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Barry, Pause/Play - Spacebar acts as a toggle Stop/Quit - Esc key Next/Previous - Left and Right arrow keys regards, Peter

I was! I was presuming John was using a plug-in memory device (e.g. USB) from which to playback MP4 files - as I do. But I could have made a false assumption there. Peter

John, If your TV is a modern digital, flat-screen one I suspect that the TV safezone is largely irrelevant. I now build to 1920x1080 and place a 3 pixel border on each image. So far, I have always seen the entire image area on my 37" LCD TV. And you'll find the aspect ratio field is on the Project Options...Main tab now. regards, Peter

It doesn't help John solve his problem, but I see what Lin sees on my 22" 1920x1080 16:9 monitor on my Vista Home Premium system. I wonder if the horizontal adjustment on John's monitor needs "tweaking". Peter

If it isn't broke, why do you want to try and fix it? Peter

Neal, It's on the Common tab in the Objects & Animation window. You can set "Go to Slide..." as a mouse action on an individual object on the slide. N.B. There is no global feature. You have to program each object on each slide separately. regards, Peter

Gilbert, Ce forum utilise uniquement l'anglais (This forum uses only English). Please post in English. Note that you can use online translation tools such as Google translator (as I have done to provide my reply and the translation of your post below). There are also well-established French-language forums that you might find helpful. One that I am a member of is www.diapositif.net. There are others. Gilbert's original post. Hello, I'm a fan of PTE for high quality rendering, multiple possibilities, and I welcome any development team (Igor and his team) for their wonderful work. I would like to create a DVD and add the same video in MP4 format (better quality) to enable the lucky owners of compatible readers to enjoy the best possible quality. After multiple tests it seems that VideoBuilder n'accpte not attach files to MP4 DVD. Is there a particular process for that? Thank you in advance for your answers. Sincerely, Gilbert83 regards, Peter

Dave, I've never tried it that way. Do you get as obvious a drop shadow from a 3-pixel stroke as you would from a solid rectangle? regards, Peter

Jeff, This is really an aside from the main theme of your topic but, given your subject matter, have you played around with the various Blur filters in Photoshop? Judicious use of them could add an improved sense of motion and speed to the bikes, depending on how many and at what angle they are to the viewer. As with all "special effects" (including pan and zoom) the secret is to use them "a little and not too often". regards, Peter

Jeff, I agree with Lin in that a "sketch" would help to achieve understanding. However, from your words I think you are now wanting to have the slide with the start grid line up (and all those umbrellas in the rain) to show a white border around the zooming part of the image (and with a drop shadow outside of that). Am I right? If so, read on... I presume your current assembly for that slide is the background image plus the mask container with the zooming image. All you now need to do is add a white rectangle. Position it in the object stack so that, visually, it sits above the background image and below the masked image. Re-size it via the zoom control so that it shows just the amount you want behind the zooming image (if necessary click on the little push button between the zoom values and zoom each axis separately). Then set a drop shadow for this rectangle (Common tab of O&A) and adjust its properties if you wish. Job done! regards, Peter

Igor, Working as expected now. Thanks for the fix to this one. Peter

Ronbu, Any values you see in the "size/position in pixels" fields were set by PTE as a result of me doing things elsewhere, e.g. the Zoom settings applied via the Animation tab of the O&A window. They were not set by me via direct edit of them. To program my animations I use the Animation tab and the 3D Parameters - and that's it! Oh, and lots of frames. I have found that, for me, the secrets of complex object animation in PTE are a) to place the complex object structure on a Frame or a nest of Frames, to animate the Frames and not the individual objects themselves, and c) to use a separate frame for each kind of animation: i.e. Pan, Zoom, 2D Rotate, Opacity change, 3D parameters. regards, Peter

Ken, Why not try 4.49 instead of 4.47? 4.49 was written specifically to be Vista-compliant and so should work OK with Win 7. Peter

Stu, Ready and waiting. I have 4.49, 5.52, 5.64, 6.04 and 6.57 all installed on my desktop system (it's still a Vista system) regards, Peter

Sheila, There's a Bank Holiday coming at the end of the month; perhaps you need to pray for wet weather! Then you will have the perfect excuse to stay indoors and "play" with your cube and pyramids. regards, Peter

Further to my last post... Adobe Photoshop's "Cookie Cutter" tool has a Triangle shape which can be constrained to be equilateral via the Shape Options. (This is true of Photoshop Elements v9. I assume other versions will also have this feature) regards, Peter P.S. No need to thank me for this info. I've learned something new and potentially useful from this research.

