Steve S

Or you can purchase individual Royalty Free music tracks in various file formats. A quick search of the Web will bring up thousands of options. This way you get to choose exactly what you want rather than a buy a full CD of which only one track may be of interest to you. Check out: Here and here for example. Steve

Thanks Brian, I’ve already seen it and I think it is a great idea. Momoftwo’s problem is different to the one that first drew me to participate in this forum though. Steve.

Thanks for the input. It’s good to get a handle on some of the peripheral issues and it looks to me as if zipping is the way to go. Steve.

Momoftwo, The answer could be in how you market your presentation. If you include a customised slide or two making it personal to the high school graduate that is purchasing the CD it will make it less useful to anyone else. Of course there are folk who would rather have this than nothing and will make a copy anyway - but realistically such a person probably wouldn’t be a customer anyway. However, this does mean that you clients will need to order the presentation, as you will need to prepare each one individually rather than have a pile of standard presentations ready to go. Steve.

Having a recovery facility would be great and I wholeheartedly endorse Igor’s intention to make it available only to the originator via their registration key. This will ensure that anyone who has purchased a business licence and uses P2E for business purposes can be confident that their work isn’t going to be ripped off easily. Steve.

I am contemplating the issues around hosting P2E presentations on a website. The normal way seems to have them in a zip file that can be downloaded and then unzipped. I’m wondering if there is any major issue with just hosting presentations as an exe file. The readers of this forum will be familiar with zip files etc. but the concept of unzipping it is a black art to an awful lot of web users. Hosting a file that can be downloaded and run with the minimum of operations would be the most user friendly as far as I can see. I am interested in what your thoughts on this issue are. Steve.

Aplologies for the double posting, I'm not sure what happened! Steve.

Thanks Al, I think it was the indexed colour that sorted it! Steve.

Can anyone help me out? I’m using ver4.3 and trying to attach my own icon to a presentation but without success. Despite having a 16x16 .ico file I keep getting the message: “Incorrect icon file. You can add 16x16 or 32x32 icon with 16 or 256 colours. Details: Number of images must be 1”. I’m puzzled as I’m only trying to add one file. Does anyone have a solution for this conundrum? Steve.

Michel, The Fred Miranda’s (www.fredmiranda.com) method of increasing image size is via a Photoshop action called stair interpolation (although his latest version is a plug-in called Resize Pro). This means the image size is increased in a lot of small steps rather than one large one. The end result is a higher quality image than going for a single step increase. Steve.

Justin, My slides are scanned to 50MB plus as is required by most stock agencies. Any photos I use in presentations are sized and saved for web in Photoshop to realise the smallest file size useable (it also means that if someone tries to rip the image file out of the presentation they aren’t getting a high-resolution version). These are kept in the same directory as the project file. Once I have finished on a presentation I burn the competed directory to CD, this then acts as an archive and frees up my hard drive. Steve.

Congrats on a well deserved award. Steve.

Jeanne, I didn't find the signature logo intrusive at all. In fact I thought that it was a stylish way of trademarking your productions. I also thought that your presentation told its story well. Steve.

Jeanie, If you've got Powerpoint available for your presentation, then I'd recommend using it. IMO the text facilites of P2E are much reduced on Powerpoint (and as you have found), creating a slideshow of text only slides can be hard work, even following DaveG's suggestion. As for picture intensive presentations, that's a different matter. Steve.

CC That's interesting (I dont' have XP). Most slideshows run for approx 3-6 minutes, what happens after the screensaver has been running for its duration. Does it automatically repeat or does the screen just go blank? Steve.

Well… I suppose it depends on what you are studying. As far as the Internet is concerned Flash is one of those things that you either love or hate. Designers love it because it can do so much. Most website visitors hate it because it takes so long to load unless you have a very fast connection (which most of the world doesn’t), or the designers (wishing to show off their skills) use the latest version demonstrating cutting edge techniques. Which means that viewers need to download the latest version of the Flash player software to see it. Flash works best when it is used skilfully as part of a web presence. The beauty of P2E is that it is self-containing and will run on (just about) any Windows based system (Pre Win 98 excepted). That means no worries for your victim, sorry, client. Why not surprise your tutor by showing him what P2E can do! Steve.

This is a very impressive piece of work, no doubt the end result of a lot of effort. It was worth it. I found it to be very atmospheric, very artistic and very very nice. Steve.

That’s an impressive list of guidelines, and a real treasure for everyone. Another generalisation, to be listened to or ignored as you see fit, is that the quality of the result is always a reflection of effort spent in planning. We are most likely to end up with an average result if we only apply and average amount of forethought. To be a little bit better take a little bit more effort. This applies to any activity. Steve.

Ron, There is a grumpy old man in us all, just trying to get out!! It does us all a bit of good to give him a bit of exercise now and again. -- unless you're female of course. Steve.

I enjoyed it too. Nice images of a nice area, although I've only visited it in summer myself. And I really liked the use of the panoramic effect at the end. Steve.

OOOH! Somebody got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning! Steve.

I think that you’re dead right Alan. It’s okay for someone to say that they shouldn’t compromise their Art for others but Art is about getting a message over. If someone’s artistic efforts fail to do that then they are effectively talking to themselves, it is poor Art and like poor anything is fit only for the bin. The best communicators keep things simple. I think that’s part of what Ron was saying in his original question. Steve.

I don't know how many have viewed this presentation on Beechbrook but it is well worth looking at. The artistic imagery is superb and is a wonderful portfolio presentation for the artist concerned. Steve.

Very witty! The more things change, the more they stay the same. Steve.

Three with one swat!!!!!