Ed Overstreet

This new beta is GREAT I just used the Replace Main Slide feature to improve the show I've been working on this past week, and it was sooooo easy. I love these new enhancements. Great work!

Hi Bob. Welcome to the club. I think everyone has had this experience, I know I have and so have several helpful folks who replied to a similar post from me a couple of months ago. The problem, if I understand the more technically inclined correctly, is probably a combination of the low resolution currently available in the AVI file format and the fact that no DVD burning software you or I are likely able to afford or run on our computers is as good as what the DVD-movie companies use to produce the much better DVD movie images we get from those media. Nothing much to be done about it, as I understand. I've given up on burning my shows to DVDs, I'm sticking with the EXE versions and sharing my shows with friends on CDs, asking them to play them on their computers. I can't stand the poor quality of DVD playback I get , and anyway while most friends and family have computers not all that many of them have DVD players yet. So it's no great loss. Maybe in a few more years the technology will catch up with the superb quality of shows PTE gives us on our monitors, but for now it's a distant and meaningless dream, IMO anyway.

Wow, thanks for all the quick and informative replies folks! There's lots of grist for the mill here!

In viewing a PTE show of my own, and several by other people, at our photo club last night, I was struck yet again by how disappointing it is to view photographs when projected on a screen using our club's digital projector. In comparison with the original shows on a CRT monitor, the projections are a puzzling combination of increased contrast and reduced colour saturation, resulting in an almost complete destruction of pastel or other subtle colours and loss of detail especially in the shadows. Our projector is about four years old now, and I hope the technology has improved. I realize the colour gamut and method of display is very different between a digital projector and a CRT monitor, and I know that at least older projectors were designed mainly for business presentations not photography presentations, and photographers as we all know have very different demands on the quality of the display than do people who are putting up bullet-slides and simple graphics. I am hoping that someone on this forum might offer some suggestions of websites with good objective reviews of various projectors (from a photographer's standpoint) or perhaps the names of particular projector models of more recent vintage which do a better job in displaying photographs than do some older projectors. To protect the guilty and avoid getting into problems with specific companies, I'll refrain from naming the brand or model of our current projector. However it was a fairly expensive and high-end model at the time, and it certainly churns out enough lumens for a large room. But any comparison side-by-side with the same images on a CRT monitor leaves one exceedingly disappointed in the projection.

Thanks cc and Al. That solution does work, once you've added all your slides to the show. However, if after removing the file-name comments from some slides, you later add to the show another slide which has a file name that you want to display, you still would have to turn the Project Options setting for setting the Comment field to the file name back on, which will re-set all comments to that value, and you're back to having to turn some of them off manually again. It's not a big issue, but my preference would be for the auto-comment choices to be embedded in the customize slide features not in Project Options, given the new beta versions have the wonderful feature of being able to select blocks of slides on the timeline and make the same customize edits to all those selected. Thus, someone who wants the file names to appear on all images could simply block-select all images and input that edit in the customize window, and someone who only wants some slides to do this and not others can do likewise. New or replacement slides added later could be dealt with individually, instead of having to reset the whole show as is now the case (unless I'm overlooking something). I appreciate that reprogramming the location of this option might cause more trouble or work than it's worth, but I thought I'd offer that as a suggestion to Igor and his team for consideration.

