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Hi David, Thanks for the new link. I've downloaded it and tried it in PTE and am getting some "interesting" initial results. I need a little time to dig a bit deeper. Will come back to you later today.

Very impressive, Lin! But I couldn't see any animation in the reflection.

And yet I do see "jumps" on my nVidia GeForce 8400 (which runs every other show perfectly, including some of Lin's very demanding animations). The "jumps" that I see are only little "discontinuities" in the smoothness of the zoom but they are characteristic of having the zoom coded across multiple keyframes with slightly different rates of zoom between each pair of points. Let's get this aspect laid to rest before we point David towards an expensive upgrade/replacement program. Let's see the actual .pte file so that the coding of the zooms can be checked out.

Hi David, I've downloaded your sequence and when I run the exe file I, too, see some "jumps" in the animated images. From what I'm seeing, I'm fairly certain that you have some unwanted keyframes in the animated slides. However, to be sure of this I need to see your actual pte file. So, could you please do the following: Launch PTE File...Open...short_rosemoor.pte Do a File...Create backup in Zip... Upload that zip file to MediaFire Let us have the link to the MediaFire file I'll then be able to download the zip file, exxtract the pte file and the image files and load your project file into PTE just as if it was you doing it. Then I'll be able to check for unwanted settings and unwanted keyframes. Take heart! I'm sure we are nearly at the major breakthrough stage.

Further to my last post... I used Google to search for VLC Media Player and found that I could download it from cnet via this link: http://www.download.com/VLC-Media-Player/3...4-10267151.html I've used cnet before and they are genuinely free. I have now successfully downloaded and installed VLC and am about to enjoy watching your tutorial.

Lin, When following the download link for VLC I get asked to authorise a payment of 18GBP for one year's subscription or over 40GBP for three year's subscription to a download service that I'll probably never use again. In my book that means VLC is not free. Free means there are no charges - period! I'll have to forego the pleasures of learning from your AVI file tutorials.

Lin, I've downloaded Sound1 tutorial. When I double-clicked it, it launched into Windows Media Player but I only got sound - no pictures. I tried to open it in Windows Media Center and was told that WMC couldn't find the necessary Codecs. So, I downloaded the codecs via the link that you had provided and installed them by following the instruction on the download website. Still don't see the pictures in WMP and still get WMC complaining that there are no Codecs. This all confirms my "luddite" view that video is just too damned complicated. My PC runs Vista Home Premium. Any advice as to what I need to do to see the video, please?

Amen to that! I look forward to improving my understanding by watching your AVI tutorial once its available. Thanks in anticipation, Lin.

DaveG, Yes, you could build all the images that way in Photoshop or similar, but you would then lose all the flexibility of being able to chop and change the images around quickly and easily.

Lin, Even I didn't know that the "Add Sound" and "Customize Slide...Music" gave different results; and I consider myself an experienced user of PTE!

David, Files uploaded and attached to a post on this forum have to be under 2MB in size. So your 5.3MB file is too big to attach directly to a post on the forum. You will need to upload it to a file hosting service such as www.mediafire.com (a free service), note the URL that they assign to it, and then cut and paste that URL into a reply to the forum so that we can then download the file.

No apology needed! As with so many software products, there are often several ways to achieve the same or equivalent function. With regards to the manual, you must bear in mind that, for the development team, English is not their first language. Given that fact, they do a really remarkable job with the Help function, the manual and this forum.

Ah, ha! We've been talking at cross-purposes. What you have been using to preview is what is referred to in the PTE User Guide as the "mini-player". And in this mode the music files associated with individual slides via Customize Slide do not play. But you can still use the Preview buttom to see a full-screen preview of your sequence. And you do not have to start from slide 1 every time. If you select a middle slide and then click the little button that sits between the Preview and Video buttons, your full screen preview will begin at your chosen slide. You (we!) have been banging our heads against PTE working as coded by Igor and his team. Hope this now explains things for you and that you can now move on with your project.

A further thought has struck me: When you installed PTEv5.5 on the XP machine, did you simply copy the zip file over and install from that, or did you do a fresh download from www.wnsoft.com? If you simply copied the zip across, it is possible (unlikely but possible) that your zip file has become, in some way or other, corrupted. It would certainly be worthwhile downloading a fresh copy of PTEv5.5 from wnsoft.com and trying that.

Ok! where does that leave us? Your PC spec has enough CPU power, enough RAM and an excellent graphics card. The PC should not be the culprit. The fact that you've found the same problem on a different PC also eliminates the PC hardware and software infrastucture as being likely culprits. I am assuming that your installations of PTEv5.5 on both the Vista PC and the XP PC were "first ever" PTE installs on each machine (i.e. there was not a previous install of PTE on either of the PCs). Am I right in this? Assuming I am then, the fact that my project runs OK on my PC but not on either of yours suggests to me that the problem is associated with a default setting in the default install of PTE. I really do believe that having sight of your .pte file is going to be a great help in trying to identify what the "rogue" setting is? Please post the .pte file as an attachment to a reply to this post, following the instructions in my post #7 above.

Something I should have covered in my previous reply: could you give us some information about the following: - your computer system: what processor? how much RAM, what graphics card or chipset? what soundcard or chipset? - your image files: what size (expressed in pixels wide x pixels high) - your music file: what format (e.g WAV, WMA, MP3)? how large?

