fh1805

I, too, would like to voice my thanks to Igor and his team for all their efforts in producing this wonderful AV software. All those who have worked so hard to get v5.6 ready for release are truly deserving of a vacation; a time to rest, relax and re-charge the batteries. Have fun folks! regards, Peter

In that case, Ralph, you no longer have a copy of your base PTE registry key outside of your registry file. The PTE base key is a separate entity to the Video-Builder key. regards, Peter

Hi Dave, I bought my PTE licence in 2005 and received an e-mail with a reg.txt file as an attachment. My working practice in respect of software that I download from the Internet is to place all the downloaded files (the zip files or whatever format they are packaged) in a special folder called, would you believe, Downloads. When building a new computer I simply copy all the contents of Downloads folder over to a Downloads folder on the new computer. Then I reinstall the software that I want using these files. Back in the summer of 2005, I saved the reg.txt file into the Downloads folder. Then, when PTE asked me to register, I simply pointed PTE to the Downloads folder. It picked the key up and installed it into the registry with no problems. Each time since then, when building a new computer I have simply copied the entire Downloads folder onto the new machine, installed the software products that I wanted onto the new computer and then, for PTE, followed the same steps that I took in 2005 to re-register the product. Since 2005 I have had PTE installed, at various times, on three different PCs: my original laptop, then my current desktop PC, and finally removed from the old laptop and installed on a new laptop. All of this with no problems. But, anyone reading this needs to factor in that I am an ex-IT techie. I understand what is happening and know what I am doing (well, most of the time!) I am aware of at least three individuals locally who have had problems sorting out what to do with the information that came from WnSoft (one of whom is currently in active discussion with Alena at WnSoft, trying to resolve his problem). It is true that all the e-mails that I have seen have been written implying the presence of an attached file. But in all the cases I know of other than my own, the e-mail had the REGEDIT command and data embedded at the foot of the e-mail text and no attached file. This is undoubtedly confusing for the user. regards, Peter P.S. As I have been writing this post I have thought of an alternative delivery mechanism for the PTE key. Could WnSoft hold the Key for each user on their server and simply send in the e-mail a link that the user can use to download the txt file? In this way, the PTE keys would always exist and could be retrieved again at anytime. If the original link information was lost, the user would have to satisfy WnSoft of their "bona fides" (but that has to be the case right now with "lost" keys. WnSoft have to separate the "scammers" from the "legitimates"). It's just a thought and I don't know how much merit it might have. Sorry if this has "hi-jacked" the original intent of your thread, Dave.

Colin, That throws up another question in my mind: We seem to get agitated about colour calibrating our cameras, our PC monitors, our printers and our projectors; but how many of us get our eyes colour calibrated? regards, Peter

Argo, I've never tried this in practice but.... At the bottom of the Project Options...Music tab there is a tick box "Don't interrupt sound comment when next slide appears". Does ticking this allow the individual slide sound (via Add Sound) to play on even if the slide is advanced before the end of the sound clip? regards, Peter

Argo, Have you got "Synchronise slides and music" ticked in Project Options...Main? regards, Peter

Tony, I confirm that the masks that JPD uses are his own creation. regards Peter

I'm chipping in on this discussion because, in my opinion, there was a little golden nugget of advice, that could easily be overlooked, buried in Barry's lengthy reply above. Listening to music while working on your image files is a great way of learning how to identify music whose mood matches the mood of the images. regards, Peter

Jean-Pierre, That's magnificent - and one of my favourite pieces of music, too! Thanks for sharing it with us. regards, Peter

Daniel, I was writing my previous post when Xaver replied. I agree with him. Because of the problems that can occur trying to build the soundtrack using the existing features of PTE, it is usually better to build the sound track outside PTE with a sound-editor software package such as Audacity. There are two ways of adding music (or any other sound file) to a single slide: - Customize Slide...Music - which then forces you to turn off "Synchronize music and slides" - Add sound icon - which allows you to keep Synchronize music and slides" turned on. In my opinion, if adding sound to a single file is what the user wants to do, then it is usually better to adopt the second technique. But better by far is to create a separate soundtrack file exterally to PTE and then add it via Project Options...Music. In your sample, where your first piece of music is exactly the right length, you could have added the second piece of music as a second item under Project Options...Music. It would then start playing immediately after the first piece ended. This is an even simpler solution to the problem as you have presented it in your zip file. regards, Peter