This may seem an esoteric problem, but it is very annoying. I'm not sure whether there's some easy solution in the current software that I'm not aware of, or whether this is a bug that perhaps needs fixing. In some shows that I produce, I want the slide's file name to appear on the screen with most slides, but not with all slides. To do this, I've been setting the Project Options for showing the file name in the comment field as the default, before I start. Then, when I've finished the show, I go back into the main screen, click on each slide for which I do NOT want the file name to show, go to the comment field for that slide, and delete the entry. Then I save the project. The problem comes if/when I later re-open the project and launch Project Options and go to the customize synchronization screen to change something (a timing, switch a slide, whatever). On exiting back to the main window, after clicking OK on the changes, I discover that PTE has re-set ALL the comment fields to show the file name, including those slides for which I had earlier deleted the file name from the comments fields. I then have to go through the show and re-delete all those entries. This happens every time I do any edits in the Project Options dialogs, usually in the synchronization window. As you can imagine, this can get to be a bit tedious especially on a longer show. It seems to me that once I go into the slide properties for a specific slide and remove any comments from that slide, the properties should stay that way and not reset to the default every time I edit any part of the show inside one of the Project Options dialogues. I am missing or overlooking a simple solution to this, or is this an oversight in the programming that could be corrected relatively easily? If that latter, I'd like to propose this as an addition to the wish-list, albeit perhaps not a high-priority one. Maybe I'm the only producer who does shows with the file names showing on some slides but not others. (In case anyone is interested, these shows are for my photo club to showcase members' slides; I ask members to identify themselves and any title they want in the file name, which then displays with the specific slide. However there are title and separator slides between different members' groups of slides for which I don't need nor want the file name displayed. It's much simpler and faster for me, the poor volunteer, to have members do the naming work than to have to create text layers or detailed comments on each slide manually. However I'd like to be able to edit these projects without having to re-do all the comment-field deletions every time I change anything. I tried setting the text colour to black for those slides where I don't want the file name displayed, but that only works if I use a black background, and in various places I use textured or other backgrounds so the text will always show in those cases no matter what colour I use.)

Sorry I thought my original post didn't take, so re-did the posting then saw two. Unable to figure out how to delete one.

I haven't had the chance to play with the new beta yet, but I did view the new scroll effect. I'm impressed and can think of some good uses for it. The other features listed also sound really good. One suggestion for a modification to an existing effect, possibly comparable to some of what the scroll effect does, it to modify the diagonal page (and perhaps also diagonal gate) effects to let the user customize the angle at which the diagonal transfer occurs. Presently the diagonal in the gate and page effects seems to be perpendicular to a line drawn between the opposite corners involved. Whatever it is, the angle of the diagonal is fixed once you pick the direction. I'd like the option of changing that angle a bit (by up to maybe 30 degrees), to match the angle of a diagonal line in one of the photographs involved in the transition. I'm not a programmer so I don't know how difficult this would be to add. Just a suggestion. I'd made it earlier in other thread somewhere but I'm afraid it got lost in the thread or maybe you haven't noticed it, so I thought I'd make it again here. Otherwise, as always I'm amazed at the good and imaginative work you are doing on the software. As are we all.

Hi Stephanie. Welcome to the Forum. I recently bought a laptop to supplement (actually, now that I've discovered what more I can do with it, it's replacing) my desktop. Even though I could have transferred my copy of PTE to the laptop from the desktop, and even though I'm not really very likely to use it any more on the desktop, I bought a second copy from wnsoft for the laptop. It's only $US24, it includes a lifetime of free upgrades, and it's the best value for money I've ever found in software, so I figure why cut corners? If I'm going to cut corners on software licenses, I'd rather do it to Microsoft or some other bloated monopoly, not to Igor and friends. I have no idea what Igor or others think about having two copies, one for a desktop and one for a laptop, from the same license, but personally I'd rather buy the second copy and reward them for all the great work they've done and are continuing to do. Just my own opinion.

I don't have any particular preferences on the default settings, because I never use them. I long ago created a "Syncronized Show" template which has all the settings I want, and I always start working on every new show by first opening that template. So the default settings are irrelevant to me. Until some new options are added in a new version, in which case I'll need to remember to regenerate my template to accommodate any new settings that are available that I want to use. BTW my Synchronized Show template turns on only the Fade transition as a default. I agree that makes more sense than having all of them on, but it's easy to change this default in a template, or for that matter to leave some turned on and some turned off in the template if that's what you want. I wish there were an easier way to change the default transition and timing for specific slides, than double-clicking on the new transition, going to Effect, clicking on the "use own transition" button, etc etc. Maybe some sort of spreadsheet option? It's not a big problem, but on a long show or with lots of small ones, anything to reduce the number of repetitive mouse operations would help

Thanks Gogs. I doubt the sharpness filter makes a difference in this case; I wasn't using it, and I still had the problem. The explanation you quoted makes sense to me. Unfortunately it sounds like something you and I have to live with, unless we want to spend $$$ time and frustration trying out other products (which may or may not work consistently across platforms or system configurations, I suspect). Given the limitations of the DVD feature as I noted above, I don't think I'll bother. I'll stick with the EXE versions of my shows, they look great on monitors and digital projectors, so I'll limit myself to those display media. Fits my own style, preferences, and venues anyway.

