ADB

Hi Lumenlux As always I really enjoyed your presentation, throughout the users of PTe everybody has their own special skill in producing presentations and yours is definitely the ability to tell a story. When ever I see one of your presentations I always feel like I am right there with you all the way! My only comment for improvement would be perhaps cutting back on the showing of similar images of the same thing, the waterfall seqence springs to mind though having said that it was a very unusual waterfall and I didn't worry me too much getting so much exposure to it.

Michel Loved your show, you have an amzing way of being able to turn PTE into a Music Video maker! Its nice to see somebody stretching PTE to its limits, I can only imagine how much work needs to go into making something like this.

I haven't dropped by Beechbrook for a while so am slowly catching up on the lastest offerings. I have just finished watching "A week alone" and was very impressed with this presentation * Beautiful photography * Excellent choice of music which matches the overall "alone" theme * Nice use of panoramas (though I bet you can't wait for the PAN & ZOOM features of upcoming PTE releases!) * Clearly there was forethought as to how the images would work in the final presentation (as you were taking them) this makes for some very strong visual effects in the presentation. * Amazing subject matter almost makes me want to plan a separate holiday just to Utah. Thanks for sharing this with us if you happen to view this post I would be curious to know what software you are using for your panoramas. Cheers Andrew

I have put all my presentations on hold pending the next release of PTE with Pan & Zoom, this is probably a good thing as I work through the 3000 images I took on my recent trip to UK and Italy! But I do my find myself everyday having a peak on the PTE site to check for that much awaited announcement. Knowing Igor and the team they will wanting to get it right and I appreciate them taking the extra time to do this. Now if I can only learn to be patient......

Same here Lin, would love to see it!

Lumenlux I start my UK trip today so won't be able to test this issue. But I thinks its a case of use the system that best suits. Personally I never worry about total show times etc as I always sync to a soundtrack so my show is always as long as the soundtrack and transitions occur when I want them to. This keeps it simple and stable. I can see how you can set up your show to give timings as you would expect and also as we have been shown how to set it up so you would get timings you wouldn't expect, but surely you just use the methodology that gives you the result you want? Jean-Claudes findings I think are correct but I can also see why PTE does that and as I stated above I would just use the appropriate method (e.g don't open timeline if you are NOT custom synching) I may have missed the point here but it seems logical to me what PTE is doing?

Inna The tutorials are very helpful and just as Al pointed out even experienced users of PTE can find useful tips amongst the tutorials. The other thing the tutorials show is what an excellent training tool PTE is as well. Thanks for the great work.

Ron If you see a guy pointing a camera at the ground with funny looking microphones sticking out of his ears ..... that's me! (For those that have looked at this post and wondered what the "record the squelch of the chewing gum is about" about three years ago I was in London and happened to look down one day and was amazed at how much chewing gum was stuck on the footpath and road, I made comment on this forum and I don't think Ron believed me. So from memory Ron went out and checked it out for himself and confirmed the phenomenon!) Ron I think this time I will have to make a short slide show of the chewing gum strewn pavements.

A while back on the forum I posted a topic to find out about making Ambient Sound Recordings to add "atmosphere" to PTE shows. Thanks for all the recommendations and links. Since then I have been doing a lot of research and have decided on the following:- MICROPHONES For the microphone to record the ambient sounds I purhcased a pear of tiny Binaural Microphones from www.soundprofessionals.com, these cost me around $29 US. The principal is that you place each microphone on either side of your head near your ears. You can attach them to a hat or pair of singlasses or you can even buy a headset that looks like a pair of head phones instead you have two microphones at each ear. When you then record using this setup you achieve a sound very similiar to if you were actually there. Sounds to the left of you are recorded louder on the left microphone because your head reduces/blocks the sound travelling to your right microphone. When you play back the recording you have a stereo recording fairfly faithful to what "each" ear heard. RECORDER I'm just really experimenting at this stage so I didn't want to spend a lot of money. I decided on a second hand Sony MiniDisc Recorder/Player MZ-R70 which I purchased on an E-Bay type site for around $40 US. You have to make sure you have a Mic In port on the Recorder/Player. One MiniDisc will record around 80 minutes audio and the whole setup weighs less than 200 grams. The few tests I have done have produced a VERY rich and natural sound and I am very pleased with the final result. To get the audio into my PC I will have to transfer using the Line Out from my MiniDisc to the Line In on my sound card in other words Digital to Analogue however I believe the new Sony MiniDisc's let you convert to Wav files retaining the full digital format. On Friday I'm off to UK and Italy for 6 weeks, so very exited about capturing images, panoramas and the sound that accompanies them. Even more excited about possibly coming back from holiday to find a Pan & Zoom beta going through the motions and making a PTE show using my newly captured material!

