alrobin

Jeff, Welcome to the Forum! Yes, you are correct. When you synch to music, you have to select your background music via the "Project Options" menu. However, you can still dub in sounds via the "Sound" line on the main window.

Thanks again, Bill - this is a very useful service. Thanks too for your offer to host the images and AV's for the New Years' Peace-in-the-World project.

Igor, I don't see any problem with this arrangement either. In fact, it seems to offer us more options than we had before.

The "More Details" link for the "Frames" CD in the "tutorials for sale" section of your site doesn't seem to be working.

Ray, Welcome to the Forum! One way to do this is to create a transparent GIF in your object editor and use this as a "button" in the object editor. Another way to create a button without a border is to overlay a transparent GIF over a "text" object in the Object Editor. Unfortunately, the "button" object in PTE always has a border.

Just wanted you all to know that I have finally managed to burn a DVD disk with 4 PTE shows, including a functioning menu introduction. One of the shows includes 4 smooth "push" (pan) transitions in a row. And all this directly from the temporary PTE "avi" files, without first creating intermediate "avi" files. I have Premiere "Elements" 1.0. Apparently Elements 2.0 is out now, and is supposed to offer custom menu capabilities - the menus in version 1.0 don't offer much in the way of personal preferences. Pinnacle offers many more options for transitions and menu designs. "Elements" sells for US $99.

I think at one time one had to be careful to set the proper options when changing file associations, so it was very easy to get oneself into a real jam. However, lately, with Win XP, I have found that I just have to browse for the correct program, and everything seems to set itself up with all the options currently set for that particular program.

Further to Ed's comments, I believe that the producers should also have the right to edit images in order to make them fit better with others in a sort of montage if that is considered to be the most effective way to use them. I would also be in favour of allowing them to use all of the images in whatever order seems to be most effective, and should have the sole right to decide on the sequence for all images. I would go along with having several persons take on the role of producing the show, but I believe that the images (and perhaps the music) should be made available to anyone who wants to try their hand at assembling them into a show of their own, which they should then be free to publish via Beechbrook or their own page if they so wish. I don't favour a competition, either, but sometimes that is one way to get people to submit their work. IMO, we should definitely have a credit slide or slides at the end with the names of all contributors - not necessarily credits by image, but simply to recognize those who contributed. The emphasis should not be on any one particular person's work, but on the fact that this is a joint effort on behalf of the PTE Forum members. And, if PTE 5 is out by then, this would be a fitting project on which to launch it.

I suggested to Dave that it might be a good idea to open up a temporary membership with Kodak's free image upload facility to avoid having to send a lot of images through the mail. My site is available too, so if Kodak's site was not suitable for longer term storage, then I could offload them periodically onto my site for members to view and access. We could give anyone interested the password to the Kodak site to facilitate uploading. Bill (cottage) has also volunteered Beechbrook. Zipped files could be uploaded to Beechbrook in the usual manner, containing images instead of shows, and I could offload them onto my site and display them as images if necessary. However, uploading actual images to a site like Kodak's or PBase (someone would have to pay to set up an account if we choose the latter) would be more convenient. Maybe it's possible to get a free temporary PBase account?? Regarding the music, perhaps someone would be able to contribute some royalty-free music to go with the images. Or, perhaps it would be possible to cover the music under the present UK arrangement with their local licencing organizations?? There has never been a problem in the past in getting popular music artists interested in projects such as this in promotion of a good cause. Any ideas here? As to what we do with all the images, there are several possibilities. One would be to have everyone who is interested in participating create a slideshow of all the images submitted and post it on Beechbrook or their own site for people to download. Then we could all vote to determine the most popular show and this one would be selected as the culmination of our efforts. Or, we could nominate one or a few producers to come up with a compilation of all of our images in the form of a slideshow. Or, we could have many different shows, all promoting peace, and leave them as created by the individual Forum members. Which ever method is selected, the objective of having AV creators in many different countries, all thinking and working on a project promoting peace in the world, would be accomplished. I'm interested in contributing, but at the moment I don't have time to do any coordination. Maybe someone could get in touch with Dave and help him out with the coordination role.

Dave, Count me in too. I would suggest the usual image size of 1024x768, but if someone else prefers a different format, please let us know. And if anyone has any ideas about how to go about putting the whole show together, please let's have your suggestions. IMO, this should be a cooperative effort, to demonstrate how people of different nations can work togather on a project, towards the ultimate goal of world peace. Thanks, Dave, for coming up with this idea and getting it off the ground.

