alrobin

Stephen, I second Ken's comments - your images are very well-seen. They are so sharp, and the colours very delicate and beautiful. I know the area around your home town very well, and you have captured the inherent beauty of the area very effectively!

Sharon, Although I've never played with fractals, except very elementary ones on my old Amiga pc, I have a rough idea as to how they work, mathematically speaking. I guess by "point" I meant "direct", or "control". There must be something you do first in order to end up with the effect you want. Some of those 3D fractals bear quite a resemblance to "real-life" objects, imagined or otherwise.

Ken, Thanks - you're too kind! Between Chretien and the Discovery Channel, we could be famous if we teamed up together! Seriously, though, Jim and I are teaming up in October to run a series of tutorials here in Ottawa on PTE, sound editing, Photoshop for AV, etc. So, Igor, we may have a few more converts for you later in the fall!

Bill, Not everyone wants to use a utility to launch their shows. For those who do, I'm sure Granot could design a simple utility which does not react to multiple double-clicks, and which flashes a message telling the viewers to be patient and not double-click, pauses a couple of seconds, and then launches the main PTE show. No need to pass on any parameters, and no need for new members to have to learn more new complicated instructions for setting up PTE shows. For those who are still bothered by double clicks, I still think that a simple bit of code added to PTE could solve this problem. Unless you can give me a good reason why someone would want to use them for some other purpose?

Bill, In your example, what parameter are you passing to the PTE executable?

Hi, Sharon, Those images are beautiful - just like your other work, including your watercolour show. And I'm sure there is much more involved than simply running the program. The 3-D images are different than I was expecting. Do you "point" them in certain directions when you start them up, in order to achieve the effect you want? Is it possible to create fancy fonts in this manner, too? This reminds me, I once saw a whole slide show of back-lit frost patterns on a window - very effective!

Anton, I think you've hit on a better solution than you first proposed.

Hi, Delsupserve, Welcome to the forum! Don't hesitate to keep posting until you get a satisfactory answer, as there are a lot of people here who can help. It sounds like you are saving the ".pte" file to disk. You must save the compiled ".exe" file that you get when you select "File / Create slideshow as ..." and reference that in your "inf" file.

Hi, Brydette, Welcome to the Forum! Your question has been asked many times on this forum. Do a search for "video" or "television" and you will find many other postings. This is but one example of previous threads . The short answer is that PTE cannot create an "avi" show, but there is other software out there that can.

Diana, Being a wedding photographer you are probably most familiar with print considerations in digital technology as suggested by your remarks: "when I resize my images to 72 dpi and about 3x3" in size they look awful" . However, dpi has no bearing on image quality on the screen, such as in a PTE slide show. These are just settings in the event that one wishes to print out the image. The first parameter you need to consider is pixel dimensions. It has been found that the maximum dimensions for photos which can still be viewed on most monitors and older pc setups is approx. 800 x 600. You can use 1024 x 760 pixels, but you run the risk of some older and slower pc's not being able to handle them suitably. The only other really important consideration is the quality of compression to jpeg's. This also has a bearing on file size, but like everything else, there is a price to pay in image quality by compressing too much. So, most users have found a happy medium of around a 50% compression factor. These parameters are important if one is to achieve a smooth transition between images. If this is not important, or if you use transitions which are very long (say 5 to 10 seconds long), then you can tolerate larger and hence higher-quality images. Maybe for wedding photographs, these slow transitions would not be so bad, accompanied by some really slow, moody music. You really have to experiment quite a bit before you find a compromise which suits your purposes. Hope this helps some!

Anton, I agree with Stu on this. At first, when I read your post, I thought you wanted to use "double-click" for a specific use, coincident with, but different from, a single click. Stu is right - what is really required is to disable double-clicks, not enable them. My first encounter with this problem was in opening a compiled PTE show from the desktop (this was a problem right in Windows itself, nothing to do with PTE). Since the show didn't open right away, I double-clicked on the icon again, and then wondered why I could hear two copies of the music, one a few milliseconds behind the other, like an echo!

I worked with a guy once who was so impatient that he would multiple-click on everything. He could never figure out why his pc was acting so strangely!

Oleg, be careful! These names have a habit of sticking to oneself!!

Alan, When I first tried your show, I could not hear the sound either. However, I immediately realized that I didn't have my MIDI sound module turned on. Depending on one's operating system, in the Control Panel there is an option under "Sounds and Multimedia / Audio" to select which devices you want to use for "Sound recording", "Sound playback", and "MIDI". You can also select an option there to instruct your system to only use the selected devices, so in my case, since I had this option turned on, when I tried to run your MIDI show, it would not play back through my pc speakers.

