Barry Beckham

Eic In photography as in life there are rights and wrongs, but many things are just personal preference. However, looking at the format of a 1280*1024 image is not very good. Its a terrible shape for composition, it just isn't a comfortable shape to our eyes. You will be using widescreen at some stage, so you might as well bite the bullet and do it now, later you will be glad you did. From what I see here, you would be hard pressed to get a 4:3 or 5:4 monitor anyway. I bet you are a really nice guy, but if I talked to your family I bet they would stay you are a stubborn so and so too. Which one of the two attached image formats are best? It really is no contest and if you have some verticals that won't fit, dump them. Its not compulsory to use them and you can often make a show miles better by what you discard

Eric Then use Picture In Picture techniques, animating a portrait format image isn't very appealing is it When your shooting images directly for AV as you are, then you should try and remain with a landscape format wherever possibe

Eric Just try once and make a test show of a dozen images that you shoot at the Steam fair. Dump your 1024*768 and your 1280*1024. Make your slide show 1920*1080 Save your images at Jpeg level 6, which will save a bit of strain on your PC. It will play on your PC with a black band top and bottom, but so what. At least you retain a far better format than 5:4. 16:9 is far far better on the eye than the near square 1280*1024 It will play perfectly OK on your projector, I did a demo the night before last and showed two shows made at 1920*1200, both played perfectly through a 1024*768 projector It will also convert to a DVD and on most flat screen TV's will play filling the screen, edge to edge and top to bottom Then you will not be loosing any quality when you view the shows and others will also see it just as you intended. What more could you possibly want

My Avatar was taken in 2007 at the Bristol Balloon Fiesta, doesn't need updating for at least 10 years

Ptigui If the key sent to you was the same that was sent to me, all you have to do is unzip the file. Save the file from the email and then right click the zipped file and choose extract all. Follow the wizard to complete the unzipping. You will notice that the zipped folder will remain, but another standard folder of the same name appears. Once you have a second folder unzipped you will find a product key inside. Double click that product key and install it to your PC registry, which amounts to following the on screen instructions You should find you are then set up with the new key. Hope that helps

Eric You need to run that filter a few more times yet Anyway, what are you doing playing around with software like this, Arn't you one of the PTE forum folk who like to see their images true to life.

The missing line must be an issue with PTE as it is fine on the PC version

Peter The filter effect originated from the Alien Skin Snap Art range, but I don't use the filters straight out of the box so to speak. Every image was individually worked through using a blend of the filters and original unfiltered images in Photoshop layers. I probably started off with Alien Skin Coloured Pencil and went from there. For the commentary I needed someone with an North of England accent to add some charm to the whole AV, so I put out a request from my own website forum and got a response from Roger Walton. I wrote the words I wanted recorded and Roger did a superb job for me. It could be yesterday is actually a remake of one of my most popular AV's from quite a few years ago called The Black Country. The original was created at 1024*768, which is a bit small now, so I remade another version at a much higher resolution. The imputus for this was to create a higher resolution slide show, but also to prepare it for an AV competition here in Australia. I am pleased the Mac version worked well, which is all down to the great work by the wnsoft team.

Malcolm You have put quite a lot of time and effort into this show and the result is a good one (Other AV workers please note) There is plenty of varienty and good quality photography included and some nice techniques too. I like to see full screen animation continuing to move as the image appears and leaves the screen, but that is a personal taste, not a right or wrong Some animations were a bit fast for me too, but generally the slide show was a very good one. Flowers and plants have the ability in the wrong hands to bore the pants off us. This didn't do that or come anywhere near that. A great slide show, which I enjoyed.

Rick As Dave says you don't ned to go that high in resolution if you don't want to and 1920*1200 04 1920*1080 is a good next step for you to take. I don't make many DVD's so I stay with 1920*1200 If I made lots of DVD's I may choose 1920*1080, but if I find a show anytime that I want to make a DVD from and I really am fussy about filling my TV screen all I have to do is recrop the images and take 120 pixels from the height. 60 pixels top and bottom is no gret problem. Set your crop to whatever res you want and the PPI will take care of itself.

