jkb

What we need is to be able to lock audio clips on different tracks together. And also to be able to lock them with a particular group of images. For now double click a clip to go to the Project options window. Select customise & then use the offset to nudge it the required amount. So for 3 tracks you need to do this 3 times, once for each track. Note. It does move all the clips (to the right of the selected clip) in that track but it does work & keeps the relationship between the clips. Much easier & more accurate than trying to move by hand. Jill

We already have this option :rolleyes:/>/> Just use a circular Mask with a hard edge. You can then insert any image, change colour (with a rectangle), zoom, change opacity etc. Also easy to change to an elispe by dragging the edges of the Mask Circle All very easy. Jill RotateMask_Nov25-2012_21-06-24.zip

If you mean the .PTE file then right click it in Windows Explorer & Open With Notepad. This will show you the text contained with the PTE project. Jill

Dave, Everything works as expected. See red replies to your questions below. The thing you have to be careful of when working in Timeline is that you position the red insert bar exactly at the end of the previous slide (video) Otherwise the new slide (video) will be inserted and could alter the times of the previous image. Jill

I have tried to see if I have this problem & I don't. :rolleyes:/> Dragging video into the Timeline it plays as expected. I can edit the length of the video, by dragging the slide edge to shorten it & again plays as expected. I have tried with both avi & mov (both very small low res files as it is all I hav) I don't see any problems with video freezing. Preview returns to the main PTE window at the end of the second video. Win 7 64 bit laptop. Jill

Igor, Please also see recent problems raised in the Archived beta threads for Custom Effect & Changing Slide to Video. Obviously they can all wait until after your holiday, I just want to make sure you are aware of them. Thanks Jill

Dave, It is not something I have noticed in previous versions, but you are correct it does continue to play the sound. However we did not have the Fullscreen Timeline before. Perhaps the bug is that switching from Fullscreen to Normal Timeline or Slide View the sound stops. This is not just at the end but anywhere throughout the sequence. Eg. Start playing in Slide View, switch to Timeline - music keeps playing - switch to fullscreen timeline - music keeps playing. But when you switch back from Fullscreen Timeline the music stops. I can envisage it will be very useful to switch from Fullscreen to normal timeline while building a sequence as you can quickly look at either slides in mini player or see the full sound tracks without having to stop & start the show. It works one way so should? work the other. Jill

Igor, I will add it to AV News website shortly (may be next week now) Also John & I are at an AV Day at Capel Curig in Snowdonia on Sunday where we are having a workshop to help people put together a sound track. We will demonstrate 7.5 to show people how easy it now is with this version. Jill

Xaver, I believe that this version has been as fully tested by the beta testers as any previous version & perhaps more so. It is just that there have been so many new functions & a lot of the program completely rewritten that it has been impossible to test every scenario in the time available. As functions have been added back in over time, I for one have not gone back to test everything which each new beta. It is only now that Igor has released the final version that I have gone back to try & test all of the new features. Unfortunately I and others are finding that some things are not quite working as expected. Igor & the team have worked very hard on this release & given us some great new features, they now deserve a well earned break. I think we can forgive them if some things are not quite yet complete. I am certain they will all be corrected once they have enjoyed a rest. Jill

I agree with this behaviour. It happens no matter how many slides as long as the music is longer than the slides But the behaviour is not consistent. It seems that the first time you play - from any view - the music stops when it reaches the end of the last slide. but click in mini player or press spacebar (in Timeline views) & the music continues. If you move the cursor by clicking to a different point in timeline, or click a different slide in Slide view, then the music continues when the end of last slide is reached Being able to continue the music after the last slide is good as it allows you to hear the rest of the music before you add further slides. But perhaps the cursor should continue to move. Another point is that if when playing you switch from slide view to Timeline, then to fullscreen timeline the music & slides continue to play. Again this is good, you can switch views & continue play. But when switching from Fullscreen Timeline to normal timeline it stops playing. This is not good Jill

Igor, Enjoy your holiday, you deserve it. Good decision to keep away from computers until you are back. Hope the rest of your team also get a holiday. Best Wishes Jill

As well as saying which slide the duplicates are it would be great if PTE could allow us to choose which folder to select the duplicate slide from. I have a sequence which has many duplicates from 2 or 3 different folders. (two of us were working on the sequence at once & sending each other the backup folders. The final sequence was then put together by copying selected slides from each into a final version.) There are far too many duplicates to go through and change them manually so I have never been able to do a backup of the completed sequence. If PTE could highlight each duplicate & allow the choice of folder that would be a great help. Jill

Gary, Why not insert several blank slides of the required length for your various text items. That way it will be easy to adjust each to the timings you require. Your video clip can then be added as a Master Clip to play over the blank slides. (Add the video to slide 1 & set to Master Video Track Then you add the same video to each of the other slides & set them all to be 'Link To' If you have added the Text Items first you will need to move them up above the video clip in the object stack (CTRL +PageUp) to make sure they show on top of the video. You can even use the transitions between each of the blank slides to fade your text in & out. Hope this helps. Jill

