fh1805

Ken, It's on the "To Do" list now. regards, Peter

Ken, We've already got this draft (http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8718) which discusses Templates from one particular angle. Are you suggesting we should have another FAQ covering the use of templates to save a copy of the sequence contents? Or is the best solution to have an FAQ on the subject of: How can I save my pte project file and all the image and music files so that I can recreate everything at a later date or on another computer? (I'd have to shorten that title because of the field length limit on the forum!) regards Peter P.S. First two FAQs were finalized yesterday. I'll be doing some more later today. We've now got a programme that is rolling!

Hi arendsoog, It sounds as if you are adopting the good practice of keeping everything for each sequence in a folder that is used only for that sequence. If so, and if you are using the latest version of PTE (v5.52), proceed as follows: - launch PTE and open the project that is giving the small size - do File---Create backup in zip and let PTE save the file - close down PTE - use Windows Explorer to find the zip file and move it to some other safe place (not either of the two existing folders) - still in Windows Explorer, delete the projectname folder and all its contents - now create a new, empty projectname folder - next, extract the contents of the zip file into this new folder - then delete the testfolder and all its contents You've now arrived at a point where the only copy of the image files and pte files (and any associated music) is the copy in the newly created projectname folder. Finally, launch PTE and open the project out of the new projectname folder. It should all work as before and give you the small size that you want. If anything goes wrong, the original folders and their contents should still be available in the Recycle Bin. regards, Peter

We are in danger of "knee-jerk" reacting to what is a very rare event on this forum. I have been a very active member of this forum since March 2007 and have read almost every post made since I joined the forum. This thread is the only one in all that time that has shown any signs of heading off in a potentially unpleasant direction. If we all let the dust settle I'm sure this thread will find its natural and proper home. Recently, Ken Cox "sponsored" my being elevated to a Moderator (primarily to make things easier for me while building the FAQ system). When I asked him what being a Moderator meant he said life would be easy, that the forum members "...are a pretty good bunch. They don't give any trouble..." Please don't go and tarnish your reputation! regards, Peter

Tom, You're quite right. The original purpose of David's posting has tended to get overlooked. David, Please accept my apologies as I was a party to the "hi-jack". Let me see if I can redress matters a little. Firstly, having been on an Antarctic expedition cruise myself, your sequence brought back lots of happy memories for me. It also brought home to me just how many photo opportunities I let go begging! Now to business. I concur with the comments about the soundtrack glitches so will not dwell on that here. I felt that the mood of the music was suitably complementary to the images. It certainly didn't jar with them. However, there may well be even better matches out there. But you work with what you have available at the time - this I know from personal experience! On first viewing, there were times in the sequence when I felt you changed image too quickly. When I watched it a second time I realised that you seemed to be trying to match the image change rate (and the overall effect thus created) to the "twinkling sound" present in the music at that point. I'm not sure that this technique worked from the artistic standpoint. Yes, it is a good idea to mix up the pace of the sequence to give it variety; but I feel that matching the mood of the music (rather than its pace) is more important in a sequence of this kind. You could, perhaps, achieve the overall feel that you seemed to be striving for by varying the transition durations rather than the overall slide durations. The music you chose almost demands an overall relaxed pace to the sequence. So keep the slides moving at that general relaxed pace and introduce the change of tempo by shortening the transitions in preference to shortening the slide durations. As alternative treatments, consider using the mosaic transition to create a visual "twinkling" effect or bringing in images as small "pictures-in-picture" to build up a collage timed to the twinkling sound of the music. I've tried to be constructive in this feedback. I hope you find it so. regards, Peter P.S. Tom, if you and David are in the same club, you've got competition!

