Barry Beckham

Here we go again. The new Virus definitions have just been downloaded for my Avast Virus protection program and it appears to be picking up every PTE slide show, old and new.] I have had to disable Avast to play anything. This is becoming tedious and I have sent the attached mail to Avast The new virus definitions downloaded to my PC this morning contain an error. Avast is picking up every slide show I have ever made, some years old, right up to one I made this morning as having a virus. They don't and it is a problem that has been experienced with other virus programs. The slide shows are the products of www.wnsoft.com and most of the Photographic world use this software, so I expect people are panicking all over the place right now. If you want a quick sample download my show made this morning from the link below and check it out for yourselves. http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/downloads/pte6/textonapath/textonapath.zip If you can correct this quickly we would all be grateful Barry Beckham

I think it might be quite nice to make it snow on the sunshine coast of Australia when its 34c

TJR I think Peter has said it all really and I agree with him. In my experience of PTE, which is considerable, I have never heard of one instance of this either. With the greatest of respect to you, some peoples paranoia and fear of viruses far outweigh the actual threat. I would say, ignore some of the scaremongers and relax. If we on this forum who are sharing PTE shows all the time have never suffered a virus problem, what is the issue. Please don't allow an error by a virus protection software program be the cause of an irational fear. Here is a question I always think about when I hear of peoples fear of a virus. How come in some 15 years of being on line I have never had any issues with a virus. Am I just lucky? I doubt it, I just use common sense and a virus protection program and they has worked for me for years.

Just a heads up that a virus issue seems to have reared it's head again, this time with BullGuard. Someone has just reported to me that one of my slide shows seems to have developed a virus overnight Its the same false positive we have seen many times with other virus software and I am sure the new virus definitins will put it right soon, but people will pannick about this as usual.

I did say that you could standardise on 1920*1200 if that was your PC screen resolution, but if it is 1920*1080 use that. Either way they should be playing back fine on a flat screen TV, I guess your using an older TV where the format doesn't fit? Did you tick the little box in the Project Options > Screen tab > fixed size of slide (in pixels)

Tom Yes, some points well made. I agree it is probably higher when you look at multimedia, but over here my gut feeling is less than 25%, but I agree it would be higher than 3

I wonder if the Beta testing of any Mac version will be more difficult for the wnsoft team? I looked up the sales relationship between Macs and PC's on the Internet and it seems to have been stable for the past few years at around 3% for the Mac. Now that still leaves a lot of Macs out there, but not as many as with PC's. The feedback on bugs may not be so quick or efficient as it is now.

Geoff I have asked for the ability to copy settings to one, a group of images, or all images. but accept it has to takes it's place in the Que :-)

Geoff Use Key strokes its much quicker. From the object box in the O&A screen, highlight the text and hit Ctrl+C, skip to the next image and hit Ctrl+V, but as Peter says, watch where the text goes if you have a series of layers there

Igor A couple of questions 1. Can you confirm that existing PTE 5.6 owners can upgrade to PTE 6? 2. Will the creation of an executable file for a Mac require an upgrade key like Video Builder?

Igor In relation to that floating point error message I got on my Windows XP computer I have now tried Beta 24 and it appears to resolve the issue, thank you very much Barry

Igor OK, I will check it our just as soon as Beta 24 is released Thanks B

Igor The machine the problem is located on is all unplugged ready to do a demonstration tomorrow. I will not have it set up again till Thursday. Can you wait till then and I will send you a project? B

I have been using Wacom graphics tablets since the very early days of Photoshop (14 years ish) and currently use a Wacom Bamboo I did a one to one tutorial with a person recently at their home using their equipment and attached to the computer was a pretty nice mouse on a mat with a nice wrist guard. There was nothing wrong with the mouse, but it was absolutely rubbish for the work we need to do in digital photography and it brought home to me just how good a graphics tablet is for digital photography. It was like trying to sign my name with a pen glued to a brick. The difference in the speed and quality of the work you can do with a graphics tablet just has to be seen to be believed. If your not using one, you really need to ask why. They take about a week to get used to, but bluetak the pad to the bench to the right/left of your keyboard and keep it in one position and you will find the learning will be 100% easier. Unplug your mouse so the first time something feels awkward you don't immediately bolt back to the old familiar mouse and you will not regret it. Finally, if you are a Photoshop user, turn off the pressure sensitivity of the pen from the brush palette in Photoshop and use the preferences along the top of the screen for brush size and flow. The difference this tool makes to the quality of your images is worth triple the cost of the graphics tablet. It's been years since I used a mouse in Photoshop and this one to one really brought home how superiour the graphics tablet and pen is

I have just upgraded my Beta copy from 21 to 23. On my Vista machine I got a brief message about a floating point, but the install appears to be OK and I can open projects made with earlier beta copies On my XP machine it installed without any warning windows appearing, but will not open any projects made with previous beta copies I have had to go back to beta 21 to get it to work. I tried a couple of installs and it is the same every time. What I get when I try to open a project is the window below I tried an uninstall and a fresh download, but it shows the same fault on the XP computer

