Barry Beckham

You need to make a back-up to Zip of your project. Transport your project to another PC and try making a DVD there. If it works then you know its something on your PC, if it doesn't it may be a rougue picture or music file in your project. I would offer a small wager it will work OK on another machine. Been there, done that, got the T shirt.

I was going to offer another suggestion too, but my PC froze as I was completing the post. I have experienced some problems myself along these lines in the past. I created a DVD with no problems, but then the next one locked up and would not complete. I found that there was some files (I assume they were temp files) left behind in the user folder. When I removed them, the DVD completed perfectly. I also had two similer questions via email from my own web site recently and I passed on what I will suggest now. Both people reported that my solution cured their problem. Go to menu builder and open the options and then the program tab (see attached) Follow the address string you see in the box to locate any old files created by PTE. You may have to show hidden files thought, as when you get so far the folder your looking for is hidden.

I don't know if this will help http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/audiovisual/dvd/dvdprobs.htm

I am trying to use pan & zoom in some of my slides, but find if I use a mode of other than linear, the pan or zoom does not start and end at the appropriate keyframe, but works from the beginning of the slide to the end of the slide, including transistion effects. I have tried various combinations of modes for the three options of pan, zoom and rotate and the animation only seems to work from the appropriate keyframes if all three are set to linear. I would really like to be using smooth. A search in the various tutorials and forums has yielded no clues. Is there some setting I am missing? Alex I hope I havn't misunderstood your question. (but works from the beginning of the slide to the end of the slide, including transistion effects) You can have your animation start and stop at any point, either after your image is fully on screen and stop the animation before the next transition, by clicking and sliding the blue start and end flags. See screen grab

While the size of the file in pixels is an issue I struggle with (currently my laptop, while not "old", has 2 GB of memory and is dual core, but doesn't have the speediest graphics card), the issue I find most troublesome is the crop factor. I really am not crazy about the amount of top and bottom that must be cut off to fit the 16:10 or 16:9 proportions, particularly since it is almost impossible to do a batch of images that way with some sort of automation. If your making an AV that is a bit more than slapping some images to music, you should not even think of batch resizing. Why would anyone give up such a huge creative part of the process and hand over what is to be seen on the screen to the automatics of a computer. Nuts, if you ask me? I find that I need to manually crop so as not to lose important parts of the image. While I love to see images (and slideshows) full-screen, most of my latest shows have ended up being 3:2 so that they only require downsizing. But if I am making a DVD for sale or for family distribution, then I tend to go with 4:3. Ultimately, it just seems impossible to come up with a one-size-fits-all show. Manually cropping is the only way to go, but while I agree up to a point, with the format issue, you have to loose only 80 pixels from the height of the 16:10 format (1920*1200) from 3:2 (1920*1280). Thats only 40 pixels top and bottom and most of the time, that isn't significant. While this will not meet all needs, I think there is almost a one size fits all. Stay with your 3:2, if you find that format best for you and live with the small areas around the PC screen that is not covered when the show is played back on 16:10, 16:9, 5:4 or 4:3 monitors. Its no great problem really and the same with TV viewing. If you really have a need to make a DVD and fit the entire screen, then you can always make a copy of your already made show and crop the copy to 1920*1080 On the subject of file size/resolution, I am currently working on a show using full-size images. The show has quite a few slow pans and zooms and seems a bit jerky on my computer. I am in the process of downsizing but am having to figure out the optimum size for the zooms so that they don't pixelate. I don't have a hard and fast rule as to what I would download, but my internet connection (like a good number of people I know and meet in my travels) is wireless (a Verizon broadband card). I don't believe it is safe to assume that most people (unless they live in metropolitan areas) have high-speed connections. I would probably balk at downloading anything over 100 MB, and would need to carefully consider even that. Another consideration is that most folks (at least those on satellite or wireless) have some sort of data download metering so they will be selective about file size maximum. (I know that most young adults probably don't give it much consideration, but then I doubt many of them are downloading slideshows.) Your right, I doubt the youngsters are downloading 100MB slide shows, they are too busy downloading 2.3 gigbyte feature films. The optimum size for a zoom is that the image must be as big, as the highest zoom you want to use. So as you zoom in. you do not go past the point where your now stretching too few pixels, over too large an area. If you go to the size position in pixels inside the Objects and Animation screen you can set your image at its highest size so you can see how much you can actually zoom, While its set at 100% make that your animation end point and your done. Be careful though as many deep zooms are boring, they go on and on an on just because the ability to create them is there, not to add any value to the end product. If 3:2 is your favoured format you can always make up a small scale chart. 3:2 format will be achieved with all of those in the list below and after a short while, you will soon see how many pixels it takes to create the style of zoom that you want. Please ask yourself one question before you spend 30 seconds zooming into some fuzzy detail buried deep in the image. Is a zoom of this depth going to enhance what I am producing? 1920*1280 2220*1480 2600*1733 3000*2000 2840*2560