Hi arendsoog, If you have created smaller image files but using the same name for these image files as they had originally, you need to place these smaller sized files into the folder that the originals are in (clearly you will first need to move those originals out to some other folder to preserve them). Then launch PTE and open the PTE project file that you were working on. It should pick up the smaller sized files. You can check that it has by setting your PTE window so that it shows the slides as thumbnails across the lower part of the window - called the Slide List area. Select one of the slide thumbnails by clicking on it in the Slide List and then look down at the very bottom of the PTE window, to the information bar. It will show you something like this: - EXE - zz MB - yyy KB - rrrr x ssss - D:/ppppp/ppppp/ppppp/iiiiiii.jpg The "zz MB" is the size the PTE predicts the EXE file will be when you create it. The "yyy KB" is the size of the PTE project file (the .pte file) which is simply a file of instructions to PTE The "rrrr x ssss" is the size of the selected image expressed as pixels wide by pixels high The long string si the path and filename of the selected image file (i.e. it tells you on which drive and which folder the image file is to be found and what the image file is called. You should, from the information displayed for your own project, be able to check that PTE is picking up your resized images from where you expect it to. regards, Peter P.S. Lin Evans is not Linda Evans - Lin is a "he".

Barry, You've got me wrong; I'm not worried! I've applied my philosophies (as described in my long post above) to my PCs for the last ten years. To-date I have not have a single virus infection nor have I had any serious problems when installing either hardware or software. Maybe I've been lucky; or maybe my philosophies have worked for me. By staying mainstream, keeping things as simple as I can, relying on the big vendors to do a "professional" job, etc. I've enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, the pleasure and convenience that my PC systems bring me. I don't like the seeming arrogance that some world-wide corporations exhibit in their dealings with their customer base but I learned a long time ago that you just have to live with it - and factor it in to all your planning and preparations for using their products and services. I'll continue to take automatic updates and I'll continue to use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office products - until they give me some really serious pain. If/when that happens then I'll re-evaluate my stance. This, to me, is the only sensible way to approach these things. regards, Peter

Barry, I was very careful to include in my post the phrase "...in a competitive environment...". There is no way, in my opinion, that Microsoft can be described as operating in a competitive environment. They have a virtual monopoly on the operating system for the Intel platform and all other Intel-compatible processors. Yes, I know there is Linux out there; but that doesn't have a big enough market share seriously to worry Microsoft. And in a monopoly situation, the monopoly holder can do pretty much as they please. And that is true of any monopoly! regards, Peter

It seems an appropriate time for me to add my "two-penn'orth" to this discussion. Firstly, I also endorse Lin's philosophy of "if it isn't broke, don't fix it!". I apply that philosophy to my own computer systems. But I also apply some additional ones that are based upon my 30 years experience of the IT industry. Buy your key software from one of the "big-league" players Any company that has built a solid reputation providing products and services in a competitive environment to major corporations cannot afford to get any bad publicity. Trust them and their offerings until you have reason to change your mind. Keep your protection (firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, etc.) up to date. If the software permits it (and most do these days) let it auto-update. And if you see the indication, usually in the bottom right corner, that it is downloading an update: DO NOT OPEN E-MAIL OR DOWNLOAD ANYTHING ELSE OR INSERT ANY REMOVEABLE MEDIA until the protection update is fully installed. Download software only from reputable sites And, preferably, do this only after a personal recommendation from someone else whom you trust. Virus-check everything you download before you open it Don't rely on the website's claims that everything is virus-free. The best protection in the world can have loopholes. Yours does; mine does! Accept this and plan your defences accordingly. Install only one software product per day, except when doing the initial "build" of your system. If you make too many changes all at once you will not know which one has introduced the problem. Therefore you will not know which one to uninstall. This can be generalized even further to: - The First Law of Change Management - make only one change at a time. - The Second Law of Change Management - Make sure you know how to reverse each change Apply these two laws, not just to software install, but to all significant changes to options and preferences as well. Watch out for hidden installs. Following some advice on this forum from Brian (Conflow), I downloaded and installed Advance Windows Care software. As it ran through the install process I noticed that it was wanting to download and install Yahoo Toolbar. I ticked the box to say "Oh no you don't!". If I hadn't done that I would have: - installed software that I didn't want - made two changes at the same time My own experience with the XP3 upgrade is this: The only XP system I have is my old laptop (A Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo). This was pensioned off from daily usage when PTEv5 came along and the poor little thing's graphics proved incapable of running the more complex animations. I now use it only in connection with my family history research. I do, however, keep its protection up to date by powering it up at least once per week and letting it connect via my in-house wireless network to pull down the latest anti-virus updates, etc. A couple of weeks ago it pulled down the XP3 upgrade, so I let it go ahead with it. If everything had gone totally pear-shaped I could, if necessary, have simply junked the machine. I would not have lost any data as it is all backed up onto both my desktop system and my USB hard-disk unit. It took the laptop about three hours to complete the download and the install process and I had to intervene via the keyboard/mouse on about four or five occasions. Most of these were at the very start: confirming that I really did want to do it, that I accepted the license terms and conditions, etc. The other occasions were all in order to enter my password as I logged in again after the auto-reboots that took place during the install activity. Since completing the upgrade I have not noticed any significant change to the way any software behaves nor any change to the appearance of the screen displays. In other words, I'm not aware when using the PC that it has had the upgrade installed. The whole process seemed totally trouble free. However, PCs are complex creatures. What works on one system will not necessarily work on another. With so many different hardware components available and so many different software products around, no manufacture of either hardware or software can give a cast-iron guarantee that you will not encounter a problem when you install something new on your PC. The only rule that applies is: Caveat emptor! (That's a Latin phrase that is usually translated as "Let the buyer beware!") regards, Peter