I guess everyone has a slightly different working methodology - that's what makes the world go around! I like to keep all my "raw" (or original) images separate from the files in my pte project folder as I like to be able to keep track of them with an image manager (in my case "IMatch", but ACDC or Picasso are also good). I may even create a separate folder there just for images acquired for the show, and give it the presentation name, too, to identify it. At the same time as I start selecting the originals and continue acquiring others specifically for the show, I like to start work on preparing them for the show and pulling them into PTE to preview. This step usually results in large hi-res photoshop files, and these I put into the same folder as the originals, to keep them together, and also allow my IMatch to easily "manage" them for me. At the same time, I try to keep backing them up onto a similar folder arrangement on a large (300 Gb) external "backup" drive. I prefer to use an external drive as that way the original image files are readily available for use on my laptop, also managed with a separate copy of IMatch. It is easy to keep each version of IMatch up to date with the latest images on the backup drive. I use the backup drive as the "principal" image source, until those images no longer in "circulation" are offloaded onto DVD's. Once the secondary images have been accumulated and manipulated I resize them to the resolution & aspect ratio required for the show and "save to web" as jpegs, choosing the directory already prepared for that show (on a different drive or in a different main folder than the originals, to avoid "messing up" the folders I am managing with IMatch. I can also target these "project folders" with IMatch, if I want to, by simply creating a new "database". Throughout the process, and particularly once the presentation is complete, I also backup the project folder (containing subfolders for jpegs, gifs, music, and project file versions) on the external drive (to a separate main folder than the one for the original images), and eventually over to a DVD. Note that with the latest version of PTE, the project file will still run OK as long as the folders are all copied intact to the new drive. Some may prefer to keep all images for a show in one main folder, but I find that requires excessive duplication of the large original images and photoshop files, and also makes the management of them in IMatch a more tedious process. I also find that the project folder, if it also contains the original files and intermediate photoshop files, will sometimes not fit onto a single DVD. I use the same process as the above for the sound files, with separate main folders for the original files, as they can also become very large until they are reduced to mp3 format for the show. I use Cubase SX to collect, edit, and compress them. I also use Audition for "mastering" the final mix.

Ken, I'm with you - I have never used templates either. With PTE using relative pathnames now, there is even less of a need to use them, provided one is careful to use copies of images in one's pte folders, and not the original images, which could be "borrowed" by other folders and hence "lost" to the pte project.

Here's to everyone who participated in the Forum in 2005 - let's use our extra second this year to promote peace in the world to all 'mankind'! One thing that impressed me very much during the SuperCircuit this year was the number of presentations which dealt with human failure to recognize the rights of others, and which advocated preservation of the environment. An audiovisual production can be a very powerful means for highlighting these inequities and shortcomings, and bringing them to the attention of other people who come in contact with our productions. Let's hope that in some small way, our passion for telling stories and displaying the beauty of the world around us also helps in some small way to make the world a better place in which to live so that we and others can enjoy even more the products of advances in knowledge and technology in this fascinating field.

As Ken said, Igor built this capability into PTE 4.4 such that if you move all of your project folders intact to another drive, for example, PTE will pick up the new pathname automatically. The problem occurs only if you move individual files or folders somewhere else, and they no longer exist in the same relative location to the .pte file.

According to Symantec, there is no trojan.Pws.Agent.Da virus - the closest resemblancee are trojan.Pws.Agent.QQPass and trojan.Pws.Agent.QPHook. For the former, the description is: Trojan.PWS.QQPass is a password-stealing Trojan horse. Delete it if you find it. However, it could be that Bitdefender, perhaps because of where it operates, looks for different viruses than other anti-virus utilities.

As far as I know, the same format should autostart a Director file - particularly if it is an "executible" file (e.g. ending in ".exe", ".com", etc.) However, you probably know that you have to tailor it for the particular file you want to start (i.e. mention the name of the file you want to start in the ".inf" text file). You can edit it as a text file in notepad, resave it, and give it an ".inf" suffix if it ends up as a ".txt" file.

I should add that the "pan" (or "push") transition in PTE translated very well into video format using Pinnacle's "Studio 8". No more jerky movement on the pans as I experienced with Nero. Mind you, in Nero I used the avi files directly from PTE, whereas with Pinnacle I converted them first to new avi files and used those for the final mix in Pinnacle.

I'll add my 2-cents worth here, too. I finally was able to burn 2 shows using Nero 6.0, and I too used the option Ken and Ralph just mentioned. And, it really is a "piece of cake" once you know how. There is also an option you can select to have each show preview in the little icon on the main menu while you are waiting to decide which one to select. However, the most exciting thing for me was being able to get Pinnacle "Studio 8" to work the way I wanted it to, and managed to burn 4 shows, including a menu which actually works the way it should. There is an option in Pinnacle, too, to have the play return to the menu after each show, as well as an option for playing a clip from each show in the menu icon windows. In order to get Pinnacle to work, I first used Pinnacle to create new "avi" files from the temporary PTE "avi" files and saved them to my hard drive. Then I went back into Pinnacle and used these new avi files as input files, and everything, including the previews, worked just fine from there on. I'm glad I finally got it to work as I prefer using Pinnacle due to their wider choice in menu features and more user-friendly timeline, complete with sound waveform.

Alan, Are you synching your shows to music via the timeline?

It's a new MS development system specially tailored for Internet business applications, in competition with Sun Microsystems "Java", etc. See WIKIPEDIA INFO

Thanks, Alan - best of the Season to you and yours, too! By the way, how do you pronounce that, or is it phonetic like Welsh?

Lin, This is what the key should look like: REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\PTE] "key"="xxxxxxxxxxxxx" As long as it ends in a quote symbol, it should be OK; no need for "=" at the end. I would delete the "+" and replace with the "********", making sure the last symbol is a quote symbol. Don't delete anything else. And, you are right, it should be 231 bytes in size, and be sure to change the name to "PTE.KEY". If this is not the case, then Igor can help - maybe not until Monday, though, as he normally takes the weekend off. Best of luck to your friend.

OK, I get it! It's perfectly phonetic! Just like Irish!

That's easy for you to say! Merry Christmas to you too!

Dave, I think you got infected with some spyware!