Well, no matter how long you were there the images are great. I have no problem with you giving a credit to our site, but to be honest it doesn't really belong on the end of your show. Save that and pass it on by word of mouth. Keep the end credits to you the author and the music. With regard size, you have one show made at 1024*768, why not try the next at a size that will fill your monitor screen. The good part about that is the result will still play perfectly OK on your other monitor too Our website isn't a .com though www.beckhamdigital.co.uk or www.beckhamdigital.com.au

Rick If those images were taken on one African Safari Holiday, then you had a belter of a time. A fabulous show which includes some stunning individual images. I have a number of comments I would like to make on your sequence, but I make them from the standpoint that this is a great show just as it is, but with a few changes, I think you could elevate this to outstanding. Firstly the music was absolutely perfect in my view, it did what music is supposed to do in a slide sequence like this, add to the mood and the feel of the show and you did capture a mood here. The quality of the images was stunning with a few exceptions. There was one transition where you used the page curl and one where you used the mosaic. I think you should lose those two transitions and stay with what you used throughout the remainder of the show.They were out of keeping with the rest of the transitions in my view. There was a panned image that appeared to me to be going the wrong way with animals going backwards, it felt a little awkward to me and I would lose the pan or reverse it. There was another where the quaility wasn't good, that has to go. I think it was cats on that distance marker The inset images worked pretty well, but I think they can work much better. Slow the animation down so that they come to a gentle stop rather than an ubrupt stop. I don't think the rotation of some of the insets was in keeping with the style of the show and in my view you should remain with a more gentle animation. You should also make a derivitive of your show with static Picture in Picture rather than animated and see what you think after watching that variation a few times.. There are a few images that you need to remove, the first being that elephant image that appears to have a green cast, it doesn't fit in with your others and they are much stronger. There are also one or two images where the quality doesn't match the majority. Remove them as your show has enough stunning images to be able to lose them easily. The show isn't short so the loss of 6 images isn't going to do you any harm at all. In fact the removal of a weaker image will enhance the overall show. This sounds like I am being really critical, but if you did nothing your show is still a great one I don't know if you have been following the thread on image size, but another thought came to me while watching it. This is a great sequence and I wonder if a year or so when and if you get a larger monitor that you will not regret making it larger and staying with an oblong format rather than 1024*768. One or two animals were jammed into the frame a little tight. If you told me you had spent 6 months in Africa getting these images together it wouldn't suprise me. Lastly have you thought of adding just a little commentary? The reason for the burning tusks is pretty obvious, but I wonder if limited commentary would really work a treat here. I wished I had been with you on that safari and this is one of the best sequences I have seen for a while. It ticked all the boxes for me.

When the Canon 5D Mk2 was launched and I saw the HD video capabilities I sat up and took note. My thoughts were that if I could add video to a slide show, which was the same quality as the stills I would be very interested to see where this could lead. Later, I had some doubts about video and DSLR cameras. As you know, if you change lenses often enough and no matter how carefull you are dust will settle on the chip. Now this has never been a concern to me with stills because it is so easy to deal with, but how would we deal with that ugly spot or hair on the amount of frames we need for HD video. Has anyone with a 5D Mk2 experienced this yet?

I agree, but the fact that we have a very interesting documentary adds another angle that is generally missing in our slide shows. There's a thought, perhaps we should consider this a bit more often and include more commentary in the form of a Documentary. I am not sure we are comparing apples with apples though. I really think there are no right or wrongs here, or in many other areas of photography come to that. Most is just personal taste and all things being equal to animate or not is a personal thing. The one area that for me I am positive about is that movement does not add impact, appeal or charm to an image. If that image has none of those attributes, it should be edited out. Would we put mediocre, boring or badly played music into our slide show and then add some digital effects to the sound to add interest. No, so why consider that as right for the other 50% orf the slide show

Dave To be honest I am not generally one who does this sort of testing, but the thread makes you think and I must have time on my hands at the moment . I am not sure that your suggestion would be a great test to be honest. If you can't see a difference between the file sizes I mentioned earlier, then a jpeg compression test is not likely to show much. I think you are far better doing that sort of test on a PC screen, but my gut reaction, (which I will temper a little by saying I stand to be corrected) is that it will not make the slightest visible difference to your slide show. I have been using level 6 for years and I think by now I would have spotted some evidence of a visible difference in quality. I havn't.

