Barry Beckham

I was not suggesting this for myself as I do understand what they all do, I was thinking more of the brand new user

I appreciate it must be very difficult to come up with a word or two that can convery what the tool or option does and if we took a poll I am sure forum members could add many preferences. In relation to the sound editing I wonder if Cut from Start would be a better choice than Start Time and Cut from End better than Duration. Offset could be come Add Silence at start. Perhaps as PTE is now becoming more advanced tool tips should be considered too. Having said this I do also appreciate that the sound controls in 6.5 may have a limited shelf life and therefore this may be a wasted excersize. Tool tips though can be quite useful even to those who are more familiar with the software. On another point, I wonder if an issue I came across this weekend is something odd on my laptop or others have found the same problem. I did a couple of demos at the 2010 PSQ convention over the past weekend, which is the Photographic Societies of Queensland. I had files pre-prepared for the demo I did on PTE and thought I would use PTE 6.5 beta 7, so current users could see the sound editing. I don't usually use a laptop for demos, but I had to at this event to fit in with many lectures throughout the day. As the laptop only had one drive I located the files I prepared in advance in Desktop>public>2010demo When I went to locate the files from within PTE Nothing would show in the file tree apart from the desktop icon. Although there was a little plus sign beside the desktop icon it would not expand to allow me to get to any of the folders or files there. I thought it was a proplem with 6.5 and opened version 6, but that was the same. I quickly had to copy the files via Explorer onto the C drive to get at them. Is this some peculiarity on my laptop or something within PTE? Any ideas

I have used Audition to do that in the past and just tried it on a PTE exe file. Nothing happens and it seems to be only looking for just a video file. I suppose if you converted your slide show to a video first it may then work, but I think to be a practical thing it needs to be simpler than that.

Yachtsman I am an Audacity user too, but it hasn't stopped me from taking to the PTE sound editing. I would suggest that for every 100 slide shows made, perhaps one needs the facility to fade music in strategic places. Already, making demos and the more conventional slide shows is easier and quicker to complete using PTE sound. Especially the adding of silence at the start of a track. You really should try it and not worry about those who have troubles with it. It really is quite easy once you spend a few minutes with it. JEB I see this much the same as you, but in time perhaps we can see the same facilities we now have in Audacity. Especially if Igor's intentions is to add all the sound editing to the time line. Perhaps we will have a Slide List, a Time Line and a Soundtrack switchable in much the same position as the time line is now. One thought that came to me a couple of days ago is this. Currently we can effectively chop off a section at the front of the music or the end and fade it in/out. We can use the offset to effectively place silence at the start of our music. (probably the most useful of all) We can mix two or more pieces of music using crossfade and we can lower the volume of the entire track, another great option in my view when you need some music, but when it is not essential to the plot. Just background. Until PTE is able to allow us to reduce volume in strategic areas of our soundtrack, I wondered how possible it would be to have a facility that would allow us to export our sound track out of PTE. You can see the reasons. Imagine you are almost finished making a slide show and then get the idea for a little commentary or sound effects to be added to your sound track. You would effectively have to start from scratch in Audacity to achieve that. If we could export the PTE sound track out as one Mp3 we could use an external editor for the jobs PTE cannot do yet. The Time Line Has anyone else had these thoughts when working in the time line. I often find that I want to be able to see the next slide before I hit the new transition button to add it to the time line. Especially important when using PTE as a medium for tutorials I find. I need a reminder to help my decision making on where it is placed on the time line.

Claudia Am I right in understanding you here? Are you really saying that you put full size jpegs into your slide show. By saying that, most of us would expect you to mean, images direct from your camera with no cropping or re-sizing applied. If the answer to that is yes, then that is why your getting the flickering and Moire effect. Your asking too much of your PC Make the images 1920*1080 and set the same value in the Project options screen tab. For zoomed images add 4-500 pixels on the height and width and may find that is more then enough. If your using a laptop, then that is very likely to make matters worse as they never seem to have the same performance as a desktop of the same or similar spec. In that case it is even more important to make sure your images are sized correctly This page may help http://www.beckhamdi...e%20%20size.htm

I am afraid that is not so clear cut as it will depend on how much you wish to Zoom. In my view many users of PTE badly overdo this and rather than add anything much to their show, they actually detract from it by allowing a zoom to go on and on an on an on. However, that is a personal view and I like my animation a little more delicate and subtle. I make my slide shows at 1920*1200 to fit my monitor and if I wanted to zoom an image I would probably add 400-500 pixels on that size making the image 2420*1600. I would use less in some cases.