Sheila, I think your problems with the base of the triangular pyramid (technically called a tetrahedron) stem from the size and shape of your face images. The geometry of shapes other than those of cuboid shape are not as simple as they might appear to our eyes. Take a look at this page on Wikipedia (and don't get overawed by the formulae): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahedron The text talks about a "regular tetrahedron". This is one made up of four "regular triangles". A regular triangle is an equilateral triangle. Equilateral triangles have all three sides the same length and all three internal angles are 60 degrees. The table of "specifications" shows that, for such a tetrahedron, each side must make an angle of approx 54.73 degrees with the base edge that it sits against. Your triangle sides make an angle of 73 degrees with the base edge (90 degrees minus the 17 degrees of X rotation you have given them). It seems to me that you have two ways forward: - you can keep your three side faces and build a custom base that fits the hole that they leave (that could involve a lot of trial and error) - you can rebuild your individual faces so that they conform to equilateral triangles, and then be guided by the values given on that wikipedia page for the amounts of rotation to give each side You might want to take a look at this Wikipedia page about equilateral triangles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilateral_triangle You are so very nearly there that I think it is worth your persevering with this project. If you can succeed you will have a good working knowledge of three different shapes that you will be able to re-use in other sequences should you wish to do so. regards, Peter

Sheila, I suspect that the problem with your triangular pyramid is that the Zoom and Pan settings are not quite right. Have you tried increasing (very slightly) the zoom value for the pyramid's base. Sometimes I find it necessary to manually rotate the object until I can see the problem, then add a keyframe at this point on the timeline for that object and set about adjusting the Pan, Zoom, etc. values. Once I seem to have resolved the alignment problem I then make a note of those values on paper, delete the keypoint that I added and apply those values to whichever of the original keypoints now need them. The other thing to check carefully: are you certain that the dimensions of the triangles are all correct? regards, Peter

Stu, Thanks, that was not quite the right answer; but it was a pointer to the solution. Firstly, I do not use the default settings. I have a customized template set as my default for all new projects. So whether the factory default is to hide the mouse cursor or not is irrelevant. However, your prompt about Hide got me to look again at the way I tried to set up the NavBar under beta 8. I found that with the NavBar customization option "Auto Hide" turned off, the NavBar always appeared, irrespective of whether the mouse cursor was hidden or not. With the NavBar set to "Auto Hide", its appearance was then determined by the Mouse setting. If the mouse was hidden the NavBar was totally hidden. If the mouse was either at Show or Auto Hide then the NavBar appeared and behaved in accordance with the timings set under its customization option. regards, Peter

Oh, no it isn't! Beta 8, File New, Fullscreen, 15:10, 1620x1080, no music, 3 real slides and Blanks at each end - and no NavBar. Again, I tried both the Sky style and the Video Player style. They refuse to appear. I even tried setting "Wait for a keypress..." but still no NavBar. Now, I don't mind this "feature" behaving like this as, like Barry, I don't use the NavBar. But I don't like being unable to get PTE to do the same things as everyone else. It worries me that I might have some fundamental setting at a different value to everyone else when I shouldn't have. regards, Peter

Using beta 8 I cannot get a Navigation Bar to appear!!! I have done the three clicks and have tried Both Sky and Video player styles of Nav Bar. Nothing appears when I Preview the sequence. The sequence was created using beta 1 and has been editted in most (but not all) of the subsequent betas. I have tried adding the Nav Bar using beta 8 only - not any earlier betas. Peter

Igor, This problem has come back in beta 8. Did your team forget to include the fix in this beta release? N.B. I ran the install by double-clicking on the setup file from within the zip file. I did not extract the zip contents first. I also confirm that AbdolReza's problem is fixed in beta 8. regards, Peter

Here's my "quick and dirty" attempt at a pyramid. Theres no sound; it runs for 36 seconds and the file size is just 48KB (yes, KB, not MB). By all means try and reverse engineer it, to understand it. However, DaveG made the very excellent point that by trying to do it yourself, you will learn more. I entirely concur with that view. The best way of learning how to control PTE animation is to actually play with the feature. There may well be a simpler method: I'm no mathematician. I did it by trial and error - and by applying knowledge gained doing Rubik's Cube in 2009. regards, Peter Pyramid 0v2.zip

Igor, The focus of the window for the "Options" at the end of the Install now works correctly in beta 7. I also found that Extract-ing the zip to the Desktop and then running the install from there gave the correct result with beta 6. However, my normal install technique for PTE is to simply download the zip file and then double-click the setup program from within it (without extracting first). That's what I did with beta 7 - and everything happened as I would have expected it to. You can tick that bug off your "to fix" list. regards, Peter

Gary, I've never found a need to alter "Cover Slide" Peter