I finally got a new computer with a DVD burner and just successfully burned one of my shows to a DVD-R. I used the default settings in the AVI button in PTE (NTSC, DVD-Video, and only the interlaced box checked On) and the default settings in Sonic My DVD Deluxe 5 for burning the DVD. It worked (took a LOT longer than PTE takes to generate an EXE file on the new machine, though), but when I play the show on my DVD player over my TV set I notice a flickering/shimmering in bright highlights (not in the rest of the image). This is in the interior of the image, not along the frame edges as reported (if I interpret correctly) in some other postings re SVCDs. I find this very annoying and distracting. Has anyone else seen this particular problem with DVDs and found a solution to it? BTW while the image quality on the DVD is much better than on the VCD and SVCD burns I did on my old system (which only had a CD burner), the image quality over my TV set is still inferior to the EXE files on my monitor. Not only are the images not as sharp (not surprising given the limits of AVI resolution), but the images are somewhat more contrasty, and subtle colours tend to desaturate. Also the transition smoothness on some effects (especially page and rhombus among those I've tested) is jagged and inferior in several places on the DVD version, though the fades all look good. I can't see myself using DVD versions of my shows except when I want to display them to a group of people where I don't have access to a digital projector and there isn't room for them to crowd around my computer monitor; the image quality is disappointing compared with what I see on the monitor and over my photo club's digital projector. The sound is very good on the DVD though. I guess it's nice to have the option if I ever find an out-of-town friend who has a DVD player but not a computer (the reverse is far more common in my circle of friends and acquaintances). Further to one of my posts some months ago, for the next version of PTE I still don't see further improvements to the video feature as being nearly as important to me as some other things (e.g., pan and zoom effect). One man's opinion anyway, for what it's worth

Quick comment on widescreen laptops -- I got one recently (1920x1200 resolution) and find it wonderful for editing in Photoshop, it's the first monitor I've had in which I can fill the screen top to bottom with the image in Photoshop (maximized) and have room on both sides to accommodate the task bar and the palettes without any crowding over the image. Sure beats hitting the tab key repeatedly. Same advantage also in Nikon Capture if you work in that software. Haven't tried a 1920x1200 show in PTE yet but will at some point, though I'm the only person I know who could view the show correctly I'd second all the other comments, also get as powerful a video card as you can afford especially with the widescreen. On my machine DVD movies at 1920x1200 are almost psychedelic; on my old desktop with 32MB on the video card (big card in 1999 ) I could never run DVD movies at more than 800x600 which was pretty lame in comparison. However this can add a fair bit to the cost

Hello again. In working on a show just now, I have a thought for what I hope would be a fairly easy revision to one of the effects -- the Gates (Diagonal). Usually when I wish to employ a diagonal wipe or gate, I want the angle of the diagonal to match a diagonal line in the next image. Usually that diagonal isn't quite the same angle as the diagonals given by the current effects. Would it be possible to replace the current four choices for the diagonal gate from e.g. top left to bottom right, instead with two choices -- left vs right, and then a spinner setting that lets the user pick and tweak the angle at which the gate comes in. I would find that very helpful, but not being a programmer I don't know how hard or easy it would be to implement. Also the same change for the Page Effect (Diagonal) would be appreciated. In fact, such changes would eliminate the need for the Horizontal/Vertical and Diagonal splits in the menu. A single Gates set, and a single Page set, each with left or right and an angle spinner, would do it -- the vertical/horizontal choices would simply be special cases of the angle setting (0, 90, 180, or 270 depending on the angle at which you do the Page, and 0 or 90 for the gate). I hope I'm communicating this clearly. Thanks.

