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Out of all the programs I have downloaded and trialled Ulead Movie Factory 2 (at this stage) is giving by far the best quality, but also is one of the easiest programs to use. On the Television the shows are looking VERY nice!

Igor you are a genius! The AVI produced by PTE now loads on virtually anything I can throw at it! (Both streams) This is a great day for PTE and cements its future in the AV market. Congratulations to all the Wnsoft Team

Wow! Loaded up one of my old shows tried the create AVI button and in less than a minute I had an AVI file of the presentation that plays perfectly in Windows Media Player - Amazing! BUT When I try and load this AVI into several AVI to DVD converters they report they do not recognize the AVI format, they seem to be able to pick up the audio but not the video? This seems strange since the AVI will play in Windows Media Player. Any body else having similiar problem?

Haunting Images, matched with a haunting soundtrack and intelligent synchronization. Loved it!! Congratulations to the author even more so as it looks like the author also produced the soundtrack!!

James You have a deal on the fishing! You might be hard pressed to line up slide scans I imagine every slide is not mounted exactly the same as the last and you will always have a tiny amount of out of alignment. But you can of course fix this in photoshop or some such similar. If you haven't aligned images in photoshop before let me know and I'll post some instructions. Cheers Andrew

James Spectacular stuff! You will be the envy of many a photographer around the world (including me!) It amazes me how different Auroras are different colours, I have seen them Green and Red and Blue. This last one seems to be tending more on the green side. Down here in the Southern Hemisphere the event has not been as spectacular and on the night of the strongest Aurora we were under cloud :-( I would love to see your show again but with all the images taken into photoshop and aligned so that from frame to frame the mountains remain in exactley the same position and only the aurora changes. Combine this with long slow continual fades and you would have almost recreated how these auroras actually appear and move to the human eye. Nice work James!! I think I might have to move to Alaska! Regards Andrew

jeasco I have started playing with the trial version of Vegas Video 4 to make slide shows, you can do absolutely ANYTHING you want and make great DVD shows with excellent quality but you are limited to producing Video Output which isn't easy to distribute on the Internet. Also video programs aren't anywhere as easy to produce slide shows whencompard to PTE. I think its "horses for courses", if you want to make Video Slide shows use something like Vegas Video (I prefer it over programs like Proshow as its so much more flexible) or wait for PTE to be able to produce AVI output. If you are making PC slide shows then in my mind there is only one choice.... PTE

GlobeFX did offer this functionality and it is very sad they have not updated their program. I have emailed them several times but with no positive response. However I am now looking forward to PTE's ability to output to AVI I then plan to import that AVI into something like Vegas Video and "add in" the extra's. The big advantage of those Video programs like Vegas and Premier etc etc is that you have almost unlimited numbers of transitions going on at once it may take the PC a while to render it but once it does the Video Output will play on any DVD player or PC. The big draw back is that you have huge files and it is out of the Question for sharing on the internet. PTE's strength lies in its high quality transitions, synchronisation and speed of producing a show, when used with a Video Package you will be able to create ANYTHING!! and reasonably quickly. Roll on AVI output!!

Full screen with black background, no curtain. Cheers Andrew

My vote is for BLACK

Hello again Granot Thanks for the update and your efforts. I tried the new version NO task bar at the bottom of the screen!!! BUT just before the Panorama starts the screen blinks to a little white square (see link attached for screen dump) http://www.imagescapes.co.nz/Square.jpg Personally the colour is AWFUL but I know you can change this As for the fade, this doesn't have to happen while the panorama is moving it can happen on the still image then after the fade has occurred start the panorama moving. I tried making a gradient in Photoshop and running it but a Sideways fade doesn't look natural Timing in conjunction with the rest of the show is still a concern. Regards Andrew

Hi Granot Tried out the new version and plays fine as long as you have it going fast enough. I got good results using a speed of 50 or less. I was using a fairly long panorama dimensions were 6548 x 698. I still had the problem with the Windows XP task bar showing at bottom of screen - see screen dump:- http://www.imagescapes.co.nz/TestPTE.jpg I probably wouldn't use this utility in a show unless:- 1. TaskBar was gone 2. Help icon gone 3. Was some way to smoothly load panorama rather than a straight cut in or out i.e it needs to be able fade in and out. and at the same time if you could provide the above I would be more than happy to pay for it! Hope this feed back is helpful Regards Andrew

