Barry Beckham

Eric The tool is like finger painting, to if there is a little contrast or an edge that causes the moire effect, you can smudge just that tiny part with a small brush and kill the moire. The bit you smear is so small its not seen on the main image. I used to use it a lot in the early days of animation, but as I said yesterday, the moire seems to be very rare these days

Gary I downloaded and tried the PC show and it works fine

I liked the challenge--no darkroom to fix mistakes Well all I can say to that is you really must make a tutorial and tell me how you do this, because it is often well beyond me and the equipment I have.What we view is very different to what our cameras are capable of recording and image manipulation/darkroom work is a means of closing that gap. I find I do have to adjust the tones my camera records because it often cannot record them correctly. Now I use a computer, once I used a darkroom, so I guess I must have made loads of mistakes. Yes it can fix mistakes and do other things too, but to say you get it right in the camera and don't use anything to fix mistakes, well words fail me. Have a look at this slide show http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/slideshow/slideshow/exposure/exposurePC.zip let me see if I can change your mind

Well, to be honest I was unsure what to do with them. You can't make a slide show with a story, ie start , middle and end and the only thing is to just put the images to music. For some reason that didn't seem enough, not sure why. I was happy with the images and wanted to show them, so chose that path. I considered adding the bird names, but decided not to. Words would have distracted and most people wouldn't recall the names the next day.

I wasn't suggesting batch cropping at all.

Eric One way you can test your show to see if there will be any issues on a monitor that does run 1920*1080 is to view your animation in the Objects and Animation screen, with the size set to 100%. You won't be able to see the entire screen in total, but it may be enough to track down trouble spots. Just one thought though. A few years ago dealing with the Moire effect was something I always included on my tutorials for PTE. Last time I went to do the same with PTE 7 I had a devil of a job to create the Moire effect. I don't know what Igor has done in the engine room of PTE, but whatever is was its darn good. PTE is now miles better on that score than it used to be.

Gary That is all fair enough, we all have our own ways of doing things and if it gives you the result your looking for, who is anyone else to say you should do things another way, but I hope you don't mind if go ahead and do just that. You said:- I do use Photoshop CS5 for Levels and USM, mainly. I also use Faststone (free program) for batch renaming, resizing and quality reduction (80 or so). This gets them ready for PTE. I've got many other photo programs but these are my main ones. I don't get too fancy (I don't know how to get fancy). I am not at all surpirsed that you don't know how to get fancy in Photoshop, as you put it. In my view its not likely you ever will. You have the best program on the planet that will do everything you want to do (CS-5) , but you choose to use all these different editing programs. Ever heard the saying jack of all trades master of none? What I have found in my travels is that those who use lots of progams to do the same thing (usually because they have means to aquire them, if you know what I mean) never get the best from any of them. There isn't enough hours in the day to become competant with them all. Of course some claim they are, but they spend so much time becoming a technical expert that they rarely produce anything of value. I appreciate that once you know how to do something in one program, we can be reluctant to learn all over again in another, but by their very nature, image editing programs are all very similar. Give some thought to dumping all those other programs and use the Rolls Royce you already have installed. The one thing Photoshop does have over many others is a vast array of automated tasks. Perhaps there is a way that you can use those in time to speed up the process of creating a slide show. eg. I have an action that will run on a single button press in CS-5. It will save an image as a Jpeg at any level compression I desire. It will also save the file into the folder where I am making my slide show, so I don't have that tedious browsing around my PC. It even removes that image from the screen revealing the next ready for me to crop to shape. I think DaveG said that in the event that you later want to make a change to that cropped image, its a 20 second job to redo it, or change it.

At the top of the page here http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/slideshows_3.html

I have a sheet of plywood down my shed, which has a hole in the middle. I need to block that hole up to use the sheet of wood. The hole measures 8 inches by 4.5inches (16:9 format) The good news is that I have a spare piece of plywood that is 8 inches by 5.3 inches (3:2) that I can use to plug the hole, but for the life of me, I can't make the second bit of wood fit the original hole correctly. I am baffled, can anyone help Hang on, the penny has just dropped, if I cut some of the wood off the edge of the spare bit, it fits.

Gary I don't have any experience of the software your using to prepare images, but can I risk another suggestion. If the majority of the photographic/AV world around you is using Photoshop or Elements, you may want to think about doing the same. Sometimes is great to be different, but sometimes, not so much. Elements isn't that expensive and you can crop and size your images in one simple operation. You can then easily make your images truly 16:9 and put all these issues behind you. I have made a short video for you that may help. You can download it from MedieFire below. http://www.mediafire.com/?clx9po2gom5uhad

Eric I applied a pan and zoom to the image you posted and struggled to create the same issue you describe. You can still smooth out those Moire wrinkles with the sharper/smoother option which took the place of the mipmapping from earlier versions. However, there are some other options: 1. The image you posted is twice the size of the 16:9 HD format. This is quite a lot, unless you intend a long animation. You could dial back your intentions a little, make the image a little bit smaller and you may find the moire effect will disappear. 2. If you previewing a 16:9 show on a monitor less than 1920*1080 or perhaps you are just looking at the animation in the Objects and Animation screen set at 75% or less. Then you are compressing your image even more and you are more likely to see the moire effect in these circumstances. View the show on a full size 16:9 HD screen and you may not see them. 3. If you do get a little moire in an isolated spot, take the image into Photoshop/Elements and look for the smudge tool. Used at a low setting I find the offending area can be softened to the degree that you cannot see it (too small), but its enough to kill any Moire effect. In fact I think its the only use I have ever used that tool for. It saves having to soften an entire image just for a very small spot.

