SeismicGuy

Well nobody has answered my last question under the "Coming from Memories on TV" heading so I figure I would try here. Since MOTV is rather long-in-the-tooth and not supported anymore, I was trying to dive into PTE AV as an alternative. As mentioned previously my needs are really occasional and limited to travelogue-type slideshows that run anywhere from 15 minutes to about 40+ minutes, depending on the the vacation I am trying to document. These typically include images, videos, and various background music pieces. The one I am currently working on is about 10 minutes and I was using MOTV to create. So at the same time I am trying to see how to go about this using PTE AV and find myself giving up after a few minutes. One MAJOR obstacle that I cannot figure out (at least it is not intuitive to me) is dealing with transition and slide effects. In MOTV there are transitions that apply between slides and "picture effects" that apply to the particular slide. I guess there is an equivalent language for these in PTE but it seems there is some vagueness or overlap. For example it is not entirely clear to me if the Styles and Themes button addresses the transition, the slide effect, or both. But then again there is the Project Options button with a sub-button of Transitions and it is not entirely clear to me if you choose several transitions for the "show" or just one. Then the main "complaint" I have is that there does not seem to be any easy way of randomizing either transitions or slide effects. For example, in MOTV I generally stick to a couple or three transition effects but the go-to picture effect I use is the Ken Burns effect (called Pan-Zoom in MOTV). In MOTV this can be applied to any or all slides and then you have the added option of "randomizing" the specifics of the effect. In other words the Ken Burns from slide 22 will not be the same as the Ken Burns for slide 23, etc. I do not see such a randomizing option for slide "style(?)" in PTE but maybe I am missing something. From what I am seeing is that you can apply a pan-zoom to any number of slides (using theme?) but the pan zoom for slide 22 will be identical to that of slide 23 which would be boring. Am I incorrect is concluding that there is no randomization that can be applied to the same "effect" over a number of slides? Obviously I guess I can go slide-by-slide and do the small tweaks but MOTV would do this automatically by choosing the randomization option". Doug

Hi Again--still playing around with making the jump from MOTV to PTE. Looks like everything that MOTV did is doable and much more with PTE albeit not nearly as intuitively or perhaps as "pre-packaged". For example it looks like a Ken Burns Effect style(?) can be created for a slide but it would first need to be created as a style. Even then if you want to have this effect on multiple slides you can do this using Theme(?) but then each slide would behave EXACTLY the same (yes?) while MOTV had an option to apply random Ken Burns Effects to multiple slides so that each one was slightly different. Am I misunderstanding this? Same thing with creating a multi-slide slide--kind of automatic option with MOTV with many canned options but it seems like a more involved process with PTE. Am I stating this correctly? Doug

Hey Lin--quite an impressive demonstration of what the software can do. Probably way beyond what I had been doing with MOTV but nice to know all of those features are there. What I liked about MOTV was that it was fairly intuitive to use, even the more sophisticated features. The online help with PicturesToExe makes it look rather daunting but I suppose there are a bunch of YouTube-type tutorials if I search. Doug

Sorry if this has been asked before but I am looking to find another slideshow-maker program that is as friendly and powerful as MemoriesOnTv was. I had bought MOTV several years ago since I enjoyed creating DVD's of my vacations. These ranged in length from about 20 minutes to more than 40 minutes and included still photos as well as video clips. All of the shows also included a variety of music clips that were appropriate to the subject (i.e., Italian songs for my Italy trips, etc.). The appeal of MOTV was how easy it was to create great shows with various transitions and effects (the Ken Burns effect being one of my favorites). However, the creators of MOTV did not keep up with the times (e.g., no support for burning BluRay discs) and the software was getting long-in-the-tooth and was subsequently abandoned. So now I am looking for a replacement and came across several alternatives including PicturesToExe, Photostage, Movavi, and others. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Doug