Diana, If I may just add to Ken's and Stu's good advice, make sure you instruct your clients to exit from all running applications, before running your show, in order to clear memory and processor time for use by PTE, especially if they are using non-P4 type equipment and/or have limited RAM, video card, and hard-drive resources. If you use a short introductory show to access the main show(s), you can put these instructions on the first slide. There are so many permutations and combinations of user equipment out there, as well as different levels of user pc knowledge, that you should not be surprised if some of your clients come back with complaints about problems in running your shows, no matter how many precautions you take.

While we are on the subject of our wish list (aka "dreaming in technicolour" ?? ), I would like to see a "nudge" feature on the timeline. Today when I "grab" one of those little blue transition boxes and try to move it left or right with the mouse, it jumps by a larger amount than I want for fine-tuning. There may be a good reason for this, but at times it is disconcerting. Therefore, it would be helpful if one could "nudge" the box only slightly left or right using the left and right arrows on the keyboard.

Hi, Lori, Welcome to the Forum (and, hopefully, to PTE!) The support people at WnSoft follow these pages regularly, so I'm sure someone will get back to you before too much longer. Whatever you do, don't give up - it will be worth the wait!

Hi, Alan, Welcome to the Forum! I have no trouble hearing the MIDI in your show. However, not everyone has their system set up properly for MIDI, so maybe that is why you received that comment. I played it on my external MIDI sound module, and it seemed to "find" all the instruments properly. The only instrument which sounds a little strange is the jazz guitar (I think this is the one). The pitch seems to be a little too high for this instrument to sound normal, so it comes out a little "screechy". Leave it out and, IMHO, the music would sound very nice. Maybe I'm showing my age here! Anyway, nice show!

Thanks, Oleg! Glad you liked it. It is more of an exercise than a serious slide show, though. You can see I was copying your metallic framing ideas. Actually, I already had the frame and drop shadow set up in photoshop as I use them on some of my web pages.

I guess that's my point. If you are already using "click" to load a program, you wouldn't want to enable "double-click" as well. If you did, then slow double-clickers would still load the program twice by mistake. And if you get around this problem by not enabling "click", then there is no need for a "double-click" command - just use "click". I know you have to be careful not to double-click a button now in PTE, but, IMHO, I don't think enabling "double-click" is the answer. I'm sorry, but I stilll don't see the need for it.

Probably a good idea, but what, specifically, would you use it for? The trouble with double-click, is that if "click" is also an option, then, since not everyone clicks at the same rate, there could be some ambiguity introduced into the system. If the intent is to disable "click" in order to indicate that the user is definite about the command, then maybe "double-click" would be useful. But, I can't think of where in a slide show this would be the case. Myself, I feel that Microsoft gets carried away with "double-clicks", and I would prefer in many cases to have to click only once. You would never use both together, however.

Even if one is being very selective about the masking, and requires a different mask for each member of the family, masking is still more efficient, as generally speaking, each mask will require fewer bits than a copy of the underlying image would. Of course, if file space is not an issue, it is probably easier, and also a little more precise, to create separate images in one's photo editor. In Photoshop, using layers, it is a simple matter to stack up a number of images on different layers, and then "save for web" to convert each into a jpeg. You don't even have to merge layers together or "flatten" the images first, either. Using separate images has the added advantage of keeping the masking stable under varying pc monitor resolutions.

Setting up the music can be one of the most tricky parts of designing a slide show. It's not always necessary to overlap two selections - sometimes it's best to just fade "off" and fade "on" the next, similar to the space between pieces on a CD, except with a shorter interval. And the fade "on" of the second piece should coincide precisely with a transition between slides. In my "Canada Day" show (just posted on Beechbrook), I wanted the music to be seamless, so I merged the three selections together by simply overlapping the ends. Here it is important to pay attention to the beat of the music so that you don't have two beats coming too close together, but have the beats of the second piece coincide more or less with the beats of the first. I say "more or less" as the two pieces probably don't have the same tempo, but where the selections come together, the beats for each should coincide as closely as possible. It is also important to choose an appropriate place in a selection at which to truncate it. You don't want to leave the music of one piece "hanging" in the middle of a bar, and just barge right into the next selection. Also, repeating part of the first selection at the end of the show can be very effective in drawing the show together. Lots to think about when making an effective slide show!

Harvey, Until Igor adds auto scaling to PTE objects, using the object editor to add text and other objects to an image will be fraught with danger. However, as Ron says, it is possible to overcome this problem by adding the text to an image in one's photo editor before using the image in PTE. This is a little more work (not much more), but it is the only way to ensure that the text will position itself on the image the way one intends it to. The only other downside is that, because the text will be converted to a jpeg, it will not be quite as crisp as if added by the object editor. But the advantage in having control, IMHO, outweighs all the negative aspects.

I always wondered what the "4" stood for!!! Seriously, though, out of 300 slides, how did you ever find it??