Igor the Beta works fine there is just one tiny little thing (was present in previous beta as well) In customizable synch window when you are editing a show and say you delete a point then use the add a new transition button, PTE adds the point but doesn't update the preview window for that new point until you actually click on the point. Its just a small thing but I have found myself getting a little mixed up with not having the preview instantly updated when you add the new transition point. On the other hand when you are playing music and adding transition points the preview updates instantly.

Igor You certainly deserve a vacation after all the hard work you have done on the current beta You have been amazing as we tear PTE apart and you put it back together again Thank you so much for all your efforts. Knowing what we are like I can also see why you want to take a vacation before we all tackle PAN & ZOOM

Igor The time line works great now..thanks! We now have all the commands we need at our finger tips:- * Insert New Transition & Slide * Insert New Transition * Delete Transition Only * Delete Transition & Slide I think what needs to happen now is the lay out of these commands needs to be simplified what about this.... NEW TRANSITION button This should be a bigger button than the others and in a different colour. It is the main button you use when adding transitions to a brand new show. Designed to be used when the music is playing and recording transitions on the fly. DELETE... button This button expands into two choices 1. Delete Transition only 2. Delete Transition and Slide INSERT... button This button expands into two choices 1. Insert Transition only (essentially the same as the NEW TRANSITION button) 2. Insert Transition and Slide This way users would head for the "Delete.." and "Insert.." buttons when editing a show and use the NEW TRANSITION button when first recording the transitions. I think this would make the interface much more intuitive and doesn't involve any "behind the scenes program changes" only interface changes. What do you think?

Alrobin, JRR, CorVdk I agree with your findings. The "New Transition" button is really a "New Transition and Slide" button when used in an edit, only you don't get to choose the slide it just takes the last from the list, which I think is wrong. The work around is:- *After you have deleted your point, use the "Insert Slide.." button and insert any slide *Then go to the slide list and delete the inserted slide, the transitions and slides will then match up as before. It comes back to the slides and transitions being able to be fully independant of each other if desired. In playing around with this problem I have noticed another possible bug and that is PTE will not let you add more transitions than there are slides (I'm not sure if you could in the past). This isn't a huge problem as you just make sure you have enough slides in your slide list to cover all your transitions however, it would be "nice" to be able to set you soundtrack playing close your eyes and add blank transition points so you can then go in and add slides later on to your slide list. Almost like you can concentrate on the music to create your transition points then drop the visuals in later.

AAAAHHHHHHH!! In all the years I have been using PTE I have never noticed that SOUND line on the main screen! The above posts make a lot more sense to me now, I think a lot of users may have been caught out with that one.

Excited doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about pan and zoom! However we thought getting the timeline right was hard work I believe pan and zoom will provide even greater challenges for Igor and his team. With Pan & Zoom we are moving in to the arena of demanding a lot from our graphics cards and systems and I think it's inevitable that slower systems may have to miss out, this will be a shame as PTE has been able to pretty much run on any configuration in the past, however with systems in general dropping in price I don't think this limatation should effect too many users. There is another very popular slideshow program on the market (it starts with P...) it also offers PAN & ZOOM on exe shows but the movement is jerky and inconsistant. I hope in this regards Wnsoft carries on in its traditional "quality first" attitude. I would much rather have limited pan & zoom abilities that work really smoothly rather than very advanced features that look unprofessional when run in a show. I dare say this forum will get a lot of views over the coming months

I don't think PTE currently allows both the background soundtrack and sound attached to various slides to be played simultaneously (can anybody confirm this?) but it would be a great future enhancement of PTE, as long it doesn't upset the synching to the background soundtrack. What also would be great if BOTH waveforms (Background and added to slide) could show in the customizable sync window (admittedly would only show once transition point added).

