alrobin

Hi, John, Welcome to the Forum. Try this link: PTE Key Good luck with PTE!

Ralvis, That is the same plugin that I installed for Photoshop 7, and it works fine. Ron, you should be able to enable the icon file "save as" capability in Photoshop by merely downloading the free ("donation-ware") plugin from the site Ralvis mentioned, unzipping it, and installing the resulting plugin, "icoformat.8bi", in the Photoshop "Plugins" folder.

Igor, This is very good news! Thanks so much! It will be very useful for making voice-over tutorials, and other narrated shows. I'm looking forward to it!

Barrie and Robert and Roger and others, Well said, all of you! And for those submitting shows to competitions, it's comforting to remember that the judges are not always right. (does that sound a bit like sour grapes? Probably! ) But isn't AV wonderful? There's something in it for everyone. And digital technology, by taking a lot of the 'drudgery' associated with the preparation of older-technology analogue shows, and at the same time giving us so many new interesting features and capabilities, is making AV even more enjoyable, even thought the quality of projection may not yet be up to the same standard as that which we are used to with the older 35-mm transparency projection. But this will come in good time, I'm sure.

Lou, Welcome to the Forum! My PTE-Adjustor spreadsheet model takes the nformation from the .pte text file and puts the timing information into tabular format so you can see the main parameters for the show at a glance. You can download Adjustor from Beechbrook. I am in the process of modifying Adjustor (for Excel 2000, only), so that you can visualize more parameters - I hope to have it completed in the next few weeks.

Guess he gave us so many new features in the last upgrade and has promised so many new ones in the next that we have let him off the hook for now!

Harry, Mine is simply called "Pinnacle Studio version 8 - Professional Movie Making System". On the front of the box there is a picture of a young lady holding up a cd beside her head.

Larry, Add the option "run application after last slide", in Project Options / Advanced, to the first and second shows, and have each one start the next show. Be sure to also select "close show after last slide" to each show.

Ron, It's just a different way of adjusting the resolution in an image editor (e.g. photoshop). But Roger is 100% correct in stating that in reality, monitor image sizes have nothing to do with print dpi. Period! It doesn't matter how many tutorials there are out there that state differently, the fact remains that to set the resolution of an image for showing on a monitor or digital projector, one has merely to specify the number of pixels in each of the two dimensions. Of course, all these measurements are indirectly related, in that for printing, you would want to have a large pixel size to start with, and then also set the print dimensions (here dpi comes into play), as there is a direct relationship between the dpi and the number of "i's" (or print size). However, it is confusing to speak of dpi when referring to screen resolution. It's almost like asking a used-car salesman how many miles per fence-post a prospective automobile gets on a gallon of petrol! Or in ordering a load of firewood, determining the size of the load by asking the salesman how many loads it would take to encircle the earth by setting each piece of wood end to end.

Ken, You forgot my Agfa.

Congratulations! Looking forward to a show - I'm sure it will be as excellent as the images on your web site!

Brian, I'm afraid I have to beg to differ with this description. The resolution of the 16-inch monitor, in order to compare with the camera, is only 1024 x 768 pixels, or less than 1 Megapixels, whereas my D70 is capable of 6.1 Megapixels - much greater than the monitor. The "16.7 million" you mentioned is pixel "depth", representing colour and intensity, and is related to the limit in the number of bits (24) which can be assigned to this task. Each of my camera's pixels can also be "resolved" into many different levels of colour and intensity - 48, in fact, or 16 bits per colour channel. Thus there are 1.7 x 2^21 different elements of information, compared to only 1.3 x 10^13 for the monitor. Hope my math is OK.

Hi, Noel, As I mentioned in my email, you have hit on a small peculiarity of PTE. The button on the last slide is programmed to go back to slide x when pressed. As long as you press the button before the expiry of the time for the last slide (in your case 3 sec.), everything works fine. However, if you wait until after the time has epxired (assuming that "when show ends keep last slide in show on screen" is also checked), clicking on the button will take you back to the designated slide, but the show will not progress any further. This could be either good or bad, depending on the action the slideshow creator desires. However, for newcomers to PTE, it can prove confusing, as in your case, and there are other ways to program the show to stay paused when one jumps back to an earlier slide. The usual procedure is to use a navigation bar, and press pause first before jumping out of sequence. Igor, could you please add this to your list of fixes for the next release?

Hi, Noelb, Welcome to the Forum. If you like you can email me the .pte file for your show and I will see if I can replicate the problem. My email address is alrobin@alrobinson.com. You can't send a file through the email system of this forum. Don't send any images or music - just the .pte file. I don't know for sure, but I suspect once you purchased the program you would be able to readily trouble-shoot the problem by trying out different options, other music, or perhaps learning more about the program and how to prepare images and music for use in a show. I can tell you from experience that the program works very well, with high image quality, smoothness of operation, and numerous options and features available for putting together a show.

Ken, I used Pinnacle Studio 8 to make a dvd on the weekend for the first time, and it went very well. I prefer the appearance of the .exe slideshow, but the only trouble I had in making the dvd was in not checking to see that the menu breaks lined up with where I wanted them in the show.