Stu, Sorry for the few days delay in replying I don't know how PTE found its way to the images. My standard folder structure for each AV Sequence is as follows: AV-Sequence-Title - Images - Music - Planning - Soundtrack - Voice-over The PTE file sits directly under AV-Sequence-Title, the image files sit under the Images folder. All my sequences are based upon a customized template that is just an empty project file, but with my preferences for Project Options set I hadn't heard about this file until you mentioned it, so have no idea whether it is being used or not regards, Peter

Ken, Firstly, can I pick up on a point you made when you wrote: Where are we going to draw the line on this? - control or no control - sound or no sound - 1024x768 or 1280x1024 or... all the other screen resolutions Multiply up all the possible options, and how many sequence variants are there going to be? Secondly, the decision about which options and settings to use has to be left to the show's creator - unless they're working to a specific commission. I firmly believe that each sequence should be created to meet the primary demand that is seen for it. If others don't like it done that way - that's just tough! "Permit control..." has got value for those of us who take our shows out to the local community. It gives me a facility that I actually had need of back in the days of slide-tape sequences. On two separate occasions I have been in the middle of a synchronized slide-tape show when the fire alarm has gone off in the hall being used - and we've had to evacuate the building. Thankfully, in those days, all I needed to do was hit the "pause" key on the tape player. When I switched to digital AV I couldn't see how I was going to have the same flexibility in such a situation. And then, through this forum, I found out what the "Permit control..." option allowed. regards, Peter

When you create a PTE file, you save a single copy of each image plus the instructions that tell PTE what to do with that image; in terms of its on-screen duration, its transition effect, etc. So an image that is going to stay on screen for, let's say, 4 seconds is going to take up 70-80KB for the image and a handful of bytes for the instructions. When you create an AVI file, every single frame of the video stream has to be pre-built. So, if your video stream system requires 50 frames per second then you will have 50 copies of that image for each of the four seconds that it appears on the screen; i.e. 200 copies of a 70-80KB file = 1400-1600KB of data! It isn't the pixel size that is the driving force behind the AVI file size, it's the number of copies of the image that have to be stored. If you want to achieve a significant reduction in the AVI size, keep the sequence length as short as you possibly can - for example: build a 15 second sequence rather than a 60 second sequence ! regards, Peter

He does! And it will work only if the "Permit control of show using keyboard" option in Project Options---Advanced has been ticked. (Admittedly, this is the default) regards, Peter

Hi Igor, I go along with Barry, I can see lots of new opportunities for dealing with the problem of mixed image sizes and orientations. This looks like a great transition effect that will prove to be very popular and very well used. regards, Peter

You might also find it instructive to visit the Tutorials and Articles section and have a look at the FAQs for PTE Usage. There are a couple of FAQs, admittedly still in draft form, that deal with adding music and sound to the sequence. regards, Peter