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go outside and shout at some clouds Sorry, lost in translation. I don' know what that means

Dave No, the Cyclone was over a 1000k away from us, but I think we are in for some rain this week because of it. We were up there a couple of months ago and stopped over night at one or two of the places badly hit. PTESize I wonder if the losses which are going to take place are greater when a show is made with 4000x3000 images than when made with carefully prepared 1920x1080 (when displayed on Joe Blogg's 1280x1024)? I tried it quickly with the high resolution slide show that I had already made. I put a 6000*4000 image alongside an identical one at 1920*1200. I can't see any difference in the two images as I switch between them. In fact I went back and marked the second shot, because I wanted to be sure I was skipping between two sperate images. Its an interesting debate, but surprisingly I agree with Eric. By the time we may want to update a show for larger screens our own skill levels would have moved on, PTE will be different and most of the time we will be more inspired by a different project to maintain interest. I have returned to an older slide show, but the remake used nothing of what I previously produced. I use PTE quite a bit in my tutorial disks these days and have done so quite a bit on a recent one. I make then at 1920*1200, but view them on an old 1024*768 monitor to make sure they look OK and I never have any issues with quality. As you know, I am pretty fussy about that. Argonaut After reading your post, I tried another test with a different image and I am not seeing what you describe. There is nothing between the images from 6000*4000 and 1920*1200. Well, not with the couple I tried. Its an interesting concept though. It only seems a short time ago that I was using Kai Power Show, anyone remember that? The maximum size you could go was 800*600 and here we are talking about using images 6000*4000. However, I will stay with 1920*1200 and if and when that needs reviewing I will.

P.S. on Barry's point about monitor sizes etc. Regardless of the size of the monitor in inches and the resolution of the images used to make a show "something" is reducing it to 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 be it PTE or your graphics card or the TVs Media Player. I'm more inclined to want to be in charge of any downsizing and see the results "pixel for pixel" the way I produced them. Just my opinion. I am not sure what you mean here, can you elaborate a bit as I am probably missing the obvious. If I make a show for myself at 1920*1200 and its seen on a 1024*768 monitor, how do I stay in charge? It has to be downsized to fit the screen.

I can't see a box here, looks more like a picture frame to me.

I suggested a re-think along these lines some time ago, suggesting 1920*1200 or 1920*1080 was better advice to be giving in the light of software and PC improvements. The idea didn't exactly inspire forum members, but that was when most were still using 1024*768 and the leap was a bit too far perhaps. I have already done this making a slide show with images directly from a Canon 1Ds Mk3 so we are talking 6000*4000 pixels or around that. I included animation to see how it was handled and as long as the animation is gentle and measured it works fine on my PC, but then is a new one and I would expect it to handle the file sizes. The Moire effect may be a bit of a problem for anyone viewing these large shows on small monitors. I could see some evidence of it on my 27in screen and I am not a fan of sweating blood to create sharp images and then softening them, just to allow animation. What I did suggest recently, was to create the bare bones of the slide show with images directly from the digital camera, then use save to zip to make a smaller version for general consumption, keeping the large file for future proofing. I am looking at what I produced a few months ago and it contains 10 images from my camera and already PTE says it will be a 122MB file. If we adopted this approach, at least one member would never see a slide show again.

I have this vision of a trout fisherman, who has just cast his fly on the surface of the river, during duffers fortnight, but the fish, seem to be off their feed.

BB Yes, you are missing something. Make your slide shows at a higher resolution than 720. The two formats you may want to look at are 1920*1080 (HD size) or 1920*1200 (many moderm monitors run at this format) The reason is that you can always reduce the size of your slide show for any other projects, but once you make a slide show at 720 pixels your stuck with that rather small size. Its like setting the quality option on your camera low because you only need low res images for a particular project. Once shot, your stuck with low res images. Shoot the images as high a resultion as you can, because you can always downsize but not upsize..Same with slide shows For example, If you made your show at 1920*1080 and a little later started dabbling in Blue Ray disks or DVD's for modern TV's. Then you will be well set for all eventualities. I have a tutorial slide show on my web site, that might help a little. Its the 6th one down on the page below, called image size http://www.beckhamdi...digslidesw4.htm

Purchase PicturesToExe and you can install it on both your desktop and Laptop. Most of us already do that, so you should have no concern.

