alrobin

Avie, Welcome to the Forum! Yes, just create your narrative clips (in mp3 or Ogg format) and add them to the sound line at the bottom right of the main window. If you want to allow some sound files to overlap onto one or more additional images, be sure to check "Don't interrupt sound comment when next slide appears" in Project Options / Music. Otherwise, the clip will be cut short when the next image appears. Sorry, I didn't realize this was a double-post!

Lori, Welcome to the Forum! Yes, you can install the new version over the old one, and your old key will still apply.

B, Glad you are sorting things out. Another way to select all slides to the right, for example, is to simply click once on the first slide, scroll to the end, and "shift-click" on the last slide. Or, any other combination of slides you want to pick. You can also select slides this way in the slide and file lists as well as the light-table.

B, No, if you are synching to music, the program ignores the entries for slide duration in "Customize slide". Makes sense as otherwise it wouldn't know which to use, the timeline or the numerical entries. However, you can enter numerical entries for the time occurrence of each transition on the timeline.

Tim, Are you able to play others' slide shows on your system? I have a couple on my website you could download, and there are several other websites around offering free downloads, as well. One notable one is Beechbrook Cottage. Most of these use mp3 music files.

Tim, Welcome to the Forum! The program will sometimes crash if you have added an image object in Object Editor, and then moved the object file so that PTE can't find it. Try stripping out all of the objects used, and also uncheck "Project Options / Synchronize slideshow".

Larry, I would guess that it has something to do with the way the different monitors are calibrated; or else different video card characteristics and settings. By playing around with the video settings (e.g. brightness, contrast, etc), can you get the show to look the same on the other pc monitor as on the original one?

Frances, I sent you a reply to your email on this subject at 10:00 this AM saying pretty much the same thing as Ken. Please let me know if you don't receive it.

You're forgiven!!

Guido, I think you'll find that the shows themselves are stored on his own home site, with a link from the images in PBase. I have some images on PBase, too, and would love to be able to store slideshows there also, as it is a real deal in terms of "storage" cost.

Daniel, You don't have to excuse yourself! There is absolutely nothing wrong with commenting on a show, regardless of whether or not the author has requested it, if you are offering positive impressions about it as you, Roger, and Dave were doing. I would have been the next in line to do so, myself. I think what Ron is referring to is "critiquing" a show, which is altogether different from congratulating someone for doing a wonderful job.

I too enjoyed Patrick's show very much partly because of it's excellence in photography and production and partly because this is an area of the world that I would very much like to visit sometime. I particularly enjoyed the way the images suited the music, and vice versa. I also enjoyed the innovative manner in which certain images were introduced, all completely synchronized to the music. IMO, this is the way it should be done - when synchronized properly to the music, an AV show is truly a homogeneous and harmonious blend of both. To me, if the music synchronization is off, it's a little like an image being slightly out of focus. This show was "in focus" from beginning to end. Thanks, Patrick, for sharing this with us!

Malkie, Welcome to the Forum! We'll need a little more information to help you trouble-shoot this problem: First of all, what kind of sound file are you using? How did you obtain it and configure it for use in PTE? Is it by any chance a "wma" file? Can you hear it if you play it using an image editor such as Audacity? What happens if instead of adding the file in "Project Options", you disable the synchronization and add it to one of the images using "Customize slide" instead? What player do you usually use when playing music on your computer?

B, You have to download the utility, "FlashMe", by boxig, from his website. .

Eric, Welcome to the Forum, WnSoft support are usually pretty good about replying. However, they are closed on weekends, so you may not receive a reply until early next week. It's frustrating when you have new software that you can't immediately start to use, but hang in - I'm sure you will find that this short delay will be well-worth waiting-out, further down the road!

B, Check out Marco's Flash demo show here on Beechbrook.

B, Welcome to the Forum! Yes, you can use regular Flash, but it is more effective if you add it to the PTE show using one of Boxig's Flash utilities, such as "FlashMe".

Jaz, To be successful with PTE, experiment, experiment, experiment! To answer your question, add a copy of the slide you want to strobe, but first radically increase the brightness in Photoshop or other image editor. Then set the transition type to "quick (no transition)", with a short duration time (e.g. 100 to 400 ms). It is easier to experiment with different settings if you are synching the show to the timeline. Hope this helps.

Yes, I agree, Ray. However, I am sure Igor is working on this, along with the zoom capability, and it will likely be seamless. I suspect your 50 ms is still too short for the exe version. I like to keep the panoramas in un-synched mode, totally under control of the nav bar or buttons placed in one corner of each image, and let the viewer explore the panorama at his or her leisure. The momentary pause betweeb frames then appears more natural.

Ray, You're right, in the preview on the timeline you get a white vertical line indicating the separation between the two images, but in the large-screen preview it should be OK. I haven't tried 800x600, but I just made an 8-image panorama (4 horizontal, 2 vertical levels) and everything worked fine in the large preview. It was an object-controlled show, however, not one synched to music. The problems you're having with the "exe" file could be due to a slow pc, or other things going on in the background, as 1 millisecond between transitions is pretty demanding on processor time in a synched show. If the time between transitions is too short, the previous slide will repeat. Try using a longer duration time, and then reducing it until the glitch reappears. About 150 ms, on top of a 4-sec transition, is about the maximum my pc will handle, full-screen at 1024x768 px. What settings are you using? Windowed mode? Fit to screen? I don't know about panoramas in AVI as I never use this mode. For previous postings, try a search on "panorama". All the best with your experimenting.

Ray, Check out the "Push" transition in 4.41. It's smooth as silk, just like the dissolves. There has been quite a bit of discussion on the forum the past few days centering around several panorama shows utilizing this transition.

Thomas, I suspect the problem with the faulty project is some strange jpegs. There is a way to preserve your object settings and that is by creating a "template" of a typical small project, and then copying these objects over to the new images to make a new project (the objects will even assume the same positions as on the original images). Then you can delete the old images and carry on with the new ones. You can also move the objects to new positions on the new images, or delete the ones you don't want, or copy the good ones as many times as you need in order to create objects on new images (each with the same fonts, sizes, colours, etc., as in the original project).

Thanks so much, Lin. I finally did get it to work - the secret seemed to be the PTE encoder - I successfully used "Full frames (uncompressed)" and it produced a 2.1 Gb avi file! I'll try the MS mpeg4 encoder next. Something interesting, though - with this option, PTE saved a permanent avi file on my HD. I didn't have to leave PTE open. But it also took about 5 minutes for Riva to create the flv file. There was no indication as to what was happening, but I could see that the processor was working away full-speed. The resulting flv file from Riva was only 4 Mb. There was some annoying artifacting on some of the images, but it worked ok. The transitions were all cuts. I'll try your suggested settings next. Thanks again for your information and suggestions!

Lin, I've posted a query about how to use Riva on the other "Ken Burns" thread, so won't repeat it all here.

Lin, I downloaded the trial version of Riva and tried to encode one of my shows, but received an encoding error message: "This can be caused by a not supported combination of parameters or by a not supported video codec." I did download and install the Riva flv encoder, but guess I'm not using the right pte video codec. I used the "custom AVI" option in conjunction with the Riva "flv" encoder 2.0 program What settings do you use, both for PTE avi creation, and for Riva? Do you save the PTE avi and then open Riva?