PGA

If you are using version 8 of PTE you can quickly preview your audio items as follows: 1) use the Folder tree structure panel to navigate to the folder where your sound files are stored 2) in the File List panel next to the tree you will then see your sound files as icons 3) click on one of these and its icon appears in the mini-player area 4) click on this and it starts to play 5) if it isn't the piece you are looking for,repeat the above steps as necessary Once you have found the piece you want then use the relevant PTE facility to add it to your soundtrack regards, Peter

Jean-Cyprien, C'est magnifique, mon ami! Vraiment, vous êtes le maître. I know just how much time that will have taken you. Congratulations! regards, Peter

Why not? We are not discussing the merits of the button vs the tick box in isolation; we are discussing the two options as they are (or might be) implemented on the Project Options > Defaults tab. In the situation being discussed, the status of the "Apply to all slides" button does not take effect until the OK button has also been clicked. If the "Apply to all slides" button was replaced by a tick box, the status of that would not take effect until the OK button was clicked. So the point at issue is: which gives a clearer indication of its status, a big button that changes colour or a little box that gains a tick in it? regards, Peter

Dave et al, Jerry is using v7.5.10 (see his post #7). There is absolutely no point in trying to teach him how to access features from v8. regards, Peter

Hi Vilara, The colour of the button changes from plain silver to an iridescent blue when it is clicked. A second click returns it to its original silver colour and, as you say, causes no action. There is, therefore, good visual feedback to the user as to whether the button has been activated. Also, the button is a much bigger target to click on than would be a tiny little tick box. On balance I would suggest that the existing implementation is, perhaps, better than your proposal. regards, Peter

John, Like you I do not understand the details of "alpha channel". Perhaps you should try using this video file as the mask file within a mask container. I mean in place of the black and white mask. regards, Peter

I do not use colour profiles. I see no difference between the pairs of images. This, to me, is good. It means nothing is being added that I do not want adding. regards, Peter

The emphasis in the above quote is mine. There is no such thing as "O&A project options". There are "Project Options" or "Settings > Preferences". "Project Options" apply to this project and can be accessed from the Slides view, the Timeline view or the O&A view. "Settings > Preferences" determine how various parts of the PTE program behave across all projects. regards, Peter

Did you click on "Apply to all slides"? in either the "Customize font" window or in the "Project Options > Defaults" tab? I don't know whether either of those is relevant or not; but I have my default font set to Nyala and it always comes up on every text object. regards, Peter

Snapcam, Try "View > Slide List as thumbnails" off the command bar at the top of the window. I just did a test where I unticked it; all I got then was slide number and file name. Ctrl+2 toggles this on and off. Peter

I can recreate something very similar in v7.0 if I hover the mouse pointer over the top edge of the Slide List, get the "parallel lines with up/down arrows" pointer icon and then drag that all the way down. I then see just the slide number, slide name, AB button, transition time and slide duration but no thumbnail. (The last three items are somewhat out of position compared to the usual Slide List view). Is this what your friend is seeing? If so, dragging the top edge of the Slide List upwards should restore the usual view. (N.B. All this assumes that he/she is using the normal default layout of having the Slide List running along the bottom of the main window.) regaards, Peter

To get your video clip to delay its start until, say, 12 seconds into the slide, proceed as follows: - Insert the clip as an object via O&A - With the video clip as the selected object in the O&A window... - In the Properties tab for O&A, set the Offset to 12 seconds - In the Animation tab of O&A, add a keyframe at 12 seconds (12000ms) - Add another keyframe at 11960ms, set opacity to zero on this keyframe - Go to the offset 0 keyframe (which I think of as the "origin" keyframe) and set opacity zero here as well. Play that in O&A, mini-viewer and Preview. Does it do what you want with the video? On my system, the blank slide shows, in silence, until the 12 second mark when the video clip plays, with its soundtrack, and then it sits at its last frame, in silence, until the end of the slide. regards, Peter

When you add an object via the O&A window, every such object starts at offset zero into that slide. The clip has been added at offset 0 into the slide; therefore it starts playing at offset 0. Therefore I hear the sound immediately but never see the video actually get played because it ends at +6 seconds whilst it is still at opacity zero. It does. As a frozen final frame that has been sat there since, in my case, +6 seconds. If you want to delay the start of the video clip to later in the slide, you need to modify the video clip's properties in the O&A window. And at this point I have stepped outside my personal experience completely. I think you need to modify the start time field. But I do not know whether this is expressed relative to the start of the slide or the start of the entire sequence. A little experimentation is called for. And that is how we learn the techniques that we then can use in subsequent sequences. regards, Peter

