alrobin

Igor, The sound is the same to me as on the first version (i.e. not very good - some "beating", or too much reverb, on the bass sounds.) Also, the sound is the same, for both laptop and desktop. On the desktop, I still get a little glitch halfway on the horizontal banner ("Create slideshow ..."). On the laptop, everything is smooth as silk. The first time I played it on the pc, and then exited, I noticed that the "Windows Explorer" screen took a long time to redraw. After the next times, everything was back to normal. Could be something working in the background. The laptop was fine. I closed everything down on my desktop with "EndItAll", and this time there was no glitch on the "Create ..." banner. Also, Win Explorer is fine, too.

Garris, You should be able to calibrate both. For the monitor, you may be able to activate an Adobe "gamma" correction in the Control panel. For some video cards, you can also go into the advanced settings and change the value for each of the three RGB colours. I had to make changes to these in my laptop so that the projected colour values were more "natural".

You can't merge video into PTE per se, but you can have a slide in a PTE show open a player and play a video file. You will then have to manually close the video player when it is finished. Or, you can output a PTE show to video format and then merge the two in an external video editor.

You can insert a black slide if you want a blank. Igor probably hasn't gotten around to implementing the "blank" image feature yet in v. 5.0. If you leave it with only one, then the image will persist over the time to the end of the section indicated by the vertical blue lines. If you move the vertical lines toward each other, then the object will appear and disappear at the times indicated. You only need to add another keypoint if you want the object image to change at some point. This is so that one can merge the end of the object action with the next transition.

Ligia, You should have no problem running PTE 5.0 on that laptop. With 224 Mb of video RAM, DrectX 9 hardware acceleration, HDTV support, etc., it should be more than adequate for the most demanding requirements. The wide screen capability is almost a must now-days, too. The dual monitor capability will be nice to have, too. However, just to be sure, see if you can try it out first with Igor's demo PTE 5.0 shows.

Mike, I had the same experience. Whenever I changed something in the "Customize Slide" menu, for some reason the effect was reset to the "Circle". When this happens, try opening "Customize Slide / Effects", check "Use own transition effect", and select "Fade". Re the sound, try running a different piece of music (preferably an mp3) to see if your other selection may be corrupted or not compatible.

Wally, you must be a very patient and understanding man!! Just the type of person we need here on the Forum!! Best of luck.

Igor, I would like to second Lin's suggestions. Lin, in the meantime, could you create a special PTE project file, and save images, with the special effects you want to duplicate in future, in this special "template" PTE show, which could then be opened and the images copied over to the new show as required?

Wally, Send an email to Wnsoft - Igor is usually very understanding when it comes to something like this. But, in future (easy for me to say now) always keep a copy of your "key" on a back-up cd or floppy.

I usually encode my MP3's at 128 kbps, 44.1 kHz. You would be hard-pressed to distinguish the difference in quality between these and their "wav" files. Especially in a large auditorium full of people. As a rule of thumb, 1 minute of music = 1 Mb in file size.

Nathan, I don't know this particular model, but it sounds like it is one of those chip-based video controllers on the motherboard. It probably has only a minimal amount of video RAM, not enough to run the new DirectX-based programs satisfactorily. You could probably have a new video card installed, with a minimum of 128 Mb of video RAM, for a reasonable price. Even a second-hand video board discarded by a young video "gamer", might be able to handle PTE more readily. Shouldn't be too expensive.

Igor, Rather than lose keypoints, as is the case now, I would be in favour of automatically readjusting "free" keypoints proportionally. That keeps things simple from a design perspective, too. I don't mean that it's simple to design this in - I am sure that this must be a very complicated issue for you, Igor.

Gary, I think that is what Igor is hinting at in his post just above yours.

Nathan, As you will have seen in the posts in the thread on video cards, this is really what is the determining factor with the special v5.0 effects. What card are you using, and how much video RAM does it have? You may well be able to run v 5.0 with slightly larger images than 1024x768, and use the zoom and pan very sparingly, just to give a sense of motion. Are you able to run Igor's demo entitled "Flowers"? It just uses a very slow "zoom" with images only 12% larger than 1024x768.

Gary, You likely shrunk the slide down to where you can't expand it with the mouse. Highlight the particular image by clicking on the appropriate image name in the bottom right section of the window, click on the little rectangle for one of the keypoints on the timeline in order to highlight it, and then manually adjust one of the "Zoom" values in the right-hand section of the window to 100%. (Adjusting the horizontal value will automatically adjust the vertical value to the same number). You should see your image object expand out to it's maximum size. To see the + indicators, the keypoint has to be positioned at either the beginning or end of a transition marker or the image object start or end. It should snap in to the right spot if you put the keypoint close to it. Conversely, try moving a keypoint with a + showing already to a point elsewhere on the timeline, and you should see the + disappear. It's just a marker to indicate when a keypoint is positioned in certain key spots on the timeline. It has nothing to do with the ability to add another keypoint using the + button located just under the "Play" button.

