alrobin

Can't you just re-render and record the show using a dvd+r instead of a dvd-r disk? I doubt if an older dvd player would require an "rw" type disk.

Robin, Welcome to the Forum! I have had a similar problem when the transitions were too close together for the computer to process, and the remaining slides got delayed a bit. Otherwise, the timing is normally quite consistent. Has this only happened with this one mp3 file? You could try substituting another mp3 of similar length to see if there is a problem with the sound file. Also, try spreading out some of the closer images on the timeline to see if this corrects the problem. Are all the images in the slide list represented on the timeline?

There's quite a bit of excellent PTE tutorial material on Beechbrook.

John, I use a firewire interface, and it works great. The nice thing about it is that I can then switch it over from my pc to my laptop when required, without having to have two sound units.

As Jim has said, the only way to select and repeat a group of slides is to click-shift select them from either the slide list or the associated light-table. Just to elaborate a bit more on this, you can do this directly from the timeline by first selecting the option, "View / Auto adding of new transition points ...", click on the timeline where you want your images to repeat, and then select "Insert Slide". This will take you directly to the light table for the images in the "file list" (not the "slide list"), where you can select which ever ones you want to repeat. You then have to sort the timing out on the timeline as you did when you first added these slides. "Import points from another show" does work. However, it is the timing of the slides, not the slides themselves, which is imported. Your existing timings will change if you select this option. I agree that under some circumstances it would be handy to repeat a selection of images on the timeline, but I find that whenever I see repeated images in a show, I am disappointed that the person didn't find new images for that part, even though it may be set to a repeated chorus in the music. Repeats in music seem to work, but not so effectively for images, in my opinion, anyway. Hope this helps.

Ken, I used to travel with my film in a couple of lead-lined bags in my carry-on backpack, and wondered why none of the security people ever wanted to see what was in that big black blob at the bottom of my pack. So, I asked a security agent in Montreal once why he didn't want me to open my pack. He took me around the counter and showed me the image on his monitor - there were my two "twenty-six" packs with all the film canisters lined up and showing quite clearly inside the lead bags. So, from then on I stopped bothering to use them.

Jeff, I would be interested in it too. Ken's idea to post it to Beechbrook is a good one. Re the timeline functions, if you highlight a group of transitions (by using click and "shift-click"), and then click on "arrange selected points", the group of selected points will be spread evenly on the timeline between the first and last transition of the group. Very useful for setting up a group of slides along with a selection of music, prior to further tweaking to obtain more exact synchronization. The update button is used to register the value that you type into the transition time that shows up just to the left of the button after you highlight a particular transition. Re the auto sync tickbox, I'm mystified, too, as the default is for PTE to set up the timeline with equal times. I guess it's just a way to confirm that you don't want to change anything as the moment you do, the tickbox changes to "custom sync". Good luck with the tutorial.

Momoftwo Did you try putting all your project files in the same folder?

Hi, Damor, Join the club - we're all learning here in this new world of digital technology, as new things are being developed and discovered every day. We're on the "bleeding edge" of technology, in other words. So, hang in and enjoy the ride! I'm older than you, (and Ron is older than both of us )so if we can follow it (more or less), then you can too! If you are like me and like to learn new tricks, then you're in the right business! To answer your question, DPI is a term that is, in fact, used in connection with ink-jet printing, but it has nothing to do with picture size on your monitor. Just an old-fashioned way of referring to the measure of fine detail in a print. Nowdays, it's not even that applicable to printers, even though the manufacturers still use it, but is more a way of indicating that one printer mode is better than another, or to indicate the granularity of a print. (Some printers print more in lines than in individual dots). Granted, ink-jet printing is done with "dots" of ink, but nowdays the dots can be of varying size, and laid out in different ways, so the comparison between printers becomes more complicated. Things have progressed a long way since the times of the "dot-matrix" printer. Whenever you hear "inches" used in conjunction with pixels on a monitor, then it can only be used to calculate the actual size in inches on the monitor, a dimension which is of no use to anyone except perhaps the designer of printer monitors. As you know, the distance between pixels on your monitor is fixed, so if your image is 1200 pixels wide, you can calculate, knowing how many monitor pixels there are per inch, how big the image will look on your monitor. Big deal! So, if your monitor shows 1200 pixels from one side to the other, then the image will fill the screen. And, if you double the number of pixels in the image, then it will take two screen widths to show it all. In photoshop a unit called "pixels per inch" is used as a conversion factor to indicate to a printer how big to print the image. (Some people use "DPI" here, but it is a misnomer). So, if you set the image at "300 ppi", and your image is 1200 pixels wide, the print will be 4 inches wide. You can then change this parameter to change the size of the print without changing one iota the "quality" of the image on the screen, (or projected), in total number of pixels. But it's only a relative thing - nothing to do with the actual number of dots which will be printed per inch. Hope I haven't made things more confusing. Just accept that for images projected or viewed on a monitor, it is the total number of pixels in each dimension (along with the degree of jpeg rendering, of course) which is the important factor in determining the quality of that image.

