked the presentation style. My only comment is that I did not feel like the reflections enhanced the show and found them a bit distracting. Thanks for sharing.

Gary, I downloaded and played the show on my Windows 7 x64 Home Premium machine with no problem. Barry, Beautiful photos. You said that you just photographed them in ordinary places where anyone would have access. I can't imagine seeing that many amazing looking birds outside of a zoo here in the US. Australia must be an amazing place. Were some of those birds kookaburras (not sure of the spelling)? Anyway, thanks for the presentation. It inspired me to grab a long lens and be on the lookout the next time I'm around birds that are more colorful that the large black ravens we have around here.

Hi Gary, I enjoyed your latest show, although it was perhaps a bit long. While I enjoyed the many views of temples, the thing that caught my attention most was the kind and amount of stuff that people are able to carry on their bicycles and motorscooters (the pig was really amazing). I wondered a bit about safety while looking at these temples and noticing the number of wood and other props to shore up the buildings. More than anything I was impressed by the fact that these places were built so very long ago by a society that had far less than us in the way of technology. My only comment was that in some of the verticals there was a bit of distortion (not sure if it is considered "pincushon" or "barrel" distortion) from what I assume to be a wide angle lens. You might try using a standalone lens correction filter or one of the lens correction filters in Photoshop. Anyway, thanks for sharing this series. It must have been a fantastic trip and I'm sure your slideshows don't begin to cover all of the amazing sites you must have seen.

Nicely done, Jeff. I loved the javalinas! The photos were beautiful as well -- especially the sunrises/sunsets. My only complaint was that the navigation bar detracted a bit for me. Maybe there's a way I could have turned it off? I had hoped to make it over to the Bosque last November, but family issues intervened. Maybe next year. Thanks for sharing this

Gary, The easiest way to create a background might be to take a portion of the vertical and crop it to a size that would fill the whole screen area. Then use a Gaussian blur, a motion blur or some other blur to make it mostly unrecognizable. Then overlay the vertical over top. You would then have virtually the same colors but the blur would eliminate any distraction. You could add a shadow to the overlayed vertical. Just a thought.

Gary, I liked this one much better! What an incredible place and what an incredible flower! I think the music was quite appropriate (and very soothing). In this case, I think the videos did add to the overall experience. I guess we will always disagree on mixing horizontals with verticals (at least without some sort of background on which to overlay them). I understand the need for inserting them, but I always find the stark transitions a bit disconcerting. I loved your little treehouse as well. The one thought that ran through my mind while watching was that the bugs must have been awful. Thank you for sharing this. I'm sure it was a wonderful trip. I look forward to more in the series.

Gary, Indeed this lake looks like a beautiful place. However, I found the transitions in the show to be a bit too abrupt and to be honest, I didn't think the video really added much to the presentation. I would have been happy with just the stills (left on the screen a bit longer) but that's just my opinion. Just as an aside, though, since I have not yet attempted to add video to a show, is there no way to minimize these videos so that the overall size of the file is smaller? I am on a wireless broadband connection and 130 MB is not something I would consider downloading on a regular basis. I realize I am in the minority, but I'm guessing there are others out there like me. I would love to look at your Khoa Sok video but I just attempted it and learned that on my connection it would take 1 hour and 45 minutes. Not an option for me this evening. But, I guess if you are typically creating a show like this to be shown locally to friends and family, it's not a big deal. Anyway, thanks for sharing your efforts.

Another keeper, Maureen! Like mother, like son? Great photography and I love the way you blended the aurora images at the end. Compliments to both of you.

Andrew, Great show. I loved it! Wonderful opening slides and very nice presentation. You have some excellent photos, both colorful and sharp with interesting lighting, which I am assuming were probably taken under sometimes difficult conditions. Thanks for the tour. A definite keeper!

Dave, Thanks for taking the time to put this together. I do have a question. From your experience, or that of anyone else who has tried it, how does the quality of this method compare to connecting a laptop to the TV via HDMI cable and running an EXE on the laptop (which is my normal and maybe lazy method)? I realize that this method means you couldn't easily distribute the show to others.

Thanks all! These are photos of the riders I took as the photographer on a week-long trail ride recently. In addition to photos, I sold DVDs of a slideshow of the ride with music and titles. It's not something I am interested in watching or displaying for friends (and certainly not anything folks on the forum would be interested in seeing). I only wanted to make sure it could be seen on the least common denominator TV (as I know it would resize if someone displayed the DVD on a computer). What I ended up doing is batch resizing the photos to 1536x1024 (which didn't require any cropping). I set the PTE project options to 4:3, added a background photo and then set "80% of the slide to show main images". That way, depending on the user's display, I believe at least the photo itself will show. I burned a 4 image DVD of the show and played it on my HDTV with my DVD player (rather old) and the main images displayed with a slight bit of the background at the bottom and a larger piece at each side (it's a piece of wood, so it looked ok). On my PC, the DVD shows the whole screen as I see it in PTE. When doing my own shows for display I set them up to display properly on my laptop and then run them through an HDMI cable to the TV. Thanks again to all for the help and suggestions.

Thanks for the quick reply, Dave! The was a setting I had forgotten about.

I need to make some standard DVDs for playback on unknown systems (i.e., maybe HD, maybe not). What is the optimum (and maximum) project size I should specify for the project. I can do this by trial and error but I thought maybe someone has a quick answer. My pictures are 3:2 format and I don't particularly want to change that. I am open to adding a background on which to overlay them to provide a better format. I've made DVDs before sized at 1024x768 with project set at "Virtual size of slide" but on some systems the bottom of the slide gets chopped off. If this has been discussed somewhere in the forum, I'd appreciate a link as I couldn't seem to find it with a search. Thanks in advance.

Morasoft, What a cool introduction! Thanks for sharing the PTE file. I've downloaded it to study and learn!

Looks like you have a few months to save for it, Paul. Kinda pricey. I had to settle for a new 60D instead.

Tillman, What an interesting and colorful collection of photographs masterfully presented! Your photographic skills are quite obvious. I'm not sure which segment I enjoyed the best -- the market scenes, the portraits, the doors and windows, or the sunflower sequence. I don't usually like such a combination of different sized photos, but your background and the manner in which you presented them seemed quite natural. My only negative comment was that there seemed to be (for me, at least), too many photos of moths or butterflies on lavender. Nicely done and thanks for sharing.