Xaver, Yes, I know that my addition is different to John's original post: but they are both about making the handling of text objects more "user friendly" and more "intuitive". Taken together they would be a major step forward in the way in which PTE handles text objects. If only one of them was implemented, that would be a significant step forward. I have some reservations about the Photoshop way of handling text frames. I sometimes struggle to get the right selection mode: am I selecting to manipulate or selecting to do text entry? Doing it the right way for what I want to do next seems to be difficult for me. My brain obviously isn't wired up the right way for this particular task in Photoshop. regards, Peter

John (jfa), The problem with "...not one of the standard Windows fonts..." is eliminated if you use "Rasterize text to PNG image" on the O&A Properties tab for the text object. But I'm sure you knew this! regards, Peter

Den, Thanks for that info. I'd never explored the icons up at the top right. I had my way that worked for me but yours seems simpler and easier. Just shows that it's never too late to learn - and you can teach an old dog new tricks! regards, Peter

I am making this post to ask for some help from some of you. I am trying to get to grips with some of the factors that do or might influence the quality of a played back sequence that has been prepared in PTE and burned to DVD using Video-Builder. I have prepared four very simple test sequences to begin my exploration. I would welcome feedback from any who are willing to take the time to assist in this learning experience. The attached file contains everything you will need, including a ReadMe file whose contents are: "Four PTE project files all built at 4:3 aspect ratio - DVD-Video-Test1 is built with images at 1024x768 and with the Project Options...Screen setting of Fullscreen - DVD-Video-Test2 is built with images at 1024x768 and with the Project Options...Screen settings of "Windowed mode", sized at 720x540 and no borders - DVD-Video-Test3 is built with images at 720x540 and with the Project Options...Screen settings of "Windowed mode", sized at 720x540 and no borders - DVD-Video-Test4 is built with images at 720x540 and with the Project Options...Screen setting of Fullscreen Four image files: - a Black Slide at 1024x768 pixels - a Black Slide at 720x540 pixels - a Background image at 1024x768 pixels - a Background image at 720x540 pixels If you are willing to help me improve my understanding in this area, in preparation for an FAQ or two, I would like you to do the following: - extract all the files in the zip into a folder - use PTE's Video-Builder component (even if, like me, all you have is the trial version of Video-Builder) to burn all four projects to a DVD - play that DVD back through your DVD-player and TV combination I am interested in your opinion as to whether any of the sequences looked particularly sharper than any of the others or particularly softer than any of the others.I would also welcome your thoughts on which zoom level for the text would seem to be the smallest level acceptable for easy reading (e.g. on an image that might stay on screen only for four or five seconds) Thanking you in anticipation," If you do decide to help out, please report back via a post to this thread or via an e-mail directly to me. Note that all four sequences were burned at 4:3 aspect ratio on the DVD. By all means watch them at all the different aspect ratios your DVD-TV combination supports. DVD_Video_Test.zip regards, Peter

KOR1, Replace your slides by selecting the slide at the position where you want to experiment; then go into the O&A window properties tab and browse to locate your "trial" slide and open it. This replaces the image file but retains all attributes: duration, transition type and duration, animation of all objects associated with the main image. regards, Peter

Xaver, Having seen and read some of John's earlier posts on this subject, his complaint is that, when we do Add Text in the O&A window, the cursor for input is not positioned in the text input area of the Properties tab. In order to change the actual text you have to switch to the Properties tab from whichever tab you were last using in the O&A window and then select the word "Text" which is pre-filled in the input field and then key the actual text that you want. John would like to see, as a minimum solution, the switch to the Properties tab and the selection of the word "Text" all done before we get control handed back to us. So that, if we start keying text "heads down", the text that we key goes into the input field. As a maximum solution he would like the word Text on the O&A display selected and for us to have the ability to key our own text directly onto the display area of the O&A window, replacing the pre-selected word "Text". I would take that maximum solution one step further and ask that PTE remember the last font and colour that we selected and use that for our next text field request. I find it a right pain having to change the font and the colour for each text item when I want them to be all the same font and colour. regards, Peter