Daniel, I've downloaded your zip file and taken your project into PTE v5.52. Your problem has occured because of the combination of settings you have used for your music tracks. 1. You have left "Repeat music after playing" ticked in Project Options...Music. 2. You have added the music to slide 3 via Customize Slide...Music. This means you cannot have "Synchronize music and slides" ticked. Which in turn means that PTE will start the project music from the beginning no matter which slide you choose to start the preview from. To make your sequence work the way you want it to, do the following: 1. Take slide 3 into Customize Slide and remove the music item 2. In Project Options...Music untick the "Repeat music after playing" box 3. In Project Options...Main, tick the "Synchronize music and slides" box 4. Add the music to slide 3 using the "Add Sound" icon. I think you will find that PTE now behaves as you want it to in Preview, Preview from selected slide and in the mini-viewer. regards, Peter

Ken (Scorpion), I was mis-understanding you. I wasn't using the Timeline view. When I tried again using this view I can reproduce your problem. I agree with you that it looks like a bug and should be fixed. regards, Peter

Ken, This brings two questions to my mind: - is what we see (in terms of colour on the TV) when we play a commercial DVD that which the producer of the DVD would have expected us to see? or is our TV in need of calibration? - if the TV doesn't need calibrating then why do some of us have this urge to constantly calibrate their computer equipment? (For the record - I don't have the urge) Maureen, I don't quite understand why you felt a need to open a new thread (I think we could have let the discussion run in its original thread) but I feel that this is going to develop into a fascinating discussion. I'm just slightly concerned that we will end up with parts of the same discussion taking place in two separate places. The moderators might have to do some post moving between the two threads to keep things tidy. regards, Peter

Daniel, I think the reason for your problem may be in the way you have added the sound clip to slide no.3. Try removing it from the Customize slide option and then using the "Add sound" icon at the top right of the window to add it. Does this then give you the behaviour that you wanted? regards, Peter

For what it might be worth, I show PTE sequences to audiences several time each month and have NEVER calibrated any of my equipment. My camera is set to sRGB, my PC is set to sRGB, my projector is set to sRGB. What I see on my LCD monitor looks like what I saw before I pressed the shutter release. What I see projected on the screen looks like what I saw on the monitor. As far as I am concerned, if it looks right, then it is right. Nobody has ever commented on any colour bias in my projected images - and at least one audience each month is a camera club or photography club. I have posted some of my sequences to this and other forums and nobody has commented adversely about the colour rendition. In the days when images were digitised by scanning from slide or film and so could have come from different emulsions I suspect that calibration might have been essential. But today, where I suspect most users are uploading from either a single camera or from mutiple bodies from the same manufacturer, then I suspect the need for calibration is lower. I also suspect that the need for calibration is lower when using LCD technology comapred to the old CRT monitors. I may be wrong in all that so I'll watch with interest as this discussion develops. regards, Peter

Scorpion, One question: Have you got View...Advanced Options...Show real slide in mini-player selected? I ask because I have downloaded a sequence built by JPD and made available by him through a French forum and this exhibits your problem - but only on certain pairs of images, not on all of them. When I investigated the above option I found it was not selected. After selecting the option the problem goes away. I have this option selected as a default for my work and have never witnessed your problem in any of my own sequences. regards, Peter

I'm coming late into this discussion, but let me try and clarify one or two points. As you will be aware, PTE exe files can be quite large; often too large to fit through the "e-letterbox" (by which I mean that they exceed the maximum size that your ISP allows on any e-mail plus its attachments). If this situation arises, the simplest solution is to upload the file to one of the free File Hosting services on the Internet (for example MediaFire). The upload process will provide you with a URL (a web-page name) that you can copy and paste as a link into your e-mail. The recipient of your e-mail can then use the link to retrieve your file from the hosting site. In my opinion, the simplest solution will be to use the template on the CD to open the project into PTE and then: - Create backup in zip - Close PTE - Extract the zip contents to a new folder on your hard-drive - Open the PTE project from inside this new folder - Create your DVD version of the project If creating the DVD version was the only thing you wanted to do and if you were confident that you would not want to make any other changes to this project, then you can safely delete the new folder and its contents and the zip file. You have the project safely stored in its template folder on your CD. I hope that makes sense to you, Mike. If not just post a question seeking clarification. regards, Peter

If you re-read post#13 and concentrate on the second line, you will see that what I am proposing is an option. If you don't want to take advantage of it you leave it turned off. If it is turned off, PTE will behave as it does today with it turned off. The out of memory condition occured for me when editing a single image with a large number of objects on it and with a significant number of keyframes for each object. The error occurs because PTE is trying to maintain its "Undo" stack of changes. Eventually the stack exceeds the available memory. There is no fault in the software, no fault in the hardware. The only fault lies in the complexity that I, the user, was trying to impose. There are many of us who have no interest in burning DVDs or in creating video for Youtube. Does that mean Igor should never have included the option to do these things? Of course not! To my way of thinking, the more options PTE has (options that are genuinely useful) the more users it will attract. Right now, the "auto-save" feature prevents the "Out of memory" condition but has severe limitations because it simply overwrites the existing file everytime. I have put forward a proposal for a solution that would provide, as an option, increased usefulness for those users who would like the flexibility of recovering to a previous point in time. Whether or not this suggestion gets included in a future version of PTE is down to Igor and his team. They have to decide whether the cost of coding, testing and then maintaining into the future is going to be justified by a) the number of existing users that might benefit from it and the potential number of new users that it might attract to the product. regards, Peter

