mhwarner

It really depends on your useage. If the shows are for your own personal entertainment (and to show friends and family, etc.), using music from CDs you have purchased or songs you have paid for and downloaded is probably not going to get you in trouble. However, if you are creating shows to sell, you should probably stick with royalty-free music. I have purchased from both of these (both are cheaper if you purchase more than one CD) http://www.pbtm.com/ http://www.music2hues.com/ Also, one of our forum members sells royalty free music on his site: http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/royaltyfreemusic.htm

I experienced some very minor jerks (more like a bit of dragging) at those same two spots on a Pentium M 1.4 GHz system with an NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 card. Otherwise the big show was smooth as silk and Flowers ran OK also. Can't wait to try the new beta. Thanks Igor!

Thanks Lin! I have downloaded the demo version, along with several other DVD authoring software packages and will test to see which one best meets my needs. In addition, I finally had a conversation with someone at Roxio and although she didn't quite say that others had apparently complained about the missing functionality, she said that the company was about to offer a $19.95 upgrade to a download of the piece necessary to upgrade the standard edition of Easy CD Creator to the same functionality as the Deluxe version. It is supposed to be available by the end of the month. Meanwhile, I'll be testing these other packages.

No, it was not part of a bundle. I paid $89 for a separate standalone package which on the box clearly states the ability to customize menus, among other things. Totally false advertising, as far as I am concerned. And there is apparently no upgrade path.

I know some of you have spent time with DVD creation and would appreciate your insight and recommendations. I have Roxio Easy Media Creator 8 (which I just discovered is only the "Standard" version and not the top of the line "Deluxe version -- some misleading sales techniques on Roxio's part but that's another story). I have the need to create both CD .EXE slideshows as well as DVDs for some of my projects and I have done that successfully with no problem. However in my latest endeavor I needed to have three shows with a menu allowing the user to choose which to run. Again, I did this successfully in P2E for the CD version and did a poor attempt in Roxio's MyDVD using the same background as I used in P2E. But with my particular package, I cannot modify much on the menu system other than the background graphic and text color and font. I'm stuck with their automated buttons with a blue frame! Supposedly the "Deluxe" version allows more control, but I am guessing that it still would not be as elegant as I would like. I really don't care much about the actual slideshow/movie creation abilities because P2E suits me just fine. I am very proficient in Photoshop as well so I could create whatever graphics/buttons, fancy text in that. I just need something that I can use to put it all together. For the latest 3-show DVD I actually pulled the shows in directly from P2E to Roxio's Video Wave and saved as MPEG-2 on disk. Then I brought all the shows into MyDVD for burning (and creating an .iso file which I later used to burn multiple copies of the DVD). So, if anyone has any suggestions about what I could use (without going to something like Adobe Premier), I would be most appreciative in hearing them. (I did look at Adobe Premier Elements but read several online reviews which indicated that it didn't support many formats and really worked best with video directly from a camcorder, which interests me not at all). I found a few packages on the web specifically for creating DVD menus, but they seemed to be for import into some DVD packages that I've never heard of. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

The show starts immediately for me (cable connection) and runs very smoothly. Nicely job! I am very interested in your experiments as I need to re-do my photography site and would like to add some flash. I would also love to get my hands on that bear necklace. It's just gorgeous!

Igor, you are amazing! You must be terribly busy trying to get the long-awaited beta ready for us and you still take the time to quickly fix bugs. Thank you for taking such good care of us! I wonder if you ever sleep?

On the off chance that what you are actually asking is: "Can I put the shows on my website somewhere and allow people to view them directly from the website?" ... the answer to that would be no. You can make them available for download only. In order to make them "viewable" from your website, you would have to convert them to a different format such as flash or possibly .AVI. This would require another piece of software in addition to or instead of P2E.

Igor: As a follow on to this topic, I requested this before in the "Suggestions for New Versions" topic but never saw any responses. It would be nice to be able to include IPTC comments or at the very least, JPEG comments, as one of the options in the Project Options\Comments\Customize Comments dropdown list. Any chance of this happening in the next version. To get around it now, I end up putting borders on my pics and adding IPTC comments using another program first, then importing the photos into P2E.