When PTE plays an EXE file, it is building all of the visual effects in real time. Nothing is prebuilt. Therefore the graphics card of the "build" PC has no bearing on the observed quality when played back on a different PC. I know this to be fact because my "Build PC" has a vastly inferior graphics card to my "Playback laptop". I see visual "artefacts" on the Build PC that I never see on the laptop. The more complex your slides are and the more complex the animations upon them, then the better the graphics card needs to be in order to do the "real time" assembly of the visual effects. In particular, the use of masks places a significantly greater strain on the graphics environment. regards, Peter

I have tried to follow your instructions and get a different result to you at the end of the first phase. I have created a blank slide and given it duration 30.0s (File New, Insert Blank Slide, change duration via Slide List). To this I have added a video clip whose duration is 6.0s (O&A Add Video). This appears in the O&A as the only object. I have set the opacity to zero at offset 0 seconds. I have added another keyframe at c20 seconds. This has the zero opacity set. I have added another keyframe at c21 seconds and have set the opacity to 100. I have set a further keyframe at 30.0s and this has the 100 opacity set. When I play this back I hear the soundtrack of the video clip but never see the image because of the opacity settings on the various keyframes. PTE is doing what it should in my test. regards, Peter

Gary, If you use a frame rate that is different to the original frame rate, the software has to either remove frames it doesn't want or add in frames that were never there. Either way you risk degrading the visual quality. I would find out what frame rate the original material is and stay with that. MPEG2 and H264 both involve compression routines (as do all video formats). Therefore you must expect there to be different output files sizes (when expressed as KB, MB or GB. That fact that one is larger than the other does not imply that the result, when viewed via a media player, will be better. And, provided that PTE does accept the input file, it doesn't matter whether you have the best format for PTE to use. If it isn't, PTE will offer you the chance to convert it using PTE's own converter. regards, Peter

Warren, The concept of a "slide" has no meaning to a video. A video is simply one long, continuous presentation of frames (25 per second usually). So you cannot instruct the video to start at a specific slide. What you could do, as explained by DaveG, is break your project down into smaller projects - one per city. Then add all of these mini-projects to your VideoBuilder and create a menu that has a thumbnail for each city. regards, Peter

I've never, ever, given it a thought! I've always worked the way that I do, since mid-summer 2005. During that time I have used two different desktop systems and three different laptops. Quite often the desktop and laptop OS have been different (XP vs Vista, Vista vs Win 7). The data has been stored on internal drives, external drives, USB memory sticks, and on the desktop environment of the laptop computer. I have used all versions of PTE since v4.48. I've never had any problem with any of my menus and I build 10-15 each winter season. My technique, in summary: in the menu EXE, refer to the target EXEs by just their file name - no path (i.e. target1.exe, target2.exe); put all the EXEs in one folder; put that folder somewhere on the laptop; run the menu EXE from the folder. No shortcuts. No problems. regards, Peter

Your menu exe and target exes must all be in the same place. When it first failed, you had placed the menu exe on the desktop but left all the target exes on the memory stick. Whether PTE exists on the machine or not is irrelevant for playback. Either run everything from the USB stick or copy the folder in its entirety to the desktop and run the menu out of that folder. Don't mess around with shortcuts. You don't need them. Peter

I am not a club photographer but I second the comments given by Colin and Dave. My cameras are set to capture using sRGB, my digital projector is taking the feed from my laptop, which has all its software set to run in sRGB, as has my desktop PC. My workflow is sRGB throughout and I never feel that the projected colours are "wrong". One simple "rule" that I was given, to ensure that images to be projected are in the correct colour space, is to save them as JPEGs using "Save for Web", ensuring that the "Embed colour profile" box remains unticked. Save for Web will automatically convert the colour space to sRGB. regards, Peter P.S. Those "Save for Web" instructions are based upon Photoshop Elements 11

Eric, You have not muted any tracks in Audacity. In your Audacity screengrab, all the "Mute" buttons are "Up" and therefore all those tracks are being sent to the "Mixdown" channel. The only button that is "down" is the "Solo" button on track 1. What you have done there is to select just that one track to be presented to the "monitor" channel - the channel that you hear when you playback on your computer. regards, Peter

The Timeline view as shown in fransw's screengrab in his original post is that which one sees after clicking on the "fullscreen" icon (the little triangle to the left of the Slides and Timeline tabs). I suspect that all that was necessary was to revert to normal view. I have been able to create the "no double ended arrow" scenario by taking the Timeline view into fullscreen mode. regards, Peter

John, Set the first images as you want it to be, then click on the link "Save and use by default" at the bottom of the Properties tab in O&A. Now add the rest of your images. These will all have the border that you want. Beware: so will every image that you add to every project thereafter: until you set an image with no border and save that as your default. regards, Peter

It isn't LAME that's needed for import into Audacity; it is FFMPEG. LAME is for exporting MP3 from Audacity. PTE already uses FFMPEG so should accept video file soundtracks into the Timeline. regards, Peter

Gary, Perhaps a better solution for you would be to use your photo editor to cut out the middle from a black rectangle, save that as a PNG file and then make the video a child of this "windowed mount"? regards, Peter