Eric, So you would just say "NO" and "NO" again. You've obviously never encountered the "Out of memory" condition in a heavy edit session. When it happens, all you want to do is tell PTE - shutdown as quick as you can, don't overwrite the existing file. And then, ideally, you want to be let back in so you can resume at whatever point PTE took the last backup. So you want PTE to hang on to the interim backups. When this problem occurs, the only alternative (and the most likely scenario) is that you lose the entire project file. And when it happens on day one of the project build (as it did for me) - there isn't any other backup to turn to. The only option is to redo the entire day's work all over again. And if you don't understand what went wrong, and simply repeat the same edit session, it happens again on day two - and you still haven't got a backup. On day three you start saving every few minutes - just in case. An improved "auto-save" feature would be a boon - on those rare occasions when something goes dramatically wrong. But the present system where it simply over-writes the project file each time, means that you cannot abandon the entire session if you feel that things are not going as you wanted them to. At least, you cannot abandon unless you started by saving as a new name at the start of the session. Which leads me to think that what I would like in PTE is not "auto-save", actually, but some form of automatic version control that includes mid-session versions as well as start-/end-session versions. regards, Peter

The way that I see auto-save working in an enhanced form is as follows: - the user interface to turn it on or off remains as now - when it is turned on, PTE saves the .pte file at the required time intervals but adds the &SYSDATE and &SYSTIME variables to the file name (thus making each file uniquely named) - the files are saved into a PTE System folder - at then end of the session, when the user closes down PTE, the processing goes as follows: - the "do you want to save?" dialogue box is presented with the options "Yes", "No" and "Cancel" - clicking "Cancel" takes you back into PTE (no saving is done at this point) - clicking "Yes" causes the .pte file to be saved over the top of the existing .pte file (exactly as at present) - and all auto-saved files are deleted from the PTE System folder - clicking "No" causes a new dialogue box to open asking: "Do you want to keep the interim saved files from this session?" and offers two buttons; "Yes" and "No" - if "No" is clicked, the PTE System folder contents are deleted, the .pte file is not saved (The project is available only as it was at the start of the session) - if "Yes" is clicked, the PTE System folder contents are retained. On next start-up of PTE, PTE will test to see if the PTE System folder contains any files - if it doesn't then the last-used project file is opened in its last saved state (In other words the behaviour is as it is now) - if the PTE System folder contains files, a dialogue box is opened offering the files to the user for one to be selected as the start point (this allows recovery from a point part way through the previous session) There will, undoubtedly, be some additional points of detail that will need to be handled but that should give a very useful and usable auto-save and recovery capability. regards, Peter

Jean-Pierre, If you turn on "Auto-save" via View...Advanced Options...Auto-save project then PTE will save at the time interval that you specify. Beware, though, the saved file simply over-writes the existing project file. It is no different than if you were to do File...Save every few minutes. Both Lin Evans and I have, in the past, experienced this "Out of memory" followed by total loss of the PTE project file. It was as a result of our experiences that Igor introduced the "auto-save" option. regards, Peter

Hi Eric, One of the sequences that I built last year opens with a pan across a panoramic image. The image file is 3332x768 and was created using Photoshop Elements v5's stitching facility. The start point was five images taken with the intention of stitching - and therefore overlapped significantly to give the software plenty of points on which to "synchronise" each stitch. The images were hand-held but I was as careful as I could be to keep everything on the same level. I didn't do anything manually - I left everything to the camera in terms of focus, exposure and WB. regards, Peter

Mike, Try Page Effect Top-to-Bottom but with "Own thickness of smoothing line" ticked and the percentage set to 50% or greater - and a long transition duration (5 seconds or more). regards, Peter

Daniel, I've never witnessed the behaviour that you report. I've just done a simple test with PTE v5.52. I launched PTE v5.52. It automatically opened the project file that I was last working on. I made no changes and simply closed down the PTE window using the "X" button at the extreme top-right of the window. I was not prompted to save anything. Does it not work like this for you? regards, Peter

Jose, Rasterizing the text object turns it into a PNG format graphics file. So, even when you run your sequence on a PC that doesn't have your chosen font installed, the appearance is exactly as you intended. To rasterize the text, simply select the text object in the O&A window, and then "tick" the check box on the Properties tab. PTE will ask you where you want the png file saving. Job done! If you want to change the text content, simply untick the box, edit the words and then re-tick the box. Simple! regards, Peter