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Shep, Welcome to the forum. Are you saying that when you view the sequence in the mini-player area of the main window it runs at a different (slower) speed compared to the speed that you see when you click on the Preview button and watch it as a full-screen sequence? The speed of the advance from slide to slide and the speed of any animation effect (pan/zoom/rotate) should be the same in both cases. regards, Peter

Gary, To make a Template of an empty show that includes all your preferred settings is very easy. You just proceed as follows: - Launch PTE and then do File---New and give the project a name such as "My Template" - Next, work through the Project Options tabs making the changes to give the settings that you usually use - Now, instead of saving the project you do: File---Templates---Create Template from this Show and give the template a name when it prompts you to do so To make this template your default for all new projects, proceed as follows: - In PTE, do File---Templates---Manage templates - You get a pop-up window showing you the available template files - Click on the big button across the bottom of this pop-up - Select the template you have just created from the drop-down list - Tick the box just above the button to confirm that this is your "Default template for new projects" - Click on OK to accept these changes and close the pop-up window - Exit PTE (there's no need to save the project as a project file) Now, when you next launch PTE and open a new project, you should see that the project name being offered to you as the name for the new project is actually the name of the template that you've just created. You just overkey this as you have been doing all along - and away you go with your preferred settings already done for you. You can create as many different templates as you want and can use "Manage templates" at any time to change the one that you want as the default for your new projects. Changing your default for new projects has no effect whatsoever on any existing project files. Let me know how you get on with this. If you're able to follow these instructions with no problems, I'll turn them into an FAQ. regards, Peter

Stu, I've taken a look at two more sequences. In both cases Reporter stated: All Missing. In both cases, opening the .pte file in Notepad showed that the pathnames were all the old, out of date ones. In both cases, opening the project in PTE showed that PTE was using the latest path locations. When I saved one of them (without making any changes at all), PTE must have updated the path details because now, when I take this project file into Reporter it says "All Found". regards, Peter

Lin, Thanks for the links. A couple of very useful looking sites. regards, Peter

Hi P-F, You are getting a razor-sharp edge! Make sure that you have ticked "Permit control of show using keyboard" on the Project Options---Advanced tab, then Preview your sequence. When one of your page wipes is half-way across the screen, press the spacebar. The show will pause and you will see the edge of your wipe clearly. When everything runs at normal speed, the slight blurring that you see at the edge of the wipe is an optical illusion. regards, Peter

I need to get a life if all I can find to do is to trawl through ancient threads on the PTE forum! However, I came across this one (and the "Creative Juices" thread and another that Ron West had started way back) and thought I would see if there's still any interest in understanding the thought processes behind an AV sequence. I recently posted a sequence called "Kaleidoscope". This sequence was inspired by the music and doesn't have a single photograph in it! As I sat listening to the music - not just once but over and over again for an entire evening - images started to form in my mind. I am keeping those mental images because one day, at the right location in the right lighting I'll get them and build a different sequence to that music. But the general feel of the music slowly seeped into my mind. To me it was depicting a stylized form of Scottish country dancing, with the groups of dancers forming circles, whirling round, advancing to the centre and retreating again, all that sort of thing! And that "feel" is what I tried to capture with "Kaleidoscope". How well I succeeded I don't know. You can find the sequence in the Sequences section of this forum. Oh, as an aside, whilst I was building "Kaleidoscope" I got another piece of music fixed in my mind that I thought offered distinct possibilities for a similar but different sequence: "Windmills of my mind" - but in an instrumental arrangement. Anyone know where I can get a copy? regards, Peter