Hi Lumenlux Thanks for your comments on the show, yes it was a much more sedate affair for me but I thought it suited the whole Autumn theme I guess from the point of view of the leaves it is quite a sad time however I just love that time of year. The ending and starting shots were sequences taken of exactly the same scene from the exact same spot about 2-3 months apart. In both cases I have actually marked the ground (a quick heel kick into the ground - you would be surprised at how hard it is to find it again sometimes ) and I just go back to that exact mark and line my camera up on a fixed object and take the photo. Obviously you can't expect to get it lined up perfectly so I just import the images into Photoshop and align them using the "Difference" blend mode then aligning with the "Free Transform" function. I learnt that once you line up one detail in both images you can drag the centre circle target to that detail which then makes any rotation move around that point making it very easy to align the total image. I may have mentioned this before but I have about 5 sites I started taking shots at about 7months ago from the exact same position with the intention of being able to a show showing the scenes transform through a variety of seasons, weather and lighting conditions. We have had a very mild winter so I am missing all my snow on the trees shots so it might not be until next year now that I can complete it. I have one sequence taken of a mountain range outside my window and the changes I have captured so far have been incredible especially when they are faded from one to another in PTE, one minute a stunning erie sunset on brown rock the next a stark snowy covered mountain in brillant white, the next a moody cloudy shot with an airline flying through the middle! I have about 20-50 images from each site so far. Regards Andrew

Lumenlux Got a really nice feeling from your show really felt like I was climbing that peak with you!. Loved some of your Autumn shots reminded of my show "Southern Autumn" (Now on Beechbrook). In particular liked your shot of the pine tree through the autumn trees. Such a different landscape from what we have here. We have pine trees but they take over and before you know it all you have is pine trees despite efforts by various groups to halt their march. They are not native to New Zealand and have only been here for a couple of hundred years. Cheers Andrew

Hi Granot Nice utility, I managed to generate a reasonable scrolling panorama in the middle of PTE show..not bad!! However just a couple of small things:- 1. Do you have to the help icon on the panorama? 2. When it played my XP windows tool bar showed on the bottom of the screen. 3. Does PTE support batch files? That way it would be possible to run more than one Panorama during the shows, you just call up Panoram1.bat, Panoram2.bat etc as a batch file and each file ran Panorunner with Panorama1.jpg, Panorma2.jpg etc I think this is a great start but to include it seemlessly in PTE show it would require some refinements. Lastly what would make it very polished is if you could fade it in and out and the begining and end. Good work Granot!! Andrew

Hello Igor And welcome back!! Three wishes not already mentioned:- 1. When you are completing an involved slide show you spend a lot of time going backwards and forwards between the customizable sync window and the main window to change the order of slides etc. The customizable sync window is such an important part of PTE shouldn't it be on the main window always available? You could then quickly change the order of the slides without having to leave the sync window. 2. A "PUSH" transition that gradually pushes one slide off the screen while another one enters. This would let us show panoramas. All we would have to do is chop the panorama up and run the slides one after the other. 3. Can we have Thumbnails of the images and be able to drag and drop these to change the order? This would save having to do this part in an external application like Thumbsplus. Really the main screen should have a "slide table" showing thumbnails of the images and the "customizable sync" window and that's it! Everything else you call up ocassionally when you need it and could be done by menus or right clicking. Oh and could we have all this by the weekend? I have just finished my Southern Autumn slide show (will post as soon as it gets the OK from Nicky - away in UK at the moment), I really enjoyed programming it using PTE. The recent changes made to customizable sync made it so easy to achieve perfect timings and this is a real credit to Wnsoft. I have seen nothing else out there in the PC Slide show world that does it as well as PTE. Thanx Andrew

Hi Mannybr2003 Thanks for your post Was trying to do it all on the one PC save having to lay out the expense of two PC's Cheers Andrew

Hi Alrobin Already have that one covered, its just that the way things are going VHS is going to be like 8mm film before long so I'm always trying to keep one step ahead of the technology. Some video rental shops over here should probably start to call themselves DVD rental shops as VHS's begin to become the minority. Cheers Andrew