Not sure what you mean by "security safe" disk. If they can see the picture on the screen, at the very least, they will be able to capture it -- whether by using the "Print Screen" key or by some other utility such as "Snagit". For what you are describing, it seems to me that you would be far better off creating a series of web pages with thumbnails which link to slightly larger images. That way they could browse through the thumbnails to view individual pictures, or if set up properly, go through a slideshow of all pictures manually. You would then load the web pages onto a CD. There are many programs, some of them free, which allow you to create web pages from your photos. Photoshop itself even has that capbility, though somewhat rudimentary. The one I use is Arles Image Web Page Creator: http://www.digitaldutch.com/arles/ which has a free evaluation download. Another is Image Walker, shareware which also has a free download: http://www.imagewalker.com/ And there is also JAlbum, which is completely free: http://jalbum.net/ The key would be to not make the larger files full size and to compress them enough so that if they decided to print them, they wouldn't get very large (or high-quality) prints. You might also put a watermark on the photos. Here's an example of what I'm talking about: http://www.mhwarner.com/albums/CaballosMar...ures/index.html I arrived at the size for the "large" pictures by doing test prints to determine that 3-1/2" x 2-1/2" was about the largest size that could be printed. I also created a javascript function that allows a click on the picture to make it larger without actually increasing the resolution. It's not great quality, but at least most of the details are apparent. You can, of course, do what you want in PtoE, but it would be a great deal of work (which is probably why you haven't found any really satisfactory solutions in this forum for the technique) and in the end, I'm not sure it is of benefit for your particular application. Perhaps you could come up with a combination -- a PtoE slideshow to browse and then a series of thumbnails and web pages on disk for closer inspection. But again, in either case, don't fool yourself into believing that the user will not be able to get copies of the pictures from the CD.

I look forward to trying this out! There are many times when I want to just do a quick edit (maybe add a border or shadow or other simple frame) to post to my website or do an adjustment requiring layers or maybe a quick "clone" and hate to sit and wait for Photoshop to load. Although I quit purchasing Paintshop Pro after version 8, I've lately begun thinking about loading an old copy of Paintshop Pro (maybe version 6), which was fairly quick to load with what I considered a much simpler interface just to do quick edits. Will this new product of yours support Photoshop (.8bf) plugins? Will there be any possibilities of automation (like Photoshop actions or keyboard macros)? Will printing allow the use of color management? Anyway, i will be interested in looking at it. A quick and small editor that supports curves, levels, layers, and free transform is certainly something that would be useful. Thanks for the heads up Igor, and let us know how we can help with beta testing!

I see that so many of you are using the timeline and taking great care with soundtrack and transition synching. Most of the time I just find or create music tracks of the approximately correct duration and synch the show to the length of the soundtrack (mainly for lack of time to play with individual slide synching). However, I would be really interested to see some examples of slideshows where you are using this technique (just to see what is possible and to give me some ideas). Does anybody have some publicly posted examples that they could point me to on Beechbrook or elsewhere? Thanks in advance. Mary

You can do it with P2E, but you would need to do all of the prep work yourself in something like Photoshop CS or Elements or any software which supports layers. Create a canvas the size you want to use for your slideshow with the color background you desire. Then paste each of the pictures you want to use onto separate layers on the canvas, resizing as appropriate. Once you have the arrangement you want, hide all of the layers but the first picture. Save that version to a .jpg. Unhide the next picture/layer, save it, etc. etc. Then load each one of these .jpgs into P2E and set the transitions as you wish. It's definitely not automatic, but it will provide the effect you want, and probably with a lot more control than something which does it automatically. Hope this helps.

I would also like to request the ability to use the IPTC caption information automatically (via a checkbox or something) as the comment on slides. I have found myself using at least this field to annotate my pictures. My current web page album (Arles Image Web Page Creator) can do this, and most image management programs, as well as Photoshop, have the ability to display it. It would certainly save time in adding comments, which I tend to not do because it can be a pain. And thanks, Igor, for such a wonderful product. It just gets better and better and you are so kind to keep listening to us.

The Plugin Commander program is very helpful for managing plug-ins: http://thepluginsite.com/products/picopro/index.htm There is a free "Light Version" you can download and try. Can't remember what the limitations are on the free version.

And last but not least (unless this has changed somewhere and I missed it), creating title slides in PS assures you that the fonts you select are in fact the fonts that show up in the presentation when the user sees it. If you use the object editor to put text on your slides, if you select a fancy font that exists on your machine but not on the prospective user's machine, then font substitution will occur at the time the show plays and it's hard to tell what font the computer will select.