Just to throw another spanner into the works! I have just created a menu on my Win7 64 bit laptop to play all my sequences. I have noticed that with sequences created in PTE v5.0 or earlier they play smoothly with no flashes. Sequences created after v5.0 have a white flash when the sequence starts. They all return to the Menu smoothly at the end whatever version they were created in. I have used Run Application or Open File on all the sequences. Hardware Acceleration is on. Now here is the odd part!! I have 2 users set up on my Laptop, one for normal use & the other when out giving talks. The menu was created on my 'normal' user. When run under that user the White flash is very brief & appears at the side of the screen, so is not that noticeable. But when I run the Menu under my 'Show' User The white is much more pronounced & is at the Top & Bottom of the screen. Also it appears as a band that slowly shrinks rather than a sudden flash. So it is much more noticeable. No time to recreate all my sequences under 7.07 as I am giving a talk tomorrow night & still have loads to do! So I will have to live with it. It just seems very strange that it is giving two different results on the same Laptop. As far as I can see there is nothing in the setup of the two user accounts that would cause a difference. Both are full Administrator access. Jill

Jose, This is something we have been asking for, for a long time. Currently it is not possible to copy/paste keyframes - Hopefully in the next version! Jill

What might be nice to have if at all possible, would be to be able to select a group of slides & have them fit to a selection of music. Say you have a piece of music & you want certain slides to auto fit to a 30sec part of it. You could select a group of slides eg slides 10 to 20 & then have them fit to that 30s of music. The other slides could be manually arranged to the rest of the music. I doubt I would use this as I always want my images to change in time with the music, but I am sure it would be useful to beginners. Even if it was just to be able to fit to a whole piece of music rather than a part of it. So if you had 3 pieces of music, you could auto fit groups of slides to each piece. Jill

Can we not already save our Preferences by using Templates? It is not something I have normally used, but might start now we can Customise things more. We could set up basic Templates for the different types of Workspace we want. If Templates can be used for this, then it saves Igor work in having to code a new feature. Jill

I agree with Lin, please keep the Project Level text comment Templates. I think Option B is perhaps easiest, to have the Text Comment on the Customise Slide. If possible to be able to select several slides at once & add a comment with common Font, Colour, Position etc. Then the actual Text could be changed individually on each slide as required. Jill

Sorry if putting both articles on the same PDF has caused confusion. It was quicker to do it that way as they follow on from each other in the Magazine. You should be able to download & save a copy of the PDF, but it is protected so you cannot copy the text or print it. We want people to subscribe to the Magazine! If anyone would like to write an article, on PTE or any other AV subject, we would be happy to publish it. We will send you a complimentary copy when we do. We would especially like to hear from anyone in the US as we currently don't have any subscribers from that part of the world. We would love to hear your views on AV. See the Contacts page of www.avnews.org.uk for details. Regards Jill

Why go to the trouble of creating a video & having a slightly reduced quality? Just make the show of the cell phone screen & then have a png image of the actual phone & add this to each image as an extra object. Simply add to the first & then copy & paste to each 'slide' in the sequence. This will overlay each image & as the same it will appear as though only the cell phone screen is changing. Ok if you have a lot of slides it will take a while to add to each image, but it does mean you can create an exe & keep the highest quality. Jill

Easy! Just press shift & drag the tail of the arrow to be the length you want it. Ok it means it also lengthens the head but is still a lot quicker than making a separate file for each size you need. And is easy to amend if you move the caption. You can also easily add drop shadows etc Jill

The easiest way is to add a Text object using one of the Fonts that generates symbols. Windings3 & Webdings are examples. Windings3 'a' gives a right hand arrow. Just set the font & try the different letters & numbers in both upper & lower case until you get the one you want. This means you can easily change the size & colour of the symbols as required. Much quicker & easier than creating a separate png file. Jill

Hi Redmond, As Peter says the error message is most likely because you have a sound attached to a slide. With the sound not playing in Preview mode I had a similar problem a while back at a workshop when helping a group make a sequence. Couldn't solve it at the time, but later at home checked the Windows sound mixer & found there was a slider for PicturesToExe & that was set at zero. How that happened I don't know, so the sound was playing just that its volume was zero so couldn't be heard. By increasing the volume on that slider all was well. So have a look at your windows sound mixer. Right click on the little speaker icon in the task bar & open Volume Control. I was running Vista on my laptop when it happened. Hope this helps Jill

Peter, I agree. I was simply explaining to Joy what the buttons did as she asked for an explanation. Personally, I usually just insert the extra slide in the slide view & then amend timings as required. Or on the timeline select all the slides after the point I want to insert & drag them along to right manually allowing enough time for the slide I want to insert. Both much quicker than using the buttons. Jill

The Project Option 'Auto Spread slides along Music' is not something I would normally use. However needing to make a short demonstration sequence to explain how a beginner may want to use this I ticked the box. All it seemed to do was put a message on the Timeline & grey out the timeline so you couldn't move the times manually. So I used the 'Timed Points/arrange all points' option to spread the slides evenly along the Timeline. This then spreads the slides & everything looks & works as you would expect. However a beginner is unlikely to find this option as they may not venture into the Timeline view. Having now played around a bit more with Auto Spread I see that if you publish the exe, or preview full screen, then the auto spread does in fact do just that. What is confusing, to myself an experienced user of PTE, so will certainly be to a beginner, is that in the main window the overall time shown is the length of the slides & not the length of the music. Also playing in the main window it plays to the timing of the slides & cuts the music off abruptly at the end of the last slide. Would it be possible, if 'Auto Spread' is selected to amend the overall time shown in the main window to be the length of the music rather than the slides. Along with a message to say 'Auto Spread - Time changed to music length' & for the main window to play as the full preview/exe do. It really is confusing when a sequence plays differently in the main window & Preview. Although far from creating an ideal sequence, the Auto Spread option is useful for a beginner & allows them to make something quickly when first starting. That way they can feel they have achieved something without too much effort & will hopefully go on to explore the full potential of PTE & not give up at the first hurdle. Jill