Ed, Thanks for the information. Still, it really surprises me that in all these years, PS has not made this operation more user-friendly.

Yes, let's keep it going - I love a good argument! Damor, Here are a couple of links you might want to check out to see what all the fuss is about: Former Forum Discussion and Excellent Web Discussion Bottom line - don't lose any sleep over it - just continue to have fun with PTE and use what works for you!

IMHO, this is one of the disadvantages with PS. Often one is faced with a folder of images with varying aspect ratios and wishes to preserve the maximum image area while ensuring that width and height of each image are less than or equal to the optimum image dimensions of one's monitor or projector. This is where Irfanview proves very useful as one can set both height and width at the optimum dimension and still preserve the aspect ratio of each image. Personally, too, I find the batch process in IrfanView much more intuitive and easy to use than the actions in PS. This is just my preference, based on having to try to remember, each time I set up a batch action in PS, which of the multitude of menus at the top of the window contains the options for creating an action, and then after searching for hours (it seems), remembering that it's not in the menu where the batch command is located, but on the toolbar instead. Also, in PS, I'm never sure what is going on with the file opening and closing process, whereas in IrfanView, one doesn't have to worry about that. Maybe I'm missing something, but, IMHO, when it comes to batch processing, IrfanView is much easier to use.

Brian, Don't you mean "time between transitions"? I regularly use transition times of 20 milliseconds without any problem. In fact they work better than transition times of 2 seconds.

Ken, I think the answer may lie in the fact that before you select the timeline option, PTE uses all of the default settings in "Project Options", plus those tweaked in "Customize Slide" to control the timing of the show. So, if you have set "duration" to be 5 sec for each of 10 slides, and the the "transition time" to be 5 seconds, the total time of the show will be 10 x (5 + 5) or 100 seconds. When you use the timeline, the transition times are embedded in the duration times (this is very logical when you look at the timeline, as the transition times then can be tweaked without disturbing the duration times). So as soon as you select "timeline" mode, the total time of the show becomes 10 x (5) = 50 sec. The overall reason for this apparent ambiguity is probably because PTE has been a continually evolving project over some 5 or 6 years (or more). Originally, there was no timeline mode, so the additive method of calculating the times was adopted, and then to avoid re-programming, was not changed when the timeline was added to the system. Hope this helps you to understand the thought process behind the development of this amazing software.

Damor, Welcome to the Forum! One thing to note in the use of "Esc" is that it waits until the end of the current transition before taking effect. So if you press the key at the start of a long transition, you will have to wait until the transition finishes before you will be able to exit the show.

Jeff, The short answer is "no" and "no". You can find a discussion of the "new" timeline features in some of the previous Forum posts, but as far as I know there is no detailed description of them. My tutorial does not cover the new features which came with Version 4.40, and I won't be updating it, at least until the new version 5.0 is out The best way to learn how to use the different options is to experiment with them, with just a few slides, until you become familiar with what happens under different scenarios. And, of course, you can ask specific questions here on the Forum of people who have played with version 4.40+, and have discovered "modus operandi" that work for them.