Stu, I've been playing around with your program some more on smaller and simpler sequences of mine and I think I now understand what "Image-Audio-Files: Missing" really means. But I've also found something which confuses me still further - not a bug in your program or anything like that! Firstly, I believe I was trying to read too much into the phrase "Image-Audio-Files". Your use of this phrase means, "Image and/or Audio Files". So when you append the word "Missing" you mean that one or more of the Image files or one or more of the Audio files could not be found where the drive/path information said it should be. Now that I've grasped this meaning I'm happy with the three possible outcomes for it. The new confusion has come about as a result of running the program against a sequence for which it reported "All Missing". This sequence Previews perfectly, so I know that nothing is missing. When I studied the text report file for this project, I spotted that all the path details were to an old pathname (I had, at some point in the past, done some restructuring of my folders and had renamed the folder at the level above the one in which the PTE project file resided). In Reporter's text file, not only were all the image file paths wrong, so was the music file path and the PTE project file path. I decided to proceed with caution. I thought: let's change the music file path by opening the PTE project, Remove-ing the music file and then adding it back in. This, I thought, should change the path reference for the music file and Reporter should now say "Missing" instead of "All Missing" because the music file will now be OK but all the rest will still be bad. How wrong could I be! When I ran Reporter against the newly saved PTE project file it now came back and said "All Found". Correcting just the one entry (for the music file) has somehow propagated that change to all the other entries. I know this is not a fault in your program, but can you throw any light on what PTE is doing "under the covers" as it were. regards, Peter

Stu, I think you have missed the point I was trying to make. All my sequences have just one soundtrack file that is added via Project Options...Music tab. All the files (of any kind) for any one sequence are stored together in a folder that is unique for that sequence. That sequence folder is just an "umbrella" folder; beneath it are folders for Images, Music, Voice-Over, Soundtrack and Planning. It is in these sub-folders that the actual files are to be found. The point I was trying to make in my original post and am now labouring to make clearer to you is this: - I believe, because of the way that I manage my files for each of my sequences, that it is impossible for any of my sequences to have any of their files missing. Therefore, when your program reported "Image-Audio-Files: Missing", I was left somewhat baffled as to what it was trying to tell me. My conclusion on seeing that text was that it was trying to tell me that I had not assigned a sound file to any of the individual slides. If that is what it was trying to tell me then I feel that the use of the word Missing in this context is misleading to the user. If, on the other hand, it genuinely felt that it could not find a sound file in the place where I had said it should be, then that is perhaps a more serious concern for us both. Because we would then have the situation where either I genuinely have got a missing file (a problem for me) or your program has made an error during its analysis (a problem for you and all other users of this wonderful tool). I need to get a totally clear understanding of just what the program is trying to tell me. And if there is any possibility of an error in your program, I want to help you to understand that error condition so that you can set about fixing it, if you wish to. regards, Peter

Gary, Your idea makes perfect sense. I was merely trying to explain what the current rationale might be. Do you find that you tend to stick to pretty much the same Project Options settings in all of your shows, with only an occasional change away from your personal preferences? Are you aware that you can set these personal preferences into an empty show and then save that as a Template and make it the default Template for all your shows? regards, Peter P.S. Re your P.S. - Sorry, no idea! I've never used the Comments fields in any of my sequences. I would need to do some experimentation - and this weekend I have friends coming to visit so my time available for PTE problems is very limited. If it is still an open issue on Monday, I'll take a look into it.

Gary, I like your problems. They're different to other peoples! If you look at the way the Project Options pop-up window is laid out, the three buttons OK, Cancel and Set Defaults are on a bar across the bottom of the window. I think from that we can infer that they apply to the Project Options in their entirety. Think of it from a different angle: if you make changes to some project options on two of the tabs and then change your mind, how many times do you need to click on Cancel? Just the once. If you make some changes on a couple of the tabs and want to accept them, how many times do you click on the OK button? Just the once. So, what you experienced with the Set Defaults is in keeping with the logic of the other two buttons, isn't it? regards, Peter

Well, I must say I am impressed by the sheer dogged determination of this program! It reached the 300K lines mark at 13:32GMT, the 400K mark at 14:44GMT and the end point (529432 lines) at 16:47GMT. A total run time of just under 5 hours - but on something of an exponential curve for elapsed time. At the end it then threw out a pop-up to the effect that "The list file is too big" There were 13175 images counted by the program and therefore your field width (which is only four digits wide) was overrun and the number spilled over onto the window border - but it kept counting them! I don't know whether you want to modify your code to be able to handle pte files of this size and complexity but if you do, please contact me off-forum by e-mail. Drawing upon my ex-Computer Programmer skills I think I know the sort of thing that is going on inside your code to cause the exponential run time. But, in all fairness, I didn't expect the program to complete. I expected a crash of some kind. All credit to you, Stu, for a program that is as resilient as hell! regards, Peter

