alrobin

Maureen, happy Valentine's Day to you too. Here's a copy of the card my sweetheart gave me for Valentine's Day. You can download it HERE from my website. It's only 1 1/2 Mb.

Hi, Leona, Welcome to the Forum! I'm not familiar with Movie Factory, so probably can't help you too much. I'll try to answer some of your questions, however. PTE v.5 is much easier to use for creating DVD's as there is no need to use a 3rd party software such as Movie Factory, but it uses the same method for SVCD's as v.4, so this won't help you much. Creating a DVD or SVCE is a completely different process than simply copying a PTE exe file to a CD as the PTE file has to be "rendered" and then burned in a very specific format. PTE v.5 is still a free download for anyone with earlier versions of PTE - however, Igor has indicated that there will be an additional charge once v.5 is completed in order to use the DVD-burning features of PTE. Maybe the best solution would be to purchase a DVD burner (they are not nearly as expensive now as they used to be, and DVD's are of much better quality on a TV set than SVCD's. Hope this helps some.

Hi, John, As you can see, we've been having quite a chat here while you were away. Upgrade to version 4.48 as Ken indicated, and if it still is problematic, you can email me a copy of just the ".pte" project file, with no images or music files, if you like, and I will have a look at it to see if I can spot anything amiss in the way it is set up. My new email address is alrobin @ sympatico.ca . Best of luck!

Alan, You ain't seen nothing yet! Wait until the 3D "analglyph" cubes start coming out. I'd be willing to bet that there are some people already working on them!

Hi, Markus, We're all "buds" here! I have had help here so many times, too, that it's a pleasure to be able to try to help someone else. Looks like Fabrizio & Steve found a solution to your problem. I use my laptop with both the screen and projector showing, and don't have any problems. However, the native resolution on my projector is only 1280x768, so I suspect that may be another reason why you are seeing glitches and I'm not. I find on my pc, that if I run a v.5 presentation in the usual 1680x1050 resolution, there seems to be a conflict between the slide transitions and the PZR effects. By the way, how do you like the SX60? We used an SX50 for a SuperCircuit competition a year ago, and found it to be excellent.

Markus, Welcome to the Forum! I use an HP "Pavillion 8000" laptop, with only 1 Gb RAM, and an ATI Radeon X500 "mobile" graphics card with 128 Mb of VRAM. It's vintage is about 2 years old, but it runs the v.5 PTE shows better than my desktop pc with similar parameters. So, you should be able to use your laptop to project PTE v.5 shows with no problems. At what resolution are you projecting your shows? Do you have a lot of images with transitions close together? I don't know what else to suggest, except, make sure there are no processes running in the "background" and taking up valuable processor resources.

Keith, I regularly use 75% as the jpeg quality setting for images 1024x768 in a PTE show, and find them quite satisfactory, as well as easier to manipulate quickly (i.e. showing images close together on the timeline).

Thanks for the correction, Keith! Yes, that should have read 500 Kb, not 500 Mb. Maybe in a year or two, we'll be using images that large! And, Maureen has it right about the "dpi". It's immaterial for PTE.

Paulo, I enjoyed watching your show, and marvel at the detail in those carved pieces and how quickly you do it. It must be very satisfying to restore monuments like that. You don't have to apologize, as you do contribute to the Forum, and you also contribute your share of excellent sequences.

John, Welcome to the Forum! How large are your images? What type of music are you using? What video card are you using? What pc, and what are its basic specifications? If your image files are very large, and very close together, your pc may have trouble handling everything, and the show might start lagging the music. A good "rule of thumb" is to use images no larger than 500 mb, to use mp3's for the music, and use "quick" transitions ("cuts") if the images are closer together than quarter or half a second. Of course there are no absolute requirements here - everything depends on the parameters of your pc system, and everyone's is different.

Mike, The best way to put 2 photos on a page is to combine them in your photo editing program into a single image. That way you have control over their orientation and appearance on the page (you can even rotate them so they are at an angle to each other, put on "corner tabs", add drop shadows, etc..)

Peter, Welcome to the Forum! If you end up using a film scanner for the job, use the highest resolution you can conveniently afford to use, in terms of time spent. You can always resize down, but rarely up, at least effectively. 2000 dpi is sufficient for 1024 x 768 digital images for PTE, but it doesn't leave much room for cropping. I am embarking on a similar task, with about the same number of slides to deal with, but I would like to maintain maximum quality. Brian's method is interesting, and I may end up using it for the bulk of my slides, too. However, I have an old Agfa 1200 dual-mode scanner, with a flat slid-out window which holds 20 slides. It can be operated in "batch" mode to automatically scan all 20, one by one, once the program has been set up, and provided all slides are set up in the same position each time (not too difficult as they are all side-by-side). This speeds up the process considerably. Good luck with your project - let us know how you make out!

Very nice, JP! I knew you would probably come up with a better-looking example than my crude attempt!

Hi, Peter, Is this along the lines of what you are looking for? I know it's a pretty accurate simulation of most of my golf games in the past. You can download it HERE. I'm sure JP and Dom could, with a little PS and spreadsheet work, could come up with a much better-looking effect!