You wrote: "I tested your show and I experience exactly the same problem." That's unexpected! I would suggest that the best approach now is for you to attach your pte file (just the file with the extension of .pte) to a reply and I'll take a look and see if I can spot anything amiss in your settings. But it is beginning to have the feel of being a problem somewhere outside PTE. To do the attach of a file, use the ADDREPLY button to start a new reply. Then key in the text of your reply. Next use the Browse button to locate and select your pte file. Click on the UPLOAD button to upload your pte file to the forum server. Then click on the manage attachments button and click on the left-most little icon (the one with the green "+" on it. This will insert a link to your uploaded pte file in your reply. Then add the reply to the forum using the "Add Reply" button. One small point: gender correction - Lin is a he not a she.

Alan, I think you've misunderstood the point being made. Yes, you can animate objects and control the opacity, the position (via Pan and Rotate) and the size (via Zoom) but there is no way that I know of to fade up an object starting at the top of it and bringing the fade up in as it wipes down the object (like a Page effect transition done top-to-bottom on a whole image). That's the sort of thing we're talking about.

Colin, Thanks for your thoughts. However, I'm in agreement with John's point. I have more than once embarked on a session of creativity with PTE and after perhaps an hour or more felt that I've gone down totally the wrong path. At that point I want to be able to abandon the entire PTE session, close PTE and re-open with the project in the state it was when I started that previous session. Yes, this can be achieved by doing things manually. I could start every PTE session with a File...Save As... in order to capture the start point. But why should I have to focus my mind on the administrative details of file management? What I want to focus on is the flow of my creative thinking. To my mind, a first-class piece of software will look after all the administrative things for me (once I've told it what to call things, where to put them and how often to do it) and will thus leave me free to get on with being creative.

Eyes, Lin's advice to you in his reply was totally wrong. If you want to assign a soundfile (in your case, a music file) to an individual slide you must not have "Synchronize music and slides" ticked. PTE actually refuses to preview the sequence if you have this box ticked and you have assigned a soundfile to an individual slide. I have attached a zip file that includes a very short sequence that starts playing a piece of music when the image of the red farm trailer appears. Take a look at the settings I have used in Project Options and for the slide that has been customized, and compare them to yours. SlideMusicTest_Jun15_2008_8_21_25.zip I hope this proves helpful.

Frank, I have no experience of Proshow. Could you elaborate on what you mean by text animation, please?

Frank, I'm happy to add my voice to this request. Like you, I've occasionally wanted to apply a transition effect to just one or two objects (usually Page Effect in a horizontal or vertical manner).

I know we had some discussion on this subject during the v5.5 beta program as a result of Lin and I both hitting a memory constraint issue in the middle of a heavy O&A edit session. Igor kindly implemented a basic "Auto-Save" feature. As the discussion continued I seem to recall him saying that he understood the need to think through a more comprehensive solution. I'm offering these thoughts of mine as a start point for a discussion to formulate a consensus view on the features that the "new, improved" Auto-Save should have: The user should be able to specify: - what name the auto-save file has (default suggestion: <project>-auto-save-sysdate-systime) - what folder the auto-save file is placed in (default suggestion: the same folder as the project file currently uses) - how frequently the auto-save is to happen (default suggestion: 10 minutes) - what is done with the auto-save files when PTE is closed down (default suggestion: if the project is saved at close down, the auto-saves are deleted; if the project is not saved at close-down, the auto-saves are retained) If PTE is closed down with auto-save files retained, then when that pte project is opened next time, a prompt should come up offering the user all the available auto-save files for that project. When the user selects one of them, then as part of that file open processing, the user should be asked if they want this file to assume the normal name for the project. Those are my thoughts. What views do other members have?

Mike, You could build a series of mini-sequences with each one chaining on to the next using Project Options...Advanced..."Run application after last slide". In this way, those images that you want synchronising to music could be and those that you don't want to have any music, wouldn't have. You'd have total control.

Hi David, I hope Colin doesn't mind my "butting in" on this thread. It sounds rather as though, when you set up the pans and zooms, you inadvertently altered some values that you didn't mean to. In the O&A window, that grey bar at the start is showing you the period of time when this image is transitioning into view and the previous image is transitioning out of view. Similarly, the grey bar at the end of the O&A timeline for this image shows the period of time when this image is transitioning out of view and the next image is transitioning into view. With the O&A window on display, and the Animation tab selected, step through each of your images and do the following checks: - select each of the red dots (keyframes) by using the left and right arrow buttons just above the Play button - take careful note of the values in the two Pan fields, the two Zoom fields and the Rotate field Unless you wanted to have the image moved away from its default position, all these should be zero. I suspect you will find that some of them are non-zero. Just overkey the field value with zero to correct any errors that you find. If you are trying to program Pans and Zooms remember the following: - Every image must have a keyframe at its origin time (offset 0 millisecs into its life) - Every Pan, Zoom, Rotate or Change of Opacity, must have two keyframes: one that defines the starting state of the image and one that defines the ending state of the image. The animation takes place between the two keyframes. For example: You want to bring an image into view via a one second fade in and after two seconds from the end of the fade in have it zoom in a little closer over the next four seconds and then hold that for a further three seconds. You program the image to have an overall duration of 10 seconds via Customize Slide...Main tab. You program the one second fade in via Customize Slide...Effect tab. You then go into O&A and program the following keyframes: - at offset 3000 you define a keyframe with all values at default - at offset 7000 you define a keyframe with both Zoom values set at, let's say, 120 And that's it! Hope this helps you to understand what is needed to achieve pans or zooms and also hope that my hunch was right and that you've found the incorrect values that are causing your jumps.