Potwnc Thanks for the offer of help, but the 64bit was a bit of a long shot, I just wanted to make sure as from what he told me that was all I had to latch onto. I am not sure what sequence (s) he was downloading. He was so short on words that every email seemed to demand 3 questions from me. I think the guy had a problem on his PC. I covered all the usual, glitch downloading, anti virus, but he was always a bit vague Its done now, but thanks anyway. A thought just occurred, I wonder if he was downloading the Mac versions B

Dom Someone has contacted me with all sorts of problems getting my slide shows to run on their machine. I have been trying to help and the only thing that I could latch onto was the fact he used 64 bit. There was no other issues to cause the fact that he said they would not play. He is very short on words too and it has been hard trying to fault find when someone only gives you little bits of information at a time. He has not come back to me so perhaps my last suggestion did the trick. I said try another PC.

Lazlo No problem I do the same myself sometimes when there is so much to read

Igor I wouldn't worry about it, It must be something odd with my machine Barry

Lazlo I think you have the wrong end of the stick here, I don't have any issues with my shows running at 1920*1200. I was just giving others the heads up that most laptops owned by clubs are not up to showing their animated slide shows as I witnessed at a recent AV competition. Some of the animation was hopeless because it was PSG. Then the debate moved over to laptops in general.

Dave I would be very nervous about those mid priced machines, tried loads in the Uk that were rubbish and what is the point of getting the bare level you need. One upgrade to PTE or Photoshop and your now lagging behind. Eric I like to demo with full size files so that people can see things done in the real world, not a PC that appears to be like lightening because the demonstrator is using 2 MB images. Open a Canon 1Ds Mk3 file at 16 bit and use smart objects and 3-4 layers and your up to 400mb + My current towers all do this regularly with little problem. My demo machine also doubles as the one I use for recording tutorials so it needs to run video grabbing and Photoshop easily. Your also right I don't do a lot of animation, but if and when I do it has to be faultless or I find it unacceptable. Audio visual to me is the smooth flow of images anything not animated super smooth should be discarded in my view. I want the flexibilty to do it when I want to and have it right. Lazlo That sounds all very well, but what sells for $3500 in US or Canada usually sells for £3500 in the UK. Brits could never really understand that and Australia seems a bit more expensive for this type of kit. Unit costs I suppose. Having said all that I have been asked to do a couple of one day demos in Adelaide and that is over 2000 kilometers away so a plane trip it would have to be. I would have little choice but to use my current laptop and make sure I didn't put it under too much strain.

I remembered it was discussed but the search never sems to work for me, I put 64 bit into the search parameters and it came up with nothing Someone if having difficulties downloading and playing my slide shows and between his one line posts, which don't explain much I am having difficulty locating the problem for him. Thanks

Eric See, that seems rather a high price to me. The last time I needed a PC to take to demonstrations I ended up buying a tower rather than a laptop as the prices quoted were about what you have said. To get a laptop that would handle the raw files I use in demos and all the animation in PTE. I discovered I would have to pay a lot more for a laptop what I would for a Tower as you have confirmed here. These days you would get a very respectable tower PC for £1800. It was a few years ago since I did this research, but I seem to recall I got a tower half the price of the laptop and with a superiour power. Now I appreciate you can't tuck a tower PC under your arm and take it on a flight, but my demos are done by car as we have lots of other stuff to take, so the size wasn't an issue. A car full of kit is a car full of kit whether you have a tower or a laptop, it doesn't make a heap of difference. I am just not a big fan of laptops mainly for that reasons, plus the keyboards are mostly black and hard to see in a darkened room when your giving a demo, even with a light. The keys are smaller too and every laptop I seem to have bought works well with the battery for 12 months and then needs power hookup all the time because the battery is shot. I checked the cost of a new battery once and got the fright of my life. On top of that I have seen a lot of people doing demos and some get in a right twist using a laptop, that I don't seem to fall into using a desktop. Most laptop users just go out and buy a laptop, they don't check up to see if the machine is up to the job, they assume it is, but my experience the other night tells me there is a huge gap between your £1800 machine and what most people/clubs are using. If I were about to spend that sort of money for a demo machine I would put it into a small toer and screw a handle on the top

Igor I will try, but I have already found a solution. I wanted to use PTE for an instructional show where I added commentary and needed a screen grab of the Project Options window. I created that screen grab with both Hypersnaps ( a small program that does it on a key stroke) and I did the same thing with the print screen button and pasted it into a Photoshop document. In Photoshop I cropped to just the Project options window. I used those screen grabs in the slide show and set the parameters for the size of my show and set the object (the screen Grab) to 100% size In the PTE show on playback the screen grab takes on a very slight softness, which is not seen in Photoshop. The solution is to past the screen grab into a new document at the size I am working at (1920*1200) and then is displayes fine. I have made a two slide test show for you that will work on a key stroke. Both images are the same screen grab. The first one is the screen screen grab window, the second is the very same screen grab pasted onto a page. http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/igor.zip

Are there any 64 bit OS users running PTE?