Perhaps I didn't state my question correctly and so I am still a little confused. I do not want to customize the synchronization. I just wanted to have multple music files and allow P2E to automate the display of slides so that when the last of the 3 files has played, the slides have also finished displaying. So, if I have 1 .mp3 file that is 4 minutes long and 2 each that are 3 minutes long (10 minutes total) and 10 slides, I should be able to automatically synchronize and have each slide display 1 minute. I don't want to have to do anything manually. If, on the other hand, I add one music file that lasts 10 minutes and I have 10 slides and check the "Synchronize to music" box, each slide will automatically play for 1 minute and the slideshow and the music end at exactly the same time.

I created a slideshow and wanted to sync it to the music I had chosen. I added five .mp3 files to the project. I could never get it to work. I finally had to combine all five files into a single .mp3 file in a sound editor and the sync worked properly. So can someone please confirm that this is in fact the case -- to sync a slideshow to music, the music must be contained in only a single file. If that is not the case, could someone tell me what I might have failed to check (or uncheck) to cause it not to work. Thanks in advance. Mary

Ron In Win2K or XP, you can simply right click on any .jpg file in a Windows Explorer listing, then selecting "Open With" and choose the program you wish to use as the default for opening that type of file.

I wasn't sure where to post this bug report but since Igor seems to be following this thread it seemed as good as any place. I worked on a large (600 file) slideshow over the weekend using the latest beta. It was very stable and the "light table" was a joy to work with. I did however, notice some bugs in the main window when using the file list only. There are some problems with selecting files in the left list and dragging to the righthand slide list. Sometimes more than one slide gets inadvertently selected or you can't quite drag. You have to keep clicking around a bit in different windows, and then it does eventually work.

If the only item on the CD is the slideshow .EXE file, then there are not actually any individual pictures to download. You cannot prevent someone from capturing the slide on-screen (with the printscreen key if not disabled in your slideshow, or some screen capture utility) and printing it. But the screen resolution will only allow you to print a decent 4x6 or 5x7. In JoeJoe's case, since it is obviously not a commercial venture, if his grandson would send him the individual (probably .jpg) files on a CD, he could print better quality (and larger) pictures.

Actually, I don't think it's a lack of interest in creating video (or DVD or SVCD or whatever). I watch that forum regularly and am disappointed not to see any postings that list easy and foolproof ways to make DVDs from P2E. When I finish my current programming project, I would love to easily create some DVDs of my slideshows so that I can pop them into the player and watch on TV (instead of carrying my laptop down and hooking it in). It appears that only a few folks have been successful in making the transformations (at least using P2E), and there is no consensus on the right way to do it, or even the best software. As I recall, the package originally recommended for creating the DVDs by Igor is not even available any more. And everybody who has posted there seems to use different pieces of software with varying results. I am by no means complaining about P2E. It is a wonderful piece of software and gets better with every update. I have been using the latest beta and I think the new light table is fantastic. I am just trying to point out that maybe it is not a lack of interest in putting slideshows from P2E on DVD, but rather the perception that it is for the moment, quite difficult and one cannot be assured of getting consistent results. My guess is that the folks who want to do this, like Andrew, have found other pieces of software that are easier and more consistent to work with for that particular activity and out of respect to Igor and his hard work are not posting their comments in these forums.

Did not use a timeline. The show is set to automatically sync to the music. The only thing I did was change the filenames of the picture slides.

Problem solved: Apparently P2E didn't like the naming convention of the slides. I renamed them from ATitle1.jpg, ATitle2.jpg, ATitle3.jpg to A1Title.jpg, ATitle2.jpg, A3Title.jpg and they all transition perfectly. But it still seems like a bug.

Unless somebody can explain what I might be doing wrong, I think there is a bug and I am wondering if there is a workaround. Although I have been using the new beta, the problem has happened to me before in the last 2 or 3 release versions of P2E. I have created some title slides in Photoshop. It is actually one graphic with say 3 lines of text. I hide the bottom 2 lines, save the file as ATitle1.jpg. Then I display both the first and second lines of text and save as ATitle 2.jpg. Then the same with line 3, showing all three lines. My show is synchronized to the 3 or 4 mp3 files I have chosen. Without those first title slides, all is well. As soon as I add the title slides, the first one fades in fine, then it transititions to the 2nd. After that, the transitition to the second keeps repeating and repeating and the rest of the show never displays. If I remove those 3 slides again, all is well. The program seems to get confused with the similarity of the slides or something. If I insert different slides in between my title slides, it also works well. They just don't work in sequence. Has anybody else experienced this? Thanks in advance for any help.