Hi Lumenlux Thanks for the warm welcome back and vote of confidence in the "UK EXPERIENCE" show. Everytime I see that show now I get the "tingles" especially as the music to it was what we played as were travelling that beautiful country. I'm currently working on "Southern Autumn" which I will probably finish soon if I stop getting side tracked by trying to find ways to put PTE on DVD!! Thanks for your coments re RayPar, I had a hunt back in the forums and found the posts relating to your shows being put onto SVCD. Sadly looks like it invloves buying hardware and I think for me this would be unwise given the speed technology is changing. I have come to the conclusion that this whole DVD thing is at present too hard and we are possibly spending too much time on it, probably better off putting all that time into making good PTE shows and wait for the technology to catch up so we can then effortlessly transfer to DVD. With DVD RAM recorders getting cheaper and cheaper this whole DVD issue will soon be a thing of the past IMHO. Failing that we might see output to AVI from PTE in the near future :-) (Igor are you listening?) I finally downloaded Screenwatch and installed it. Wish I hadn't, not only did it lock my screen colours on on a lower than 16 Bit level it defaulted my screen resolution to 800x600 (understandable for video I guess but it never asked me!) loaded an AOL link and basically behaved very badly. I couldn't get it to capture anything. So I have learnt my lesson and am back into the job of making presentations and not trying to discover things that probably don't exist!! Cheers Andrew

Hi Anton Thanks for your post, have already given Camstudio a go, and it suffers the same jerkines during fades as do the others. I'm currently downloading a 156 MB program called screen watch which captures in a different way. Rather than recording the whole screen every frame it only records the changes to the screen. From the promotional blurb it looks promising BUT the $650 price tag will be the killer for me! Cheers

Hi Granot Thanks for the post So far in my journey of discovery I have tried SNAG-IT, CAMTASIA, CAMSTUDIO, PROFESSIONAL SCREEN CAPTURE with varying degrees of success. So far none of the programs will produce a smooth dissolve, I always seem to get a jerky result however the quality of the AVI is excellent. So I am still searching the net. I am currently running a 2.4GHZ Dell with 500 megs RAM I have read some mention of video capture cards that allow you to send your video signal from your video card to the capture card and it captures in perfect quality video but from what I have seen these cards don't come cheap. So the search continues. Cassie is a bit of a whiz when it come to these things but I haven't seen any posts from him here for a while now? Cheers

Has any body found a screen capture program that can successfully capture a PTE show played in full screen together with soundtrack? This could be a simple alternative to convert PTE to DVD. Topic was discussed some time ago but I can't find the posts, it may have been on the old forum Cheers

I just checked out a program called "Slide Show To Go" When I first started playing with it I was quite impressed:- -Abilty to export to exe or avi (thereby able to convert to DVD or SVCD with third party program) -All images were shown in thumbnail form and the order of these could be manually sorted -A "PUSH" transition that lets you cut a panorama up and display this as a scrolling panorama I think all these things PTE needs to incorporate at some stage to keep up with the vast array of programs coming onto the market. The reason I didn't spend any further time with Slide Show to Go was that as I delved a bit more I found it was buggy, even though you could synchronize transitions to a soundtrack this was impossible to edit without reprogramming the whole show, and the export to AVI seemed awful when I tried it. When I use PTE it feels solid and very customizable. I like this and I hope that this feeling of stability will prevail with all future enhancements. From experience WNSOFT do put a lot of work in any enhancement to get it right and while this may slow overall development of the program it does make it very stable and reliable.

Hi Jim Yes I have Audacity use it for PTE soundtracks. What I like about Mixmeister is you can put together 10 hours of music complete with crossfades on a single CD and it only takes about 10 mins! This could take all day with Audacity and the likes. Cheers Andrew

Alan Thanks for your suggestion, I have had a play with the Magix programs but found another to meet my needs. The program is called mixmeister www.mixmeister.com and does exactly what I want. It will automatically import a playlist from the likes of Winamp or Media Player or Musicmatch then automatically generate an intelligent mix of all those songs complete with crossfades and if you want it can even even match the beat of the songs for really professional crossfades. You can save the mix as one big file then burn to CD as MP3 or CD Audio using your standard CD burning program. Very happy!!