Tom I can't offer much advice as I don't use Itunes for my PTE music. However, I did have a recent contact who had all sorts of issues with a music track and from memory he experienced much the same as you. He also converted his music via iTunes. It just so happened that I had the very same piece of music and when I provided it to him as an Mp3 every worked perfectly. We came to the conclusion that there was some glitch in the music and assumed that taking it from iTunes was the cause. Can you locate/create the track in another way

Gary what is wrong with resizing it to 1920x1080 Nothing and that is my point. If you want a slide show of 16:9 format then you should pre size your images to 16:9 format at 1920*1080 to retain the very best quality and only make images larger if you want to animate them. Forgive me if I have mis-understood, but that didn't appear to be what you were doing at the start of the thread. In that case you have no need of % of the slide show. You originally said that My camera's images need about a 118% amount to move the left and right edges of the image to fit the aspect ratio window in PTE. They shouldn't need that at all if you do actually size your images at 1920*1080. You now seem to be indicating that you do size your images to 1920*1080 and in that case I am even more confused because I thought you indicated that you felt that took too long in an image editor.

I do this quite often as I use PTE for tutorials. I just make three shows, the first programmed, then the manual one for the live speaking and then the end part. Its not as though there isn't a gap between all three and I can't help thinking your making things over complicated.

Well, I have been around digital photography a long time and also Photoshop and rightly or wrongly I will always size my images to the size they will be seen. I really can't see any point in spending a large amount of money on a camera to deliver quality images, then spend time and effort to take pictures, then put them in a slide show trusting to luck to some degree. Sorry, that doesn't sound quite how I meant it, no offense intended. Broadly speaking (very broadly) there are two types of slide show. Image based and story based. Story based slide shows are not quite so dependant on great quality images, because the story/commentary generally carries the whole thing. In image based slide shows and from what I see, they contribute 95% of what is posted, the images must be really, really good, if the slide show is to have appeal and staying power. Why give up ANY chance of that to save a few minutes.

I don't see an issue with the final quality on an image whether you use my method or doing it in Photoshop. Do you? I can't say I have ever tried to be honest Gary. One thing that I do notice in Photoshop is that if I have a high resolution image on screen that has been compressed (for want of a better word) into a smaller space, I do see a slight difference in the images. I see a slight softening of the high resolution image, but I can't say I have ever carried out any tests to see if this is transferred to PTE. If your a regular Photoshop user you may be aware that if you apply text and text effects like shadows and bevels to a image. You often need to view that image at actual size to see the text crisp and clean. At lower magnifications it can often look a bit crinkly. I have always resized images to the size I wish to use them, I suppose because in the early days we had no choice if we wanted the slide show to run smoothly at 1024*768. Things are different now and if you get the result you want, then I am a great believer in staying with what works for you. Having said that I confess to being a little confused after reading a later addition you made. I assumed your approach was to place images directly from your camera into your slide show, so they would be far greater in pixel dimensions than 1920*1080, but later in the thread you say:- Yes, I resize my images to 1920 on the long side, to reduce the overall size of the PTE exe file. If you do that before increasing the width to 118% as you described, arn't you affecting image quality by displaying pictures oversize, or have I missed something?

Gary Well whose to say what method is best, if any, its the end result that counts and too many AV enthusiasts don't give any thought to how one image appears over another, so at least you are considering that aspect. Its just that the tool you mention is one that for a long time I have wondered what on earth its good for. I prefer to prepare my images in Photoshop and I use layers a lot to fine tune transitions. I don't find it a chore to crop images to the desired size.

Gary I notice your comment has been posted all day, but as yet no-one has replied. I wonder if they are wondering why and are afraid to ask At a risk of poking my head above the parapet, why would you want to do this? I don't understand and I suspect others don't either. If you do as you have suggested there will be one of two outcomes. 1. You will reduce the quality of your images by making them larger than the slide show they were created for. 2. If they were already created larger, by enlarging them as you describe you effectively crop quite a bit from the top and bottom, which you have no control over.

Well, I suppose most users have a commercial use for the software and then £168 isn't a great deal of money.

I never looked at the price to be honest. When I got the 64 bit machine and found that MMB that I had been using for years would no longer work I had to move on. I seem to recall I struggled a little to find something that I could be certain would meet my needs and that one did. MMB may be cheap, but they are not developing it any longer and with so many people turning to 64 bit, its as good as useless to many now. However, it is a great bit of software for 32 bit users.

I can vouch for Multi Media Builder and used it for some time, but its now reached the end of its development and I found it would not work on a 64 bit machine. I reluctantly had to change to something else and chose Autorun Pro Enterprize 2. Once I got used to Autorun Pro, I found that I liked it just a bit better than MMB. I use it constantly for every video tutorial I make and I have found that it meets all of my needs. If anyone wnats to see how it looks and works, shout http://www.longtion.com/

Peter I don't see it that way, they are both presentation methods which is different to image editing. As always just one persons opinion.

Dave elitist ? What for having an opinion !! I think it's just common sense. Unless you know of one software program that is a master for everything you want to do on the computer. I would much rather see the essential parts of PTE improved, the sound which Igor is working on now, the text options which are limited and perhaps even give PTE to sort of functionality that Powerpoint has for those who would like to use it as a teaching aid.

Dave Well, they couldn't do what has been suggested anyway, because you cannot make a Mask of that complexity in PTE, you need an image editor for that. what about the beginner who wants to import images directly from a compact and has no editor? should igor cater for him/her also. No every day of the week and twice on Sundays, or PTE will be turned into a Jack of all trades and master of none. It should stay with what it is good at, presenting images in the best way possible.

but wouldn't you need an image editor to create the mask in the first place. Once you have done that, why complicate things by using a mask in PTE, just create 2 images, its not as though we are hard pressed to keep file sizes down.