Barry Beckham

Better to leave the audience wanting than bored to death tho?

Called Shoreline Very simple, quite short http://www.beckhamdigital.com.au/store/pc/Page-5-Latest-c100.htm

I helped a guy sort a problem with his slide show in PTE8 a few weeks ago and was surprised with what the ultimate cause was and what I experienced may help others perhaps. The show was quite lengthy at 15 minutes long and it had a music track added at that length. Symptoms : Slide show played perfectly within PTE via the mini player, but the executable file played with no music. Actions: 1. Imported the sound file to Audacity and exported it back out and into PTE - No change to the fault 2. Imported the sound file to Audacity and exported it back out and into PTE and made some changes to the quality settings - No change to the fault 3. Tried a new piece of music of roughly the same length as the original - No change to the fault. 4. Tried another much shorter track in the slide show - The Show played OK and the music could be heard. 5. I doubled up the track of music that worked to make it extend to around 15 minutes - The Slide show played OK, but not sound again. 6. I opened the folder of images in Photoshop and used the image processor to make a copy, save each one again as a jpg, with a compression of 8. The Slide Show then played perfectly, even using the original track created by the author. It appears that some unknown fault with a Jpeg image, prevented the music from playing. It then appeared obvious that the problem image must have been quite a way into the slide show because a shorter track that didn't quite reach the offending image played OK. As soon as a second music track was added to reach the end of the show. NO music would play. I think most people faced with a music fault like this would spend their time looking at the music as my friend did until he ran out of ideas. So a dodgy Jpeg image can cause music not to play outside of PTE. (as far as I am aware from the original author, the offending image, visually played ok in the slide show)

Thanks Peter Why didn't I think to look down there

I must admit that I miss the mark all items as read option too.

Igor It's noticeably faster than the previous server, so well worth the effort.

There is the answer from Artem This is not a bug. You just need to delay the start of two smaller video clips. By default they start at the beginning of a slide. Select the video in O&A editor, and set 'Offset' parameter to 7 seconds. Clear concise and fully understood. Thank you Artem End........................ Mountain out of a molehill comes to mind sometimes on this forum.

What different approach?

Artem Well that was a surprise. I was treating the videos like a still image which is what I use most of the time and the offset never occurred to me as a solution. However, now you have put me right and I stop and think things through, I can see the logic. Video really is a whole new ball game isn't it.

I wonder if I have found a bug. I was placing two inset videos over the top of a full screen video and the object of the exercise was planning the video lengths to ensure the final file size was no bigger than necessary. I am working with full slide duration. The full screen background video was planned to be 18 seconds in length and that was optimized by PTE. So the full slide duration was also set at 18s The inset images were trimmed via PTE to be 12 seconds in length, reduced in resolution to 960*540 and optimized. The first keyframe for the inset videos was set at 7s into my total 18s of time. They were both set to take 3s to fade on screen, which takes them to keyframe time 10s. Subtracting 7s (their starting point) from 18s suggests that as long as the inset videos were 11 seconds or longer they would play right to the end of the full slide duration. They are 12 seconds in length, but they will not play in full and stop well short of the end of the 18s time. To get the two inset images to continue until the end of the 18s keyframe time I had to make them 18s in length. Using a keyframe to mark the position when the videos stop, seems to indicate they are stopping at the 12 second point along the keyframe. Well before they should and well before the fade out to the next image. I have uploaded a short zipped file of the problem. https://www.mediafir...sbabb7biz40lvhc

http://www.mediafire...Nurburgring.zip Mac and iPad versions now here http://www.beckhamdigital.com.au/store/pc/The-Nurburgring-100p588.htm

Igor Sorry, but I not sure of what size the exe was. I as looking at it on another persons computer and even they were not the author. I was just asked to try and help find the issue, but It had a lot of images in it. However, I would be surprised if it was as big as 600MB

Dave Yes, of course your right, but I have just turned my attention to making some tutorials on adding video and one of the first things I find the need to warn people about is something that MAY trip them up. A newcomer not used to adding video will presumably drag it down as they would a picture.

Igor I notice that when a video is dragged into the slide list and the optimisation of that video is requested, the optimisation window has always opened up behind the PTE main screen on my computer. I have got used to this now, but until you realise what has happened, you would think that the option hasn't worked. Most of the time when a person does this, they will be waiting for it to finish so they can proceed, so why doesn't the screen open on top where all can see it.?