I think I have been able to answer my own question, but once again I stand to be corrected. I have just taken the high resolution show I posted a couple of days ago and made a backup in zip From that bakup I resized two sets of identical images, one set at 1024*576 (16:9 format to fit my 60 in plasma screen edge to edge) The second version was created at 1920*1080. (ALSO 16:9) The 2 DVD's display identical on screen. I have been going back and forth between them and I cannot see a difference. So, perhaps if I resized the images even further down to to 720*405 (also 16:9) before making the show, I should see no difference in that size either. Should have thought of that when I did the original test I suppose. I now have two DVD disks created 1. Contains two idendical shows one started off at 6144*3840 and one at 1024*576 2. The second disk also contains two identical shows one created from 1920*1080 and one at 1024*576 Both DVD's record a total file size of 423 Mb

Ken I think your missing my point a bit and the lack of response to my question may mean others don't know either. This isn't about resizing images as much as what PTE does to our images when a DVD is created. If a standard DVD resolution is 720*576, what would happen to a show created at 1024*768 and one at 1920*1200 when it goes through the DVD process? Do all the images from both shows start off the same, but get reduced to 720 for the DVD. I am not sure if that is the case or not and I am happy to bow to greater wisdom on this point. BTW Changing image size can have a dramatic affect on sharpness, it all depends on what resolution you are starting with I guess. Photoshop may have a better algorithm when re-sizing than the PTE software. The trouble is we hear all this technical stuff, but how often does it relate to what we actually see with our eyes.

Ken The statement I made assumes a static show, I just want to know what PTE does to a 1024 pixel image as opposed to a 1920 to prepare it for a DVD Does it, as I suggested reduce them all to 720? I dunno really

I have always viewed this question differently to you and I suppose it is this variety that makes the work go round. 1. Are my images of enough interest to be presented with animation that would keep the image on screen much longer than a static slide show ? 2. Is movement going to put any appeal or interest back into the image, compensate for it being a little ordinary? 3. Can I try to make something different and original to surprise my audience ? Answer in my view 1. Probably not, so better stay with a shorter show and don't have the image on screen too long 2. Definately not. The worse example I ever saw was from this very forum. An out of focus image on screen for 50 seconds being moved and warped all over the place. (An extreme example I know) 3. Yep fully agree I always find myself uncomfortable with this line, which I have heard many times and would like to put forward another way of looking at this. Unfortunately a very few of us are profesional photographers and have the talent/the subjects to make this kind of pictures 1. Most of the amateurs that I come into contact with would hold their own with many professionals, they certainly do have the talent to produce images worthy of a great slide show, especially from a creative viewpoint. 2. Professional means a person earns their living at it, it doesn't mean they are any good at it. There are many examples of wedding photographers who make a good living without a creative bone in their body. 3. How many of us here are professionals anyway, by that I mean we are commisioned to take pictures. Very few I would guess 4. The line could also be viewed as a cop out too perhaps. Well, I am not professional so I can settle for a much lower standard. Doesn't the amateur usually put more TLC into their work, because they are not chasing the almighty dollar? Having said that Lin makes some good points, look how television uses movement to keep our attention. Sometimes the movement is almost overpowering, but it is obviously done to add interest. I like animation, but I like subtle movement most of the time. I can't quite make up my mind if video/TV is different or not to our still images. I suppose if you animate you please half the people and if you don't, you please the other half. That's life

Perhaps this thread is suffering the same as a large slide show Howevre, nobody has confirmed my earlier statement that I would like confirmed as true or false. Currently when we create a DVD through PTE, as a part of that change all the images will be reduced to 720*576 for the DVD. I assume there is some variation to allow for format issues, but generally the images we create will be reduced to 720 by whatever. So, it doesn't matter in DVD terms whether we start with a file size of 1920*1080 or 1024*768. Is that because members are not sure either or the thread was missed.