Further to my previous post... I'm giving your program the ultimate test - the project file for "Kaleidoscope"! This sequence runs for only 4 minutes and 9 seconds, uses just seven unique images but has over half a million lines of code in the pte file - 529432 to be precise! I started the analysis going at 11:56GMT. The first 25K lines were analysed by 11:58GMT. The next 75K lines took it up to 12:09GMT. The next 100K lines took it up to 12:41GMT. The halfway point (at 265K lines) was reached at 13:12GMT. I am not predicting when, or even if, it will finish successfully - but I'll give it every chance to do so and report back. regards, Peter

Stu, This is a wonderful tool! In the text files that accompany the program you ask for feedback about it so here goes: I threw it in at the deep end and gave it a project with 100762 data lines in the project file. For info: the scan took about 12-14 minutes on an Intel Core2 Duo 2.33GHz PC with 2GB of RAM running under Vista Home Premium SP1 with nothing else happening. The scan speed was not uniform throughout. It was noticeable that the further it got into the scan the slower the scan process became. Whilst it was scanning I couldn't minimize the window. On long scans like this one it would be nice to be able to do so. After the scan had finished but before the Scan Complete pop-up window had appeared, there was a noticeable "twitch" of the main window. It moved a few pixels to the right and a few pixels down. As the Scan Complete pop-up appeared, the main window twitched back to its previous position (i.e. to the left and up). Some prompts on each of your icons when the mouse is hovered over them would be nice. You know what they each do, but a new user doesn't! You and I both know from the PTE Forum that users don't read the instructions or help files - not even when they can't make it work! And now to two questions that are specific to the file it analysed: In the Scan Complete pop-up it reported "Image-Audio-Files: Missing". None of my projects use sound files associated with a single slide. Is it actually trying to tell me that there are no sound files associated with individual slides? If so, wouldn't "Image-Audio-Files: Not used" be a better phrase. To me, missing means I have coded references to some but the files are not where they are supposed to be. Finally, the summary reports that there are: File Positions = 2211 (2209 Found, 2 Missing). How do I set about tracking down what these two missing things might be? With v4 of PTE I used to use a combination of Sy(P) output and Excel spreadsheet to document what was in a sequence. This tool of yours is going to make the documentation process so much easier. It's brilliant! Many thanks for all your efforts in coding and testing it - and providing it FREE! regards, Peter

Andrew, The fact that your sequence runs OK on both a desktop and on a laptop and under XP Pro and Vista for at least a couple of times suggests to me that the problem lies outside of the PTE sequence itself - but possibly still inside the PTE code. By which I mean; I don't know of any settings that you could have made which would work OK for a couple of times - and then go screwy! It has a feel to me of some aspect of memory being used by the program - but not being properly reset at the start of each run; so that, over time, the area of memory becomes corrupted and from that point on things go haywire. I'm inferring from your posts above that the problem occurs on the laptop which is running XP Pro. I run my systems under Vista so cannot even offer to help isolate the problem as I am again inferring that you don't have this problem on your Vista-powered desktop system. Or am I wrong? regards, Peter

Andrew, Totally off-topic: I wonder if we're related? regards, Peter

Andrew, When you say "..after running the exe several times..." do you mean after launching it several times or that you had it running as a continuous loop and the loop had wrapped around several times? regards, Peter

Yachtsman1, A totally new main section on the Forum's home page would be an ideal solution. An alternative would be to change the "Tutorials and Articles" heading to be "Tutorials, Articles and FAQs". This decision is out of my hands. It is one for Igor to make. As a temporary solution, Ken Cox has set up a pinned item under "Tutorials and Articles" called PTEFAQs and I've added a post to this in which I am listing all the drafts as I get them prepared and posted individually. regards, Peter

