Barry Beckham

I sort of guessed that as I created my original Utube account from the UK and was currently accessing it from Australia, that may have caused the issue. So I created a new account, but sadly the same error message appears. A Utube video can be created andf uploaded by creating a Vimeo upload and then using the option to create a stand along video and uploading that to Utube, but I would rather do it through the PTE5 software.

I can't wait for our desktop PC's to catch up with us in early January. Unfortunately most of our belongings have to travel by ship and it can take 4 weeks before they even leave the UK. They are now on their way, but I doubt they will clear customs in Australia much before the 10th January. In the meantime we are getting our workstations organaised and ready. I can't wait to get back to some real productive work. I just cannot get on with laptops. They don't inspire me to get creative

After my Ipod issues I thought I would try out the Utube option and I chose to keep a video after uploading. My Utube username and password are correct, because I can get onto Utube no problem, but when I click the next button on the publish to Utube window from PTE5.6 I get the attached error. Has anyone else had this error at all?

It was a setting in my Ipod that I never noticed before. We only bought the Ipods for entertainment on our trip to Australia so we are not very experienced with them and I havn't had the time to spend as I ussually do finding out all the various aspects of an Ipod. Anyway I have it now and the little PTE5 test I made is now working. As is usual it is a simple setting, but one that can be overlooked untill you become experienced with an Ipod. The idea works very well, despite the image size and I can see whay Igor included this as an option in PTE 5.6 I also notice that the animation also appears to work much sweeter, not the physical movement, but the ease of how the animation can be contained within any size or format you make your images. That is going to make is so much easier for newcomers to PTE Well done Igor

OK, I have found the answer myself.

Hello Guys We are just becoming a little more settled in Australia after our move from the UK and although we don't have any of our PC's yet. (still on a ship on the way) I do have a laptop. I have just tried the new PTE5.6 a bit late, but for understrandable reasons and it is looking rather good as usual. However, I cannot get a slide show on my Ipod and would welcome some advice. I can create the video from PTE5 and it makes an MPEG-4 movie. I can play that movie on the PC and I can also add the file to the Ipod Library. It appears in the library and will play in the library. However, when I connect my Ipod up to the PC to sync it, it goes through the sync motions, but the video is nowhere to be found once the process has completed. Because I have been out of the loop, forgive me if I am jumping the gun and that part of the software has not been hooked up yet. If it has, what do I need to do to get the show on my Ipod Any help would be appreciated

I did intend to document our new life for a slide show, but will not be able to get started on that for a few months. Most of our belongings are shipped by boat and can take up to 12 weeks to arrive. However, house purchase here seems to take around a month or so, it really moves quickly. Watch this space as they say I feel a little out of it at the momemt, unable to do anything with the new beta PTE5, just too busy doing other things

Having just moved to Australia I have not had the chance to keep up todate with the forum, but I thought I would chip in here. There are a number of filter techniques that add a great deal of charm to a slide show. I have a couple of examples at the links below. Try the top two slide shows. One used filters available in Photoshop and one uses Alien Skin filters. http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/freestuffdigslidesw3.htm There is also another couple of great watercolour type affects that I have used before, but not with slide shows. What needs to be remembered with all these filters is they rarely give you a great result straight out of the box. You need to work at them a bit using the filters and the other Photoshop tools to get something really special, but it is worth the effort. We have some tutorials at the links below for anyone interested. http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/downloads/...reducenoise.htm http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/photoshopc...ers/filters.htm

Tom In my view the slide show is now far more appealing, but those voices are just not working for me at all. Its easy to impose your own views over another persons slide show and suggest all sorts of things you might have done different. There are three things that I would highlight. The chattering voices, the red flame fires and the brass band music. The red flames are not convincing and for me I think your intentions are having the opposite effect. The flames draw my attention for the wrong reasons. The other music was perfect, but not played with a brass band. What you start off with fits a treat and that also sets a scene that is compromised by the brass. Not easy to find suitable music I guess. This is a far more difficult project than it may first appear.