Eric Barry imagine the ordinary man in the street buying a DVD, would you not agree he would be upset if it ran for only six minutes? The 600 plus pic jobby I am in the middle of is a documentary about Leyburn, where I live, covering as many commercial and social aspects that go on in the town. It's for a specific audience. The intention is to have a premier in one of the local halls, split the show into two halves, with a couple of complimentary shorts to pad out an hour and a half. The aim is to pander to people's vanity in wanting to see if they are included. Yes, if you buying a bag of do-nuts you expect to get 6 and would be annoyed if you only got two, but its not the same thing. I presnt many hours of video broken down into subjects. If I put 5 hours of solid video on each DVD that would he horrendous. No,one would sit through that lot. Slide shows are the same. If you have a lot of ground to cover with your AV break it down into those bite sized peices and people will watch it. Present it in one lump and if the viewer has any control they won't watch it all. Most people when cornered are too polite and worry about causing offence to the author. They will sit through a long presentation, but in their own homes, they would be hitting the stop button way before you are 25% in. One of the things I learned in my early days with AV, film and disolve units is that if you present 12 & 5 minute sequences on different subjects with different music and a different mood, you will be asked back to the club again and again. Present a 60 minute travelogue and you will get one visit only. You will not be invited back next season. Its common sence and doing it for charity makes no difference whatsoever. Your good intentions and well meaning with not make a 60 minute slide show any more watchable.

Ron I never originally raised the jpeg compression issue, I only responded to someone else and stated what I had been doing. I have saved the images for the PTE shows I have made since I have been in Australia and since I started using the larger monitors at 1920*1200 at level 6 However, based on my demo slide show a day or so ago, in future I think I may create my images at full resolution and save them at level 6 just as I did with the high resolution demo, but to be honest, its likely to be a while before we need to seriously consider resolutions above 1920*1200 (famous last words, these could be) so I think my advice to anyone who asked the question what sized images do I need it would be this Create your shows at 1920*1200 or 1920*1080 despite the fact that you may well be using 1024*768 or 1280*1024 screen resolution now. Then to address Eric's point, what if they are using an old PC that struggles to cope with the larger files. Don't worry about it. Create the show at that size anyway, make a backup in zip and re-size the backup to meet the needs of your PC. Keep the original, which is effectively your raw file. You can go back to the high res original at any time and create what ever format you want and should you find yourself using a large monitor 3 years down the line, all the shows made in that time will fit your new screen.

Eric I suppose a wedding DVD could be an exception to the rule as they generally do have many more images than a pictorial AV. However, they have a limited appeal only to the close family. I would have little or no interest in someone elses wedding DVD unless they were a part of my family and even then I am not sure I could sit through 300 wedding images. In actual fact I did make a slide show resently that had 180 images and ran for 36 minutes. I agreed to put together a slide show for an aquaintance in Australia, but didn't appreciate at the start how many images he had shot and wanted me to use. I did suggest alternatives to using so many images in one go, but that was what he wanted. It combined two visits to the East, one was India and the other Tibet. I think that if you had a greater than average interest in Tibet and India, then you could probably sit through the sequence once, but I had to do it to check the slide show I had made worked OK and that was difficult enough. With the greatest respect to him the slide show was too long, with insufficient variety, or quality in the images to help sustain a show of that length. In truth it is as boring as hell. In these circumstances you can advise, but the paying customer gets what they want in the end. For those of us putting together shows to primarily entertain, long shows are a disaster in my view. I think all AV enthusiasts fall into this trap at some stage or another, where their creative juices overpower good sence and it is only much later that the penny drops. I know I have, probably still do from time to time. It is probably better to break large slide shows down into more manageable sections. The images can still be used, but perhaps instead of a 36 minute sequence we could have produced 4 or 5 shorter sequences covering Tibet, the temples, the mountain people, then India and its various parts. Not difficult to do that and present the whole thing, but in bite size chunks. Now, you stand more chance of people watching it as they can do so over time and when they want to. To be plonked down in front of a TV for a 60 minute AV, that you can't eject or escape from.................torture! I am not sure what you mean regarding "what I have encountered in the production of your commercial instructional dvds" In what respect, length of the PTE demos and slide shows, length of the videos.? I also am not sure that picture size has a great bearing on the final DVD size, but I am not sure about that, see my post above that no-one has confirmed or put me right on yet. I thought Lin or the Dom would be able to tell me if my assumption is right or wrong. I make very few DVD's. Having said that, is a 300+ slide show the norm? Probably not, so the obvious thing to do is to make the show larger for PC use and then reduce size for your DVD, but I say again. This isn't a command from on high, just a suggestion that technology has now given us options we didn't have a short while ago. Ron I have always saved images at level 6 as you probably know. You have seen lots of my slide shows and demos. Are there a quality issue in them caused by my save methods? Sometimes some aspects of these debates border on the ridiculous, here we are debating whether level 6 or 12 should be used when we have one member making a show smaller than the screen its shown on. More quality will be lost that way than in any other aspect of image production. Quality is not all about pixel count or compression when saving. They play there part, but not the be all and end all. Quality is achieved from a multitude of photographic and post production techniques and you can often get better results by getting the Photoshop work right than any save issues.