I would say "give priority in any timing conflicts to the timeline and/or Project Options/Customize Slide settings. Then have all keypoints adjusted to fit. That means that the "free" keypoints would have to be re-located somehow within the boundaries set by the timeline, etc. If the on-screen time were shortened, then some of the times of the "free" keypoints might have to be made to occur earlier, and perhaps the best way to do this would be to adjust all the free keypoints in proportion to the changes in the times for the main slide. If on-screen time for the main slide is made longer, then the "free" keypoints could remain as they were, and it would be up to the maker to go back and adjust if necessary. However, even here, in some instances, one might prefer a "proportional" treatment of the free keypoints, so maybe an option could be selected which would activate this mode. Just my 2-cents' worth.

Garris, This demonstrates the importance of constantly checking your scanner/monitor/printer/projector system to ensure that each is calibrated correctly and that they all work together as a compatible system. However, if you still have the original images (raw, tiffs, original jpegs, etc.), then you are still ok and they can be re-edited. If not, well - as you said, you may be out of contrast.

Ronnie, That is indeed the question. And it's one which I don't have an answer to. Ideally, the programs that you can close are the ones you have your ID associated with (see "User Name" in the Task Manager.) However you can run into problems if you close explorer.exe. Which is why "Enditall" protects it. I believe the utility is safe, as it basically uses the same process to close programs as the Task Manager, but gives you the opportunity as well to protect the programs you don't feel comfortable about ending. It's just a faster one-button way to close the ones not required instead of going through one at a time in the Task Manager. Other than that, I can't tell you much about the program other than it was originally recommended by PC Magazine, but that was some time ago, and it no longer shows up on their list of recommended downloads. I use it, and it seems to work fine for me.

Thanks, Igor! That's fantastic - I noticed the blue bars but had no idea I could move them. You're still one step ahead of us! Thanks for taking the time out to reply on your holiday!

bfreas, The screen options don't work on my system, either. I suspect that these are some of the features that Igor still has to work on. I have a question about the placement of objects on the new timeline. Does anyone know why it might be necesssary to have the added images remain visible at time "0", even if they are "moved" to a later time along the timeline? I'm thinking that it would be handier if we could control the point at which they become visible by simply moving them off the initial placement, and not having to play with the opacity.

Robert, Your show has some beautiful views of Machu Pichu (always wanted to go there, and even more so now!) Interestingly, my wife and I watched a friend's show on Saturday featuring a trip to the same place. Your images are so crisp, and colourful. Also, I like the opening effect where you pan the image of the trees and zoom in at the same time - almost looks like an IMAX movie where the camera swoops in on a scene while suspended on a cable from a helicopter. Don't care for the vertically-shrinking mountains or the one where you stretch the image out horizontally only. The large revised show ran with a few hitches on my desktop pc, and with fewer hitches on my laptop. The three places they showed up the worst were: - the image with the long planks bridging a gap in the footpath along the edge of the canyon. (I would have a few glitches if I tried to walk that plank, too! - the image behind the bunch of pink flowers while the circle is transitioning on, - the last image, just before the credits - the image dims in distinct steps. There were a few other minor hitches, but not particularly offensive. It would be interesting to see the same show modified per Igor's suggestions. I also tried your other three versions. "Q60" siezed up on my laptop when I pressed "Esc". I put the computer into "hibernation" and then restarted, and the slideshow program was still there, but in the background somewhere, but this time I was able to release it from the task manager. Also, the previously-noted glitches were still there. On "Q40" the glitches were also still there, but they were much less pronounced in the 1024x768 version. For those posting demos, I agree with Granot. It is the smoothness of the effects and other technical qualities we are testing out at the moment. At least, it would be helpful if the images were numbered so that those of us testing them out could report back as to precisely which image is affected. It would also be helpful if the demos could be kept shorter, so that it doesn't take so long to go through them over and over again.

Ronnie, A friend told me about a small utility called "EndItAll", which is available HERE. It was designed for Win 98, ME, and NT, but I find it works well with XP. It will close down all non-essential programs without having to go "Ctrl-Alt-Del" and then try to decide which programs you can safely close. Everything is reinstated by re-booting.

Ron, I, personally, do find some of the features similar to others that I have experimented with in other programs (e.g. Flash, and other similar 3d and animation programs I have played with). IMHO, the best way to learn how to use a new program is just to dive in and try things out. I have '"crashed" the computer a couple of times, but nothing serious. If you watch the demos, and then try to replicate the effects on your own, you will learn a lot about v. 5.0. Also, Igor gives a list of new features whenever he releases a new beta, and that is a good way to learn about the new capabilities he has added to the program. I rarely watch a tutorial or read a "help" document, preferring to play around with a program on my own and experiment with it. But, watching others' shows and demos does spark new ideas about different things to try out. Also, I find that part of the fun with working with PTE comes from the fact that I am constantly finding new features, work-arounds, etc.

While we're on the subject of advanced graphics boards, here's the latest from ATI. The "Radeon'R' X1900GT ". Looks like it might do the job quite handily!

Hi, Ian, Very nice! It's an improvement over the original, and it was very good in it's time, too! And it's only 300kb larger than the original! Just a little hitch near the middle of the second pass of the shuttle (could be caused by anti-virus activity or something on my system in the background). Also, the first dimension arrow (on the shuttle fuel tank) shows the radius instead of the diameter. Altogether, a very clever and effective use of the new v 5.0 features - especially the starfield, and I like the distant galaxy at the top RHS! It shows up much better on my wide-screen laptop than on the standard desktop monitor.