If the resolution of the PC matches the new monitor and you still cannot see the words correctly the problem may be that your icons are set too large. Make your icons smaller and I think you will find the solution. You will find the options to change these in control panel. With Vista I think you need "Ease of Access"

Peter Sorry I am a bit slow replying at present, but that warble wasn't your voice it was electronic. I have heard that sound before when I was trying to clean up a H4 sample that someone sent me. When I got the background noise of birdsong out, sometime it left that odd sound.

Igor I see what you mean and you may well have the answer, but I am unable to test that right now. As you know we are moving to Australia next weekend and I have most of my equipment ready for the international shippers. However, I will remember that and try it in a couple of months when all my stuff catches up with me in Australia. Thanks for the imput

Ken I can't do any tests at present, just about to leave the UK for Australia Peter No, it has nothing to do with PC power and I will explain why. I use the same desktop PC to record videos and make slide shows. Animation is perfect when displayed on PC screens using this PC. It is not perfect when viewed through a projector from the same PC. Dom I don't think that is the issue either, because the email contact I had today was using a 1024*768 club projector. The AV's were native 1024*768. Now sometimes I will increase the resolution of my PC when showing 1280*1024 shows at demos and you could be onto something. However, why are the same issues present with shows being shown by my contact which are created and displayed at 1024*768. Dave The answer to your question is yes, that is why this issue is so baffling. To be honest I think the PSG thing is a red herring, there are a number of reasons why they might run OK, but god knows what. Usually it is PSG that doesn't display smooth animations even on a PC screen. I have experienced this animation issue on two different projectors and just lived with it as I don't use animation a great deal. It is only the email received this morning that reminded me of it.

Tom I am sure there are other brushes available if we search the internet, never felt the need I have to confess. In fact we can make brushes can't we. Not too sure of that statement though. Thanks for the events list, but you may be a little late, We expect (hope) to exchange contracts today on our house sale and by the following weekend 18th/19th we will be permanent residents of Brisbane Australia. You don't have a Pdf list for the Brisbane area do you?

I received this question today via email. Last night we had our club AV competition. Three of us showed PTE sequences and in all three the animation was faulty when shown through the digital projector. The panning was really jerky and not smooth. The strange thing is that on our laptops and PCs it is smooth and normal. Other sequences made with Proshowgold and other software did not show the same effect. I also notice this problem when I do demos and now I come to think about it, I don't know why I havn't raised this issue myself. I use a fairly powerful desktop (not a laptop) for my demos and my animations run perfectly on screen but not through my Mitsubishi or Epson projector. Any ideas why this should happen and what, if any, is the solution

I was impressed with the iMic recordings. It sounded great to me. Not sure about the recording on the NYM Railway AV. It had a distinct warble that I was not too keen on. The sequence was great though

Personally I don't change the sepia colour on slide shows I make, but I think that is a personal choice of the maker. There is not a great deal of change you can make to a sepia tone and when we move towards red it looks wrong to me. In my view your example looks perfect given the subject. There is nothing wrong with the edge effect your using and it works well with your example, but you can use any of the shaped brushes in Photoshop to create what you like. For a slide show where you going to be placing edge effects on quite a few images, perhaps a ready made one (or three) is the best approach. However, create a new layer above your image and flood that layer with white. Set the blend mode to screen and choose black as your foreground colour. Now you can use any shaped brush to create all sorts of edge efects. If you get it wrong switch to white and the edge effect can be repaired/altered. Try the thick heavy brushes and use the brush opacity down around 2-4%

Peter Yes, they will run in any program that supports third party filters. I did a review of them some time ago and have used them in a few slide shows. The Art of Cornwall being one and Fountains Abbey was another, but those sequences used Alien Skin Snap Art filters. Link to the article below. http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/filters/al...n/alienskin.htm Thing is they are not the cheapest filters, but in my view they are one of the best makers of filters. Link to those slide shows below http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/freestuffdigslidesw3.htm

I appreciate that some third party filters are not cheap, but there is a set of Alien Skin filters called Exposure 2 where you can simulate many different old film effects. There's a turn up for the books eh. Digital, imitating film, whatever next....... Anyway one filter is called old Daguerreotype and it does give and aged feel to the attached image. I think it would work well for a historical slide show.

