HaroldB

Igor, I started using beta #3 in earnest last night, and I really love the ability to preview from the middle of a show. However, it seems to me that if you are in the synch window and you make changes to the show (try it by just adding a new transition point) and then you hit the preview button in the synch window, the changes you just made aren't reflected in the preview. (It works fine if you hit OK in the synch window and then go right back into the synch window.) Harold

Isn't that exactly the way it's supposed to work? Harold

But there's no way to get all transition points unselected once any transition point IS selected. OTOH, one can always simply exit and re-enter the synch window. As far as I am concerned, this is good enough, unless you can come up with something really easy that works better. Harold

Igor: One minor, minor problem, that IMO is not even worth fixing unless it's real easy to fix. In the synch window, I don't see a way to do a preview from the beginning of the show! As I said, I don't think this is worth dealing with unless it's real easy for you to do. Harold

Igor, Beta #2 seems great to me. I've got the same problems Al and Guru have already reported, but outside of that, it really seems to work fine. And it's a GREAT IMPROVEMENT!!! It's nice how in the synch wondow, when you press the Preview button while it's playing, it will switch to full-screen preview from where it is up to! I think that if somebody changes the duration for a transition on the synch window, the slide should become Personalized. And I think adding this feature would be a Really Good Thing. While you're at it, I think it would be really good to also be able to change the transition type (let me choose from a drop-down list box) in the synch window. Same thing goes here.... if the user changes it in this window, the slide becomes Personalized. That allows one to experiment with different transition types without going back and forth between dialog boxes. One tiny thing, but only if it's easy to do: could we go directly from the main PTE window to the synch window and back? You could gray the button out if the proper option isn't selected on the Project Options dialog. I'd be so bold as to say that if you make this change, there is no need to go to the synch window from Project Options, although you might want to keep that for people that are used to it. Great work! Harold

IMX, the jerkiness on the fades is more noticeable when fading from very light to very dark or vice versa on slower machines. Harold

The best advice I can give you is to shorten your transition times a bit where PTE is now tripping up. Until Igor fixes it, if the transtion time exceeds the slide display time plus the time it actually takes to load your slide (which can be much slower on a slow machine), PTE trips up this way. Shortening the transition times at the affected places usually gives you bullet-proof results. For the fades, I find that the poor fades on a slower machine are especially noticeable when going from a very light slide to a very dark slide or vice versa. Try not to do that, and your problem may be less noticeable. Harold

Studio sounds like a Good Thing. Would you happen to remember if it is a quick install (ie, I can wait to buy it until I need it and then reasonably expect to install it fairly quickly) or a problematic install (which would mean that I should get it well ahead of when I need it)? Harold

I have Cool Edit 2000, but not the Studio multi-mixer. What does the add-in do? Harold

Al, I have no idea... I never tried that -- too lazy to make a CD to test it . Harold

I agree that preview-from-the-middle is a great feature. And I simply can not wait for full-screen preview-from-the-middle for synchronized shows! Harold

Just to complicate things a tiny bit, you do not need to put the .ico file on the CD at all. If you have specified to PTE to use an icon, that icon is embedded within the PTE exe, and you can code icon=xxxxxx.exe in your autorun.inf file. Harold

You can add a new transition by clicking anywhere on the timeline and then clicking the "new transition" button. Of course, that may involve you moving other transition points to "make room" for the new slide. To move a transition point, just click on a transition point and move it to the left or right. Harold

I'll triple that suggestion . I think it would be great if that were added. Harold

Igor, Another minor anomaly. For shows with lots (>100) of slides, the gray bars for the transition effects timing in the timeline are drawn so that they start before the marker for the slide itself. And thanks for the news on "preview from the middle"! Harold

Igor, I noticed two anomalies. There now seems to be just an open and close parentheses following the effect duration value on the Customize Slide Effects tab. And the effect for the first slide is not shaded on the timeline. I liked the shading on the timeline for the effects. << please notice that it is a first beta yet, and it doesn't contain completed features of v4.00 >> PLEASE tell me that there is going to be a full-screen "preview from a specified point" in this release!! I think that is EXTREMELY important!! Harold