Douglas This isn't an idea I would ever recommend to anyone wanting to learn any new software. If you already have tutorials, why not use what you have then? Are they PicturesToExe tutorials? Is there something wrong with them that makes you want to look at disecting an already made slide show?

Eric. Why would I bite your head off because you give me the answer I am looking for. I'm not from Yorkshire........ If I don't know something and a kind person points it out to me, I don't get annoyed I am gratefull. Its only arrogant people who believe they know everything. However, its not that setting I was asking for. In your screen grab you can hardly see the outside area I meant. See the two screen grabs enclosed. Igor. Did you try "Save and Use by Default" funtion in the Properties tab of Image object? This will automatically add border to all new images. Thanks Igor, that is a setting that got in well under my radar, thanks for pointing that out. Thanks also for the advice with the sound. I'll take a look at another way of feeding sound to my amplifier.

I was using the border option in the Objects and Animation screen to add a one pixel line in gray to various images, but I became frustrated that every time I went into the controls it went back to the default setting. Is it possible to make this option stay on the last settings used. It would be so much more convenient. In the Objects and animation screen and also the mini player, I would like an option (like Photoshop) to change the colour of the backgrounds. (the area oustide the picture area). There are some effects that I can only see clearly in a full screen preview. I would love to be able to change those background colours so I can see them in the mini player. I also use Headphones a lot, while working in PTE and there lots of noises that seem to be caused by PTE. Is that just my system and if not, is that necessary?

Bert That was an interesting slide show. What a place, I would love to be let loose in there for a few hours. Quite a shame to see it going to rack and ruin, but on the other hand as a pristine building it wouldn't have half the appeal. There looks to be lots of salvagable stuff still in place. I enjoyed the show, but do have a couple of comments, the first of which is that you won't please all the people all the time:rolleyes:. I thought the HDR worked very well with this subject, but the colours were a little overpowering for me at times. I always take my Photomatix HDR images into Photoshop via Camera Raw. I find that helps me to temper some of the worst effects of HDR, like excessive colour, noise and sharpness. I thought the animation was measured and was just about right for my tastes. I like animation delicate and I havn't seen any fast zooms they add anything to a slide show. They also don't always work so well with images this size. By the way it was nice to see full screen images filling my Dell monitor too. The show looks impressive at that size. I thought the music worked very well with the haunting appearance of the place. I would loved to have seen a few close ups of the super textures inside the building, rust, flaking paint etc and the white line around the edge is a bit powerful for me. I am a supported of a thin line, but not too thick or too bright. Have you thought of making it a dull grey. It will still do the job, but without causeing any distractions. Lastly, if I ever come to NY, will you take me there?

Edwin I hope I have your question right here, but there is a blue icon down at the extreme bottom right of the main PTE window. That will take you into a lightbox where you can drag and drop images and change the order at any time.

Jerry and Lois Your not going to be able to do what your want here. You cannot have a logo appear in the same place on every image, if some of those images do not fill the frame. Unless you accept the text partly on the image and partly on the border that you mentioned. You would have to do what Peter suggests and apply the logo to every image, but if the images and text are different sizes, that would look pretty awful I would think. It would almost defeat the very reason for using PTE in the first place. I assume you want to use this method of presentation because of the visual benefits, but the logo will destroy that, to a large degree. Do you mind me asking why the logo is so important and then someone may come up with an alternative idea that might suite your needs

Ray I see you posted this query on the Beckham forum too, but don't seem to be getting many answers. Its unusual for the key not to work, once you have one. That isn't a typical problem for PTE. However. your posts here and on the beckhamforum have tailed off. Sometimes that means a solution has been found. Have you stumbled on an error you were making putting in the key? I have fallen into lots of those traps before, and I was going to ask that you check that you are in fact copying the entire key. Go back to the original email and follow the instructions once again. If your using windows 7 try installing the software again as an administrator. If you have a solution, please let us know you are now up and running

Snapcam Can I ask what you are concerned about, with regard the public saving the show?

I have no idea what an iPod touch is, but you have answered my question. I have never looked at the iPad in any detail, just assumed is was a small mac.

No-one seems to be mentioning the Mac version of a PTE slide show. Am I right in thinking that a slide show made for a Mac, cannot be played on an iPad. It must be converted to video first???

Round the world trip is it