Joy PC screen Resolution Go to your desktop and right click - Select Personalize with Vista, properties I think with XP - Select display settings and the screen resolution will be displayed bottom left of the Display settings window. See attached TV Screen Resolution A 52 inch plasma is likely to be full HD and that will be 1920*1080

Isn't the simplest method here to just open up the original project file (assuming it is available) and make two shows with no changes at all bar one. One show would be what is currently made, the second would be identical apart from the fixed size of slide box ticked. On the night of the projection do a quick dummy run of the first 3 slides of each sequence and guage which works best. The original one may be stretched a little and lose quality, but if it does use the fixed size of slide version and live with a slightly smaller image, or zoom the projector.

Well, we can look at this anyway we want, but the upshot is that what we see ain't what we get. When our cameras can do the same as the eye and record a different exposure in many different parts of the image, then we won't ned image editing. I wouldn't hold your breath though

Thank you Alan I intend to use it as an opening to tow demoa I will be giving in the next few months Barry

Bill You went to the right place, but what I can do today is to remake it with beta 5. Could you give it a few hours and download it again, I will put a little note on it when done to indicate what beta it was made with. NB. This is now done and you should see PTE6.5 Beta 5 on the Exposure Slide Show text on this page here http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/freestuffdigslidesw4.htm B

Thank you Henri, that news is good for the PTE team

Modern high-end laptops with dual-core processors, advanced graphics cards and 3 or 4 GB of memory are just as capable as desktop machines, and have the advantage of being portable so you are not in the position of using someone else's computer (of unknown capability) to present your shows on - or lugging your desktop machine, keyboard and monitor along. Forgive me Colin, but that is rather stating the obvious. However most laptops have black keyboards, which are a pain in the rear end while trying to demonstrate in a darkened room, especially with my eyes. The keyboards are small and don't fall to my fingers like a desktop keyboard does and to get the spec you quote is darned expensive, even more so in Australia. I am not prepared to pay that sort of money because over here you only get about $30 expenses from a Camera Club no matter how far you drive. When I do a lecture I take 4 boxes of large prints, a PC projector, keyboard, graphics tablet and all our tutorial DVD's that will be for sale, so it doesn't really matter in that scenario whether I put a laptop in or a desktop in the car, it really isn't the issue for me. I need to be confident in the equipment I am using. I have seen too many lectures that crash and burn because the kit being used is not up to the job. I don't need a screen because I demo from the PC projector so I am looking at the same picture everyone else is. Older laptops with smaller memory, slow hard drives, and single processors are less able to handle PTE shows, but PTE users would probably not attempt to use such machines anyway. Again your rather stating the obvious, but its not just PTE shows. I like to demonstrate with full size files, what I mean by that is not the little images we see on web based tutorials where everything appears to works instantly. It's not reflective of what most people will experience. So, I use full resolution files 16 Bit Raw files and I make full use of smart objects and multi-layers and my experience of laptops (even so called good ones) is not good. One layer from my camera when opened up is 120MB, add another layer and your already at 240MB. I have to have a dedicated PC to make my tutorials videos on and that is the perfect medium for me to use to demonstrate live as well. I didn't cost the earth, it's powerful enough to work on huge files and record a video at the same time and the files are all in place and ready for any live demos. It doubles up perfectly for the job I need it for. Many of the problems and issues people have, even on this forum is because the laptop they bought is just not up to the job. I suppose we could always take the view that this is their own fault for not researching things correctly, but many are not aware of laptop limitations when they first buy them. Only later do they realise what they bought is OK for emails and the odd letter, but that is about it. Its too late then, the money is spent. I realise this is a personal view, but for what I do laptops "Suck" and I fail to see what all the fascination is with them. They have their uses, but not for me, not for showing PTE shows or demonstrating Photoshop

Its one of the reasons I don't like laptops, screens too small, over priced, underpowered, awkward to use

Dan THis is a guess, but your not using images directly from your camera are you? Images for a slide show generally need to be scaled down from their original high resolution size. I have heard of this issue before and the computer copes with a few slides and then just doesn't have the power to keep going and that could be causing the problem you are seeing. Can you tell us the size of your images length in pixels and height too?