Hi, Ron, As usual, Ken said it very well. I use lower-res for a lot of my images as I know that I will never get around to making large prints from most of the images I shoot for digital slide shows, for instance. However, if there is any doubt about the way I will eventually use the image, or if I am shooting with large prints in mind, I will use the maximum resolution available. One reason for using a higher resolution is where severe cropping will be required - and one does not always know for sure about this until one is preparing the images for a show. Often I crop just to get two images to line up properly for that "third-image" effect, or just to have certain areas in each image in a pleasing juxtaposition with each other. If there is any doubt about the use you will be making of the photos, go to a higher resolution. And always try to edit "down" in photoshop or other image editor. i.e. in your editing start with a higher resolution than you ultimately need. Also, it can be problematic if you try to edit low-quality jpegs. And if you have to go back and re-edit, try to use the original image, whether it is a jpeg or a lossless image. One further point, it is confusing to refer to digital images in terms of "dpi". "Dpi" is reserved for printing - it really has no bearing on the quality of images as viewed on a monitor or with a digital projector. All that is required is the size of the image in pixels and the jpeg quality - if they are jpegs.

Hi, Jenni, Welcome to the PTE Forum! You probably referred to the flash file with it's full pathname, so that when you tried to open the slideshow on a different computer it could not find it in on the drive designated. The best way to run external programs is to remove the pathname, and just refer to the filename. But, of course, you have to have that external file in the same directory as your pte slideshow file. It is good practice to put all files required for the running of a show in the same folder so that you will have fewer problems running it from a CD or another computer. Hope this solves your problem.

The show performed well on my system, too (also a P4, 2.8GHz, 1Gb RAM). Don't think I have the GlobFx plug-in. Some of the evolving Moire patterns were interesting during the zooms (esp. for the broken window, and some of the images with sharp vertical lines). Didn't like the attempt at the start of the show to access the internet - my firewall blocked it. Seems to happen with every GlobFx show. I felt the dissolves were just as smooth as PTE but the images maybe not quite as sharp (hard to tell without a side-by-side comparison). Some of the pans were a little "wobbly", due probably to the line by line refreshing of the images. One feature I really like is the ability to control the position in the show with a movie-like slider at the bottom.

I agree with Alan - IMO he has hit the nail right on the head. I can't add much to it, except for the following observations about "professional" photographers: - First, I think we need to make a distinction between "professional" and "commercial" photographers. Many amateurs are "professional" without being "commercial". - In general, and without taking anything away from "commercial" or "professional" photographers, I have found that advanced amateurs are often more proficient, particularly from a purely artistic point of view, (if there is such a thing), than a lot of commercial photographers. After all, the difference between the two is that an "amateur" is making photos for the love of it, and the "commercial" photographer is in it for the money. Of course, this is over-generalization, and probably does not apply to most of the "commercial" photographers making slide-shows and contributing to this Forum. I have had commercial photographers tell me that we "amateurs" are so lucky, because we can concentrate on making the photographs that we love to do. However, this is detracting from the original topic of this thread. More on track, I agree with Ron's observation that one needs to be a good photographer first in making an AV. (we could spend a lot of time discussing the definition of "good photographer"). While I believe Alan is correct in that not all the images in an AV show need to be award-winners, I also believe that the majority of them should at least be able to stand on their own and be reasonably good photographs. "Poor" photos can detract from an otherwise excellent show. Of course there are exceptions to this rule in the choice of images to include in the show, if they are absolutely essential to the telling of the story. In answer to Ron's question, I first try to obtain the best image in-camera, but then I use Photoshop extensively in preparing it for a show, just as I often use PS for preparing a single image for presentation in a photo competition. I use PS not only for resizing, but also for colour correction, sharpening, brightness and contrast adjustment, cropping, elimination of distracting areas, addition of other elements, etc., etc. In my mind, an effective photo should be "made" not "taken". As with most things in photography, there are many exceptions to the above remarks - that's the beauty of it, and one reason why photography is truly an art form - there are no hard and fast rules.

Michel, Thanks for sharing your wonderful show about Scotland and also the thinking behind it and the discussion of the third image. The show is very effective. I am a big fan of yours - please keep the slideshows coming! I enjoy every one of them!

Hi, onbelaydave, Welcome to the Forum! I presume the same version of the show on your pc's hard drive runs OK before you upload and then download it? At what point in trying to run the download version do you receive the error? It could be that there is not enough memory to run it properly. Have you tried closing down all other programs running in the background and then trying to run the show? Would it be possible for you to send me the address of the web site so I can try it out on my pc?

mamad, Send it on if it's not too late - I sent you a private email. All the best at the wedding!

Hi, mamad, If you want you can send me the .pte file (without music or images) and I can run it through my Adjustor model to check for any timing discrepancies. If the show is not synchronized, then it is unlikely that there would be any, but it might be worth a look. My email address is alrobin@alrobinson.com.

Thanks for posting, Chuck Both the photos and the show are well done.

Hi, paul, What operating system are you using? It sounds like the problem is with a faulty OS on your pc that PTE is getting tangled up with. Not a problem with PTE, but you may have to fix something in your OS. The dll sounds like something left over from Windows 95, or are you still using Win 95? The name "shw95dll.dll" doesn't sound like a valid driver name. You could try temporarily changing its name to shw95dll.old to see what happens. It should be located in the Windows / System directory if you are using Win95. If not, do a search for it. You could try moving the PTE show to a different drive or different folder. Does it have a very long file name? Sorry I can't help any further with this without more info. Good luck!