Beth, If you uncheck "Auto adding of new transition points for new slides", then PTE functions as it did in versions before 4.40 in that if you add a transition between two other transitions, the new one takes on the characteristics of the slide to the right of it, and effectively moves the remaining slides to the left. It's a little hard to describe - you really have to try it to see what is happening. Of course, to add another transition, you have to have at least one unassigned slide in the slide list. Hope this helps.

Beth, Moving all of several slides over is quite easy on the timeline. Just click on the first slide to be moved, then "shift-click" on the last slide, and all will be highlighted. Then just move them over as a block of slides. Also, I presume you know about the option "Timeline / View / Auto adding of new transition points for new slides" to switch back and forth between the new timeline options and the old way of doing things.

Ken, In synchronized mode, you can't set both the duration and transition times to the same value or you will have incompatibility problems, as PTE needs a few milliseconds between each transition to prepare for the next. Do another test, this time with something more reasonable, like duration 5 seconds, transition time 2 seconds.

Ken, Welcome to the Forum! If you are synching using the timeline, the timeline "duration" settings take precedence over anything you have entered into Project Options or Customize Slide. In that scenario, only the transition times can be set using Project Options/Customize Slide. However, when setting up a new show, if you change the default duration and transition times before entering the timeline, the new times will be used as defaults instead of the normal default time of 4 sec, and transition time of 1.5 sec.

Dave, Thanks for sharing - there are some great programs listed there!

The slide number always appears along with the slide in the "slide list" (the other one is called the "file list".) And, it is possible to drag the timeline over to the second monitor. However, one cannot adjust the slides in the "slide list" without first closing the timeline window.

In English we sometimes call it "The path of least resistance."

Lin, I enjoyed watching your show very much - the wildlife photographs are superb! You are fortunate to be right in the heartland of such fantastic mountain scenery and with all that wildlife around you. In general I like the pan and zoom effects, especially where they contribute to a sense of motion in a slideshow. They can be used very effectively to convey the feeling of moving into or out of a scene, and also where one wishes to indicate lateral direction of movement from one scene to another. However, as a continuous effect throughout the entire show, I'm afraid that I, personally, would prefer to be able to just sit back and admire a gorgeous scene or a beautiful wildlife photo. I find (and again it's just a personal thing) that I have more difficulty concentrating on an image if it is in motion than if it is still. When the motion stops, then I feel that I have more freedom to let my eye roam around the image and admire all the little details that I seem to miss when it is motion. And some of your images deserve to be admired for a long time. As for shimmer, the show runs flawlessly on both my desktop (2.8 MHz) and my new HP laptop (3.2 MHz), both with top of the line ATI video cards. However, at times there was a slight shimmer of Moire patterns in the very fine detailed textures during the pans and zooms. At the SuperCircuit I had some difficulty with some of the ProShow shows, as the pans seemed to be a little jerky, but this was entirely absent with your show. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was running a projector and laptop screen simultaneously. Another idiosynchrasy I found with the ProShow entries was that whenever I showed a ProShow slideshow, I had to exit from my PTE "intro" slide back to the desktop and start over with the introduction screen, as the objects in PTE seemed to seize up. One thing that's interesting with shows utilizing the Ken Burns effects is that one seems to be able to make a longer show with fewer images, as one's attention is taken up with anticipating what is coming "around the corner" and so the images can be left on-screen for a longer time. On a final note, I found the background sounds a little monotonous. Again, just a personal observation and preference. I like the idea of background sounds, as they give presence to the show, but maybe they could be a little more varied, and spaced out a bit more. Overall, though, I thought it was an excellent production, and one that I will definitely watch over again. Thanks for posting it!

Yves, Welcome to the Forum! Yes, the ideal solution in your case would be to create a folder in addition to the template folder, put all the images, music files, and .pte project file in the same folder, and zip and email that to your friend for burning onto a dvd. I also use such a folder for backup on a separate external hard drive.