Is it just me or are you all making hard work of this. Read the Dom's answer again, he has it.

Peter, thanks for that, I wonder why Lmoreels is still having a problem? Your right about not wanting to be a software developer. I always have a smile when I hear the people ranting about Windows, expecting it to be perfect straight out of the box. It must be a nightmare just sorting out genuine bugs from user error. I don't envy Igor. He must have a very organised brain

Mac Users and following on from Igor's beta 4 release above I have just remade my tutorial slide show "Exposure" using beta 4. To do so I went back to my originally made mono soundtrack, so any Mac users who had any issues with the sound may like to test this one to ensure it now runs perfectly OK. http://www.beckhamdi...digslidesw4.htm It's at the top of the page

Bluebells in a Beach wood is like our Rainforsts out here in Australia. You need to shoot the images on a day that is not bright and sunny. Or you will never control those high lights. Not having a Mac myself I am unable to comment on the sound, but I already have some feedback that it was OK. Perhaps it was my conversion process from Mono to Stereo. A later version of PTE will probably put things right.

Davy You don't need winrar to open that slide show, its just a standard windows zip file. Right click and select extract all

Dave I avoid commentaries as I don't have the dulcet tones of a radio 2 presenter. I tend to avoid much by way of text as well,at least during an AV,but I suppose it is necessary some times. I don't think your alone there, most people don't like the sound of their own recorded voice, but its a shame to abandon the idea. I did float some thoughts about getting a group of people together who would be happy to record a commentary for others, but it went down like a lead balloon. There are times when you need a different accent from your own. Images from the States would not work so well with an English accent for example. I have some ideas for a slide show, but it would need an Australian accent. We can always ask someone else to record it for us and I did that with my "It Could be Yesterday" AV and that worked a treat. However, not many people seem to be able to make a recording of sufficient quality. I did think that the answer was in this forum, but perhaps not. Having said all that, your own voice is probably more suitable than you think

Davy Nice images, good music, but it seems to be in a documentary style, without the info. Would a little commentary set the scene here a bit.

Personally I don't think this is a big thing and there are lots of ways around it, but its darned confusing for newer users

I know exactly what Sheila refers to here. There was a time in PTE where you could take a soundtrack already in use, open it into Audactity, make your change and export it out of Audacity using the same name and PTE would pick it up straight away. In later versions that doesn't happen and you can often see the same thing with an image. If I want to change an image I often just select another, prepare it and save it with the same name as the image I want to replace. In any previews the correct image will appear, but in the thumbnails the old one will remain until you close PTE and re-open it. Its a small point and I have used Peter's method as a work around, but it was convenient the other way too.

Not being a Mac user I thought I would pass on this comment received today. I have copied it here becuase the two shows he mentions are the ones that were made with the new beta version using PTE sound, Botanical Artistry was not. Hello friends at Beckham Digitall, I was formerly a PC user but late last year changed over to all Mac and have written you several times before about your great work! Both during our PC time and then when going to Mac. I just downloaded both "Perfect Exposure" and "Everlasting Home" and both played perfectly except the audio in both is missing and thought you would appreciate the feedback about the audio problems. I immediately downloaded and played "Botanical Artistry" for a test and it played perfectly both video and audio. My system is a MacPro Quad 2.93 6GB Ram and is a late 2009 model. Thank you Regarding the above I followed Dmitry Hapilin's advice and remade both these slide shows in Beta 2. My contact then reported that the Everlasting Home slide show then worked perfectly, but the Exposure tutorial show still didn't play the sound, visual only. The sound file in the exposure show is commentary only and is a mono soundtrack, so I took that into Audition and converted it to Stereo. I remade and uploaded the show, but have not had any feedback yet that the problem has been fixed