Eric Two things. 1. The suggestion wasn't seriously suggested for those of you who want to use 620 images in one slide show, lasting an hour. I would suggest that this isn't what the average PTE users does and whatever suggestion you make in life there will always be extremes where it doesn't apply. 2. Don't do it if you think its a daft idea, It's not compulsory, just something to consider. However, here is a question for those more technically minded than me. Let me put this statement forward and see if I have this right, I am not sure to be honest, because the last DVD I made was such good quality on the 60 in plasma that I wondered how that could be from images only 720 pixels in length. I have only ever made one DVD for a real project, all others have been for demo purposes or just to judge the quality and format issues. Currently when we create a DVD through PTE, as a part of that change all the images will be reduced to 720*576 for the DVD. I assume there is some variation to allow for format issues, but generally the images we create will be reduced to 720 by whatever. So, it doesn't matter in DVD terms whether we start with a file size of 1920*1080 or 1024*768. Am I right or wrong here?

Dave You will always recieve different opinions on saving images and jpeg compression. I have always saved at level 6 as that seems to me a nice balance between size and quality, but don't forget that creating images at HD size still throws away millions of pixels from most images these days. In that case a slight touch of unsharp mask may be called for to give back a little of crispness lost. Care needs to be taken if you intend to animate the image as too much sharpness can increase the Moire effect. Of course things are not always equal and quality doesn't just come from the pixel count, although that helps. I have been saving images at level 6 for years in slide shows and quality has never been an issue with me, but to be sure, why not make your next a slide show and use jpeg quality 12 then see how the runs. If it works well, then great, if it creates any issues all you need to do is save the images again and change the save quality. If you are a Photoshop user you can always use the automatic Image Processor to do this automatically for you, but perhaps its best to always create these derivitives on a copy of your slide show. If we make our shows at higher resolutions and save them at level 12 we could think of that slide show like we do raw files. From that one high resolution show we can make any number of derivitives quicky and easily, even DVD's now or in the future as technology changes. Large Shows Well, I think they need to be avoided like the plague, but that is just my view. I have been asked many times if PTE can cope with many different pieces of music and 300+ slides and I always say yes it can, but your audience won't. If your making a show that looks like it may be a large one, then in my view it needs splitting into appropriate sections so that the viewer has a choice of which part to watch and when. If I put 300+ of my best images together from the last 20 years, could you realistically sit down and watch the lot and enjoy it one go, maybe sitting there for 50 minutes or more. I would suggest that most people would be reaching for the escape key before you are a quarter of the way in. We can take a few liberties with images for a slide show that we would never take with images destined for printing or storage for possible printing. Adding increased sharpness is probably the best example. Animation aside we can apply more sharpness than we would for hi-res prints, if we need to. The reasons are that our images for a slide show are never going to be printed, they certainly will never be enlarged and they are only on screen (generally) for a few seconds at most. So images that have that instant impact an appeal often work well in a slide show even though you may not be able to put the image on the wall and live with it for a year or two. Having said all that, if your large show will not fit on a DVD, then just re-save the images and make a slight compromise on what quality/size you would like to save at, as opposed to what you can realistically achieve.