But with Mp3 files we are not constantly doing that. We may change the project file a little, hardly the same as major work with a Jpg. We need to be careful on forums that we don't over state things and make it sound as though unless we work in wav files we are losing lots of quality. If I am, I or none of you have ever heard anything. I have played loads of sequences in big halls through some quite sophisticated sound systrems and as I have said, I cannot hear any quality issues working entirely in Mp3's.

Tom Yes, that Sepia is the sort of thing I had in mind, but perhaps an older looking sepia, that one looks a little too red to me, but its what I had in mind. You could also experiment with some light filteration to try and add some age, not sure if grain alone will do that, but it costs nothing to try a few images. Best of luck

Tom I enjoyed your show, the venue and variety of images looked pretty good to me. I wish I knew that event was on as I would have liked to have gone too. Why do we always hear about these things a few weeks too late? I think your soundtrack is OK, but I also believe you could get it a little better. Some of the fades are a little too abrupt for my ears. Fades are one thing that has surprised me with sound editing. They often need to be fairly long to really sound good. I think the chatter at the start of your sequence is the one thing that has to go. In my view it doesn't add anything to your sequence and I am not sure what you are trying to convey. Was it the sounds of a real encampment or the fact it was a general public event with them in the background. Either way I don't think that part has worked so well. The one battle (pun not intended) we always have with these events is trying to capture some of the history in our images. For reasons we all understand everything is too pristine and clean and we have a great deal of problem trying to dispel that fact. We have the same issues at places like the Black Country museum and steam railways. I know it is used rather a lot, but if ever a show needed to be in sepia tone, I think this is it. If the images were presented with faded edges like old photographs, you could add a hint of colour every now and again if you wished. Just as though they had been hand tinted as they would have been at the time. A lot of work has gone into this sequence and even if you change nothing, it remains a good sequence. Remember, you cannot produce a work of art by committee, listen to views, but do what pleases you in the end.

Umberto I use Vista business and find the same issues as you do with regards to a locked music file. It isn't the be all and end of course, all we need to do is change the name of the sound file each time we adjust it and re-save it. However, there are times when for speed I don't want to do that and I miss the opportunity to just hit save from my sound editor and be back in PTE in seconds. With the greatest respect to experienced users of PTE on this site I think that the music quality issue is a little over stated. I have thousands of music tracks on my PC and listen to lots of it and I can't hear the difference between Mp3 music sampled at 128 Kpbs or at higher levels. I am listening through a good quality amplifier and quality headphones where sound quality is far more evident. I have put together loads of soundtracks and have never used Wav files at all and I have never detected any quality issues. Those who know me are aware that I am pretty keen on image quality and the same goes with the soundtrack too. I would be onto it in a flash if I thought my slide show sound was below par. As this seems to be a Vista issue, perhaps it isn't a PTE thing at all and Igor may not be able to do anything about it. I have noticed that the increased security of Vista does seem to throw up a number of small odd things different from XP.

There is a lot of technical debate about this issue, but can anyone provide some links to slide shows where live sound recording has been used? I would be very interested in seeing/hearing those shows and I guess others would too. This will allow those of us who are not turned on with technical specifications to actually hear the results used in a slide show so we can draw our own conclusions using our ears. Can anyone provide a link to a show and just let us know what recorder was used?

I think Umberto has a point here as I miss the ability to do exactly what he says he wants. To make a quick and simple change to the soundtrack and have it straight back in PTE directly from the sound editor. We always could with PTE4. I personally think this quality argument is overstated and anyway that is the authors choice. Its just a suggestion. I have always worked as Umberto would like to and have never had any issues with sound quality. Well, not to my ears anyway. I applaud the effort put into wave files to retain quality, shame we don't see the same effort with the images.