As best as I can figure out, this number is only used when a transition effect is NOT specified for a slide. In that case, a transition may be selected off the list of checked transitions specified in the Project Options, and if a fade is selected, then this number is used as the duration. This gives you the option of specifying a different value for fade transitions versus all other transitions. If a transition is specified at the slide level, I do not think this number is used at all. Harold

Al, I acutally used copy and paste to get the data from Excel to a text file . I'm glad you got it to work! Harold

I find that a problem with these pretty fades (even when you are NOT going from very light to very dark or vice versa, which is what I believe generates the flicker), is that you can't easily do a series of continuous fades. FX, I can not go from slide 1 to slide 2 to slide 3 with all fades. The reason for this is that PTE needs a minimal amount of time to "set up" the picture. In the current PTE version, if you specify a slide duration time such that the duration time minus the transition time is less than the time needed to set up the slide, PTE behaves unpredictably. The net is that you always have to include this time, and since this time varies unpredictably depending on the hardware configuarion that it is executing on, there is no easy to do reliable mutiple sequential fades without leaving the images in an untransitioning state for at least a bit. If Igor would change the program so that the transition time was automatically shortened to the remaining slide duration time after the picture was already loaded, this would make those kinds of effects very possible and very neat. I'm hoping it might even be something easy for Igor to do!! Harold

This is not necessarily a complete solution, but when you log on to the forum, the software puts a little down-pointing blue arrow just before the thread name for all threads that have had additions since you last visited the forum. If you click on this blue arrow, you are taken to the messages added since your last visit. The reason that this is not a complete solution is that if you don't visit all the threads with new messages before logging off the forum again, the forum software will not track this and will not put the blue arrow there the next time you log on unless there have been additonal new messages posted. I find this helps a lot, though. Harold

Al, I only replace the lines of the PTE file that contain the transition times. I leave everything else alone, so it loads without any problem. Harold

Mike, Absolutely. But if you're watching a synched 15 minute show for the third time, and what you're really INTERESTED in seeing is the last five minutes of it, it makes sense to use Alt+Tab to do something else for the first ten minutes! FX, I do this all the time when previewing long shows during show development. Harold

You DO get the caption in full-screen mode, Kurt.... not as the caption of the Window (since there is no window) but as the label in the small button on the Taskbar at the bottom of the screen. Try it. Run one of your PTE full-screen presentations and use the Alt+Tab keys to switch away from it and to some other application that you had previously started. See how the PTE presentation is represented on the Taskbar. Then enter something into the caption field by temporarily specifying a windowed presentation. Switch back to specifying a full-screen presentation and run (or preview) it. Use Alt+Tab to switch away from it and see the Taskbar now. Doesn't it look much more professional? Harold

Igor, I want to report a Really Minor Bug . On the Screen tab of the Project Options dialog, there is a field called "Caption of window". This field is grayed-out except if Windowed mode is selected. However, even if Fullscreen mode is selected, the contents of this field appear to be used by PTE! If I am running a PTE show full-screen and use Alt+Tab to switch to a different application so that the taskbar at the bottom of the screen is visible, the caption in the taskbar seems to be taken from this field. The only way to set it correctly is to select Windowed mode, type in a value, and then select Fullscreen mode. This field should probably be available in both Windowed and Fullscreen modes. Harold

I do this kind of thing in Excel by manually editing the .PTE file. If you use the synch window and examine the PTE file, you'll see all the synch times near the front of the .PTE file. To do what you described, I would: 1. Make a backup copy of the .PTE file. 2. Manually strip off everything but the slide transition times in the appropriate lines in the .PTE file. 3. Copy those lines from the .PTE file to a column in Excel. 4. Use Excel to increase the values and create an appropriate column to copy back to the .PTE file. 5. Copy it back. Viola! This takes less than five minutes and it's done. Harold