I helped a guy sort a problem with his slide show in PTE8 yesterday and was surprised with what the ultimate cause was and what I experienced may help others perhaps. The show was quite lengthy at 15 minutes long and it had a music track added at that length. Symptoms : Slide show played perfectly within PTE via the mini player, but the executable file played with no music. Actions: 1. Imported the sound file to Audacity and exported it back out and into PTE - No change to the fault 2. Imported the sound file to Audacity and exported it back out and into PTE and made some changes to the quality settings - No change to the fault 3. Tried a new piece of music of roughly the same length as the original - No change to the fault. 4. Tried another much shorter track in the slide show - The Show played OK and the music could be heard. 5. I doubled up the track of music that worked to make it extend to around 15 minutes - The Slide show played OK, but not sound again. 6. I opened the folder of images in Photoshop and used the image processor to make a copy, save each one again as a jpg, with a compression of 8. The Slide Show then played perfectly, even using the original track created by the author. It appears that some unknown fault with a Jpeg image, prevented the music from playing. It then appeared obvious that the problem image must have been quite a way into the slide show because a shorter track that didn't quite reach the offending image played OK. As soon as a second music track was added to reach the end of the show. NO music would play. I think most people faced with a music fault like this would spend their time looking at the music as my friend did until he ran out of ideas. So a dodgy Jpeg image can cause music not to play outside of PTE. (as far as I am aware from the original author, the offending image, visually played ok in the slide show)

That doesn't seem to do it for me once the slide show has been uploaded.

Bill Is there a way for the user to remove a slide show that they have posted. I can't find anything? Or is that something you can do upon request

Just tried the two slide shows we made for the last camera club meeting, created ISO's and burnt them to DVD, no problems

Bill I understand that with this type of software we have to work with what we have, not always what we would like. I have found in life that what makes me stumble, usually makes others stumble too. In fact someone on my forum thought he had published a show to slide show club, but clearly something went wrong with his submission too. User error I am sure like me.. It is just that it is unusual for tags to be a must have field and that is what threw me. I hardly looked at the feint guidance and when I did, that was the point when the penny dropped. Perhaps there is a need for something in the guidelines and info.

If you do a screen grab of the largest thumbnail size you can find on the Slide Show Club site and measure it. The size appears to 120 pixels square, so to my mind it makes no sense to put up a large picture. Use the crop tool in your image editor to pre-crop a size of 120-150 pixels square. At least that way you get to decide what part of the image the thumbnail displays.

Am I the only one who seems to have so much trouble uploading a slide show to this new site. The time I have spent on this over a number of days is now seriously giving me the hump. I am not exactly inexperienced in these types of uploads as it is much the same as my web site, but I have more failures than successes right now. I uploaded a couple of demos yesterday, but not without incident or a whole heap of time spent doing so. This morning I tried again using Windows Explorer and step 1 appeared to go according to plan. Next I added a 150*150 pixel thumbnail and that appeared on the upload page too. I added the required text and then selected Add Submission and was taken back to the disclaimer page and I had to start all over again. I did the same thing again using Google Chrome and exactly the same thing has happened. Something is wrong somewhere, either me or the system being used, but it's just too frustrating to continue Solution Found: It is essential that you add at least one tag and while it does say that on the page, it does not indicate that it is an essential part of the upload procedure. Even if the tag is missed, it's a bit of a pain that the whole thing aborts rather that the field highlighting to allow the omission to be put right. . So up-loaders be warned, don't forget to add AT LEAST ONE TAG

Well it makes a lot more sense to spend your time in Camtasia finding out, rather some convoluted way that is likely to take you considerably longer.

All you require, to produce quality videos is there in Camtasia as I have already said. Trying to make videos with a combination of Camtasia, Audacity and PTE doesn't make any sense. Camtasia was designed and created specifically for what you want to do, PTE wasn't.

40-50MB will get you at least 25 minutes of video with a screen size of 1600*900 and great quality, straight from Camtasia. What you're faffing with all these conversions for is beyond me. You have the Roll Royce of screen capture, use it.

It happens in the Objects and Animation screen, because usually you're watching the preview at 75 or 50% and that will make the moire effect worse. You need to make any animated images that you want to place over the blurred background no bigger than they really need to be. Then the smoother/sharper option will have an effect. The real test is what shows when you view the slide show at full size