Yachtsman1, I assume you are referring to the PTEFAQs. The question is on the title bar of the post when it gets displayed. The intention is to provide a set of model answers to the sort of questions that crop up time and time again. It was not the intention to build a comprehensive index linking all the relevant previous posts on each subject. Now, when a new member asks one of the regular questions, we can point them at the FAQs, answer that question and hopefully forestall their next question! regards, Peter

Alex, When you convert your PTE sequence into a DVD video sequence you will always lose the image quality. The DVD systems use a resolution of something like 700x500 pixels compared to PTE's ability to use all the pixels you give it. In addition, when running as an exe on your computer, PTE uses the graphics processor to render the images, thus retaining every bit of detail and sharpness. DVD-Video software doesn't do this. It's rendering techniques are primitive in comparison. To get the same picture quality on the TV that you see on your PC monitor you need to hook up the TV to the PC as though it were an auxilliary monitor. regards, Peter

Lin, Thanks for the support on that one. My use of the word "need" was, indeed, very carefully chosen in this instance. Barry, I agree that sequences don't have to be scaled down to the 1024x768 constraint of the digital projector. But, if that is the intended final destination, there's no need to make them bigger - unless there is an additional reason such as your desire to build them to 1280x1024 to fit nicely on your monitor. In your particular example, your build size and playback technique work well for what you do - just as my build size and playback technique work well for what I do. regards, Peter

Tony, You could also try setting the Project Options...Screen to give you "Windowed mode", setting your window size via the two input fields and (optionally) turning off the window border. If you set the window to 1024x768 the slides would fill the screen on the laptop and appear in the middle of the 1920x1200 monitor. They will also playback correctly throughan XGA digital projector (1024x768). regards, Peter

Hi Geo, A further point that Lin failed to mention (surprisingly for him) is that your image files don't have to be at "as taken" resolution. You should resize your images to suit the final viewing medium. For example: If you are preparing your sequences with the intent that they will be projected via a digital projector then their size need be no larger than the native resolution of the projector. ( My sequences are all resized to 1024x768 because that is the native resolution of my projector). If you are building them simply to view them on your computer monitor then their size need be no larger (in pixels x pixels) than the natve resolution of your monitor. The only exception to this advice is where you are using the image in a "deep zoom" or long pan. In these two situations you should aim to always have "original" pixels on the display. So, if your original "as taken" images are 3000x2000 pixels and you are building to 1024x768, you could zoom in on one of these in excess of 200% and still have only "original pixels" being displayed. What you always should strive for is to avoid any "interpolation" of pixels - the addition of pixels by software to make up a shortfall. regards, Peter

Xaver, Is this the sort of thing you have in mind? MaskedAnimation_Aug31_2008_20_16_14.zip regards, Peter

Hi Debi, I am assuming you mean "...whilst I am still building the sequence" The answer is yes but the method depends on the technique you are using to add the music. If you are adding the music to specific slides then you need to proceed as follows: - ensure that you have "Synchronize music and slides" ticked in Project Options...Main tab - select the relevant slide in the Slide List, then add the music to that slide using the little "Add sound" icon up at the top right of the upper tool bar - finally you need to go into Project Options...Music tab - even if you are not adding any music via this route, and tick "Dont interrupt sound comment when next slide appears". If you are adding all your music via Project Options...main tab then simply proceed as follows: - ensure that you have "Synchronize music and slides" ticked in Project Options...Main tab Now that you are all set up, you can preview the sequence from any selected slide by simply clicking on the little button that sits between Preview and Video buttons on the lower tool bar. On the DVD issues, I'm afraid you are several steps ahead of me down the learning curve. I burned my second DVD this morning and have noted this problem of different aspect ratios. I'll need to do some experimenting myself (and keep an eye open for the answers you get to your other two questions). regards, Peter

And let's not forget that both Lin Evans and Barry Beckham use voice-over on their tutorials. So there are plenty of readily available examples of English language voice-overs. regards, Peter