Thank you all for the info, I am quite amazed at how something seemingly so simple is actually fairly involved. Off now to wade through all the info, I'll report back on my final findings.

I'm wondering if any Forum members could offer me some advice. I am looking to record outside ambient sounds and atmospheres to add my PTE shows and 360 degree Panoramas. Has any body had any experience in this area? If so I would love to hear your recommendations as to what type of Microphone and Recording Device I would need. I'm not looking at spending a huge amount of money but do want reasonable quality. I also want to keep the equipment compact. Any advice greatly appreciated

IGOR!!!! What more could we want? The new enhancements are perfect! This makes the timeline very "user friendly" to edit a show. The popup menu on the Timeline Transition points is awesome! Congratulations to you and your team as you have really "hit the nail on the head" with these enhancements. Thanks again for all you efforts.

Igor/Ron I think your proposed enhancements are just what we have been asking for (especially no.3!) What these changes will do is make the timeline "intuitive" which will greatly improve editing changes but at the same time provide flexibility for all users and their different styles (hopefully!). Just can't wait to try out the next beta now!! Thanks again for all your efforts Igor

I agree with Ron, the whole purpose of this thread is to discuss the fundamental change to the operation of the timeline. The change primarily being that Slides are now linked to transitions and whether we can work around this or not. I am wondering if we start a thread running a simple poll to see if users prefer the "old" or "new" style of timeline? To be honest I have thought of the saying "If its not broken why fix it?" many times in the course of the many discussions that have been presented about the new timeline behaviour.

Al you are quite right and I can see why it is happening. When you add any images to the Slide Window PTE will automatically add a transition point at the end of the timeline using the default time set in the main Project Options Window. I didn't realize this. I was looking at the process from a different angle. This is a new feature and is why when you first go into the timeline PTE has already laid out transition points for you which it never used to do. All these problems are being caused by the fundamental change that if there is a slide added to the slide list there must also be a transition point added which I too don't like, I do yearn for the old system. As has been said many times in the discussion about this beta, Transition points are all important, in Customizable Synchronisation they should only be added when the user wants to add them and not by default by PTE. We are really asking that the linking function between slides and transitions be removed and that both slides and transitions can be managed independantly.

I have retested my results from this morning and confirm what I found plus an additonal point as shown in bold below:- Try this 1. Start with a new presentation 2. Add 5 slides 3. Add some Music 4. In the timeline mode clear all the transition points and hit the ADD transition button to add the first slide right at the start (position 0) 5. In timeline press play and add three more transitions say at 10 sec intervals Now you have 5 slides in the slide view window and 4 transitions on your timeline 6. Because you have more slides than transitions when you now add another transition ANYWHERE on the timeline PTE inserts the transition point AND takes the first slide that DOESN'T already have an assigned transition point (i.e. the 5th slide) and inserts it at that point. This is great as it means if you need to add a single slide to an already programmed show you just throw it in at the end of the slide list go to the point you want to insert it and hit ADD TRANSITION I didn't realise this in my earlier post. Now you have 5 slides and 5 transitions if you try to add another transition point amongst your existing points PTE has no slide to use so it will grab the closest slide to the right and shift its transition point and slide to the new position which generally will be BAD as it leaves a gap - so hence the rule always have more slides than transitions when you are editing.

Maureen and Al I did those tests as I was running out the door this morning I'll try to recreate them tonight and report EXACTLY what I was doing. I think it may have something to do with trying to add transitions when there is no music space left at the end maybe??

Igor I hame more happy with the Beta now if I follow these simple rules:- 1. Allways ensure you have more slides than intended transtion points if you are going to edit a show. 2. To add a transition to an already programmed show add a slide to the slide list then hit Add New Transition in Timeline and existing transitions will be preserved. 3. Use the appropriate button DELETE POINT to delete a transition only and DELETE SLIDE to delete a transition and slide Using the above rules I am actually VERY happy with the new beta but new users will need to understand this functionality. Thanks Igor