Lin, Sorry, I thought you were talking about a vertical scroll. I see now what the problem is.

To see the codecs available in PTE v.5, click "Video / Create AVI". Then select "Create custom AVI video file" and click on "Video codec" to open the "Video Compression" menu. Then select the arrow under "Compressor" to open a list of Codecs.

Yes, I remember now that I too had problems with Player 9, and so set the file association for ".swf" to open with Internet Explorer. However, you can also download from GlobFx a "Swiff" player and then set the file association to it for playback of Flash files.

Daniel & Peter, You probably have a point, but what we have here is really just a library organization problem. We have a thread already for this purpose - Igor pinned it to the top of this section when he issued one of the latest beta's. Its main purpose is to discuss problems and features relating to the new v.5. But, one single thread is very awkward, too, as you have to scroll back through it and look at each posting to find one dealing with the feature you want to know about. Personally, I prefer the present system of creating a new thread about a specific aspect of v.4 or v.5 that someone wants to discuss - then all the discussion about that sub-topic is in one place, more or less. But I would not be against creating a main category for v.5 technnology if that's what everyone wants. However, getting people to use it properly would probably be as difficult as it is now to get people to post comments and questions about dvd's in the video section. As far as the presentation section is concerned, I believe that v.4 and v.5 discussion should be all together - it shouldn't matter whether the show was made with v.4 or v.5, as far as presentation discussion is concerned. But, even here, it's difficult to separate out the techniques from the results. The main thing is to put good descriptive titles on each posting and each new thread created.

Lin, This is the code I used once on the page where the flash file is embedded: "<OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=5,0,0,0" WIDTH=800 HEIGHT=600> <PARAM NAME=movie VALUE="promo-movie7.swf"> <PARAM NAME=loop VALUE=false> <PARAM NAME=menu VALUE=false> <PARAM NAME=quality VALUE=high> <PARAM NAME=bgcolor VALUE=#FFFFFF> <EMBED src="promo-movie7.swf" loop=false menu=false quality=high bgcolor=#FFFFFF WIDTH=800 HEIGHT=600 TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE="<A href='http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash">http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"></EMBED>" Change the WIDTH and HEIGHT to the values you want, in each of the 2 places where they occur. Make sure the original "swf" image is the correct size, too. When I just click on your link, it downloads automatically and starts playing, at a convenient size, in my browser. You have to be patient, though, as it takes a few seconds. You can see the page referred to above here. Hope this helps!

Thanks, Ken, for the heads-up! I put the wrong file up - sorry for the inconvenience to those who tried to download it. It should work OK now.

Jeff, I've had a similar experience trying to use Flash version 7. I had to upgrade my player, or use Irfanview, before the new "swf" files would run properly.

Bruce, I have experienced similar delays, both in refreshing icons in Explorer, and in starting various programs, including PTE exe's. Explorer in Win XP seems to be much slower at refreshing than it used to be. I have no answer for what causes this, as there is so much going on in the background these days, even, it seems, if you disable all of the obvious culprits. I know it sometimes helps to defragment the drives, and also to apply a program like "enditall" which clears out everything not essential from RAM. Your suggestion for a note about the version is a good one. Alternatively, perhaps Igor could implement a "Ctrl-shift-V" capability in the "exe" files which would flash the vintage number, and perhaps other vital statistics up on the screen momentarily for those of us "in the know" to use.

Hi, Daniel, I appreciate the way you and Patrick and others feel, even if I may be a little harsh at times. But as Igor has explained, this discussion on the Forum is the only way we beta-testers have of sharing our findings and making suggestions - ultimately, I hope, for the benefit of not only future AV makers, but also for the benefit of Igor who has to keep PTE competitive and make an income. I think a better analogy than your "French chef" one above would be to compare this activity to one of learning how to use a recipe to cook a meal in one's own home. We are not expecting Igor to cook up some beautiful AV shows for us, and then just sit back and enjoy them. Then, of course, we would not have to know how PTE works. Au contraire! The work which Igor is doing is giving us the tools for "cooking up" AV's in our own homes, and for that we need to understand the terminology and also how to use all the new special effects in a way which will make the final productions even more effective than they are now.

You're right, many possibilities! This is more fun than "Tinker-Toys"!! That's a good suggestion. It's hard to make an action appear random, however, without something random to start with, like random noise speckles. I revised the original project to include two other versions, using smaller flashes of light - the file size is larger (~600 Kb), so I posted it and the "exe" file (~800 k) to my web site at: - project version: http://www.alrobinson.com/glitter-3_Feb-09-2007.zip - exe version: http://www.alrobinson.com/glitter-3-exe.zip Please feel free to rip it apart and experiment with other ways of achieving a good "glitter". Meanwhile, I'll start working on the glittering snow-show. Isn't that an "oxymoron"??

Thanks, Kieth! There are loads of possibilities, and it is so simple to execute, after experimenting a bit. Thanks, JP. Not nearly as much work as some of your amazing demos! And I didn't need to use a spreadsheet, either!