Eleanor, It sounds to me as though what you want can be achieved by doing File---Save As and giving your project a new name. For example: you already have MyProj1, so you open this into PTE and do File---Save As---MyProj2. You now have two project files, currently identical. You can now work on them totally independently. Any changes you make in one will not be reflected in the other unless you make the same change there as well. regards, Peter

Gary, As I said before, you do come up with different problems to most other folks! Problems can occur when copying any object from one slide to another. Let's consider what the key factors are irrespective of the type of the object: Q1. Is the object an independent object or a child of some other object? Q2. Is the object's mode defined as "Original", "Fit to screen" or "Cover slide" in the Common tab of the O&A window Q3. Is the object's position defined as "In Percents" or "In pixels" in the Common tab of the O&A window These three factors work together to influence the final outcome. There are twelve possible combinations of these factors; the rest of this discussion covers the situation when the object's mode is "Fit to screen" and its position is "In percents" (the defaults in the as-shipped product). If the object is an independent one then the pan/zoom values are determined by the setting that you have in Project Options---Screen. If you have "Fullscreen" then the pan/zoom numbers are relative to the full screen view. If you have "Windowed mode" then the pan/zoom values are relative to the defined window size. If the object is a child of another object then the effect of the pan/zoom values is modified by the "inherited" pan/zoom values of the parent. To demonstrate this we'll use text as our object, but the principles are the same for all objects. Note that when I say "Select" an object, I want you to click on its name in the object list and not on the displayed object. As a brief aside, when you click on an object in the displayed area you don't always get the one that you thought you were going to. If you always select the object by clicking on its name you do get the one you wanted. Now let's go with the little tutorial: - Create a slide that has on it a coloured rectangle (Use the Add rectangle feature). - Add some text as a child object of this rectangle. - Zoom the rectangle down to 50% and note the effect on the text - Now add another slide with a different coloured rectangle leaving this rectangle at 100% (You can change the colour via the Properties tab) - Copy the text from the first slide (Select the text object and then Ctrl+C) - Select the rectangle of the second slide - Paste the text (Ctrl+V) - The text should show at the size it originally had on slide 1 before you zoomed the parent rectangle down to 50% - Now zoom this second rectangle down to 50% and your text goes down with it - Now delete the text item off this second slide - Click in the empty part of the Objects list area until nothing is selected - Paste the text - Note how it appears at its full, original size because it is now an independent object - Now zoom the rectangle to a new value (up or down, it doesn't matter which) - Note how the text does not change because it has no relationship with the rectangle. - Now zoom the text up or down - Note how you have independent control of zoom on the two objects (the same would be true of pan) - Go back to slide 1 and select the text object - Change the zoom value (up or down) - Note that you still have independent control of the zoom value for the object; but that it is conditioned by the zoom value of its parent as we saw earlier. I hope this helps you to understand a little more of what is going on. One final point: I would never copy and paste objects from landscape orientation images to portrait orientation images. Unless you have a really thorough understanding of just how all the factors interlink with one another, you are always likely to get results that are not quite what you expected. If you feel that you must do this (because you want to have the object pass unchanged across two or more slide) then make sure the object is an independent one on every slide. regards, Peter

Gary, Thanks for the feedback. I'll turn this into an FAQ when I have more time. regards, Peter

Eric, Version 5.52 implements the Timeline function as an alternative view within the main window of PTE, replacing the Slide List area of the main window; thus bringing everything except, at present, O&A into the one window.You can do everything in this new Timeline area that you used to do in the old Timeline window. You can move slides along the timeline You can zoom in/zoom out using Ctrl+F11/Ctrl+F12 You can drag transition duration bars You can drag additional images from the File Panel down into the Timeline and place them where you want - without displacing the existing slides from their time positions You can display the waveform (as either a single track or as left/right channel stereo tracks) Using the mini-player and the Timeline together you can get a pretty good feel for the accuracy of the timings of your animations (Pan/Zoom/Rotate) You just use the Slides/Timeline button as a toggle between the two. regards, Peter