There is one new feature that I'd like, and a fix to a problem I've been having, that I think are higher priority (for me at least) than new transition effects like Pan and Zoom. The new feature is an optional spreadsheet display for editing, particularly block-editing, of timings and perhaps transition effects as well. In the block editing, it would be very useful to be able to adjust the timings of all images in a block by a fixed amount. For many of my shows doing such edits in a spreadsheet display would be much easier than the current alternatives in PTE. The fix relates to a vexing problem that I've noticed in setting the Project Options to use for example the file name as a comment. In some of my shows, I would like the file name displayed on some slides but not on others. So I set the Options to show the filenames, and then clear the comment field on those slides where I don't want the file name displayed or where I want something else displayed. Unfortunately, if I do this in a project on which I'm working, these changes seem to get lost even when I've saved the project, when I go back in to do further work I discover than the file name is showing as a comment on those slides from which I had earlier removed it. I haven't yet figured out exactly under what circumstances this does or doesn't happen (I think it hasn't happened in a couple of cases, but it usually does). It is quite annoying. Other than that, I am delighted with version 4.3 especially the light table and waveform displays. Great work, guys!

Hi Marianne. I've certainly started with a piece of music and then searched for photographs I already had that went with the music. I also know people who've taken a song (with recognizeable words) and shot images to fit the words, though that's a LOT harder than starting with purely instrumental music (or vocal music with nonsense syllables or in a language that most of one's audience won't understand anyway). For some shows, I find this isn't an either/or proposition. Sometimes I have a great piece of music that I'd love to use for an AV show, and a vague idea of a theme or topic from images I've already shot or that I want to shoot. Then I work back and forth between the music and the images. The most successful example of this approach was an analog two-projector show I did about ten years ago, on the theme of Remembrance (i.e. November 11). I chose Aaron Copeland's Fanfare for the Common Man as music I wanted to use, before I started shooting, then went to our local War Museum, Aviation Museum, a nearby military cemetary, and then did a "photojournalistic shoot" at that year's November 11 ceremony at the War Memorial here in Ottawa. The music drove the images that I shot to a large extent; I'm very familiar with the music, so it "played" in my head all the time I was shooting, and I was conscious of shooting short themes or sequences that would fit into particular musical sequences in the score. Also, when I visited the Grand Canyon on a solo photo holiday, I had with me a tape of a particular Mozart opera aria that I love, which I played over the car radio as I drove around the countryside, and replayed in my head as I was shooting. At some point I realized that the music was probably influencing my photography, decided to use that music for the AV show I produced from that trip, and it was very successful by all reports. The music was an unorthodox choice for a landscape show, but it worked. I'm sure others have had similar experiences. Try it some time. If you know of a piece of music that you really like, and find yourself thinking "gee what great AV music, what images would go with it," try setting yourself the assignment of picking a theme or subject that might fit the music, get really familiar with the music, and then go shoot. No need for a formal "storyboard" (I NEVER bother with those), you can invent one in your head as go you along. It's fun.

My top three preferences, in descending order of importance to me, would be: 1. Light/dark table display of thumbnails in a folder, so I can sort slides within PTE before moving them into the show. 2. Tabular display of images, timings, and ideally also transition types, as in Alrobin's Adjuster, built into PTE, to make it easier to do individual or block replacements of images, transition lengths, and maybe transition types. 3. Shift-click-and-drag adjustment of blocks of transitions on the sync timeline. Thanks again for asking!

Interesting idea, Bill, for those with the software, interest and time to go through the technical manipulations you outlined to identify the beat. However, I think such a feature would be of more interest to technophiles than to most users of the software, or perhaps I am projecting my own preferences on this? I can hear the beat on the music, I can synchronize to that music very well with the software as it is now, and I can't see myself using the feature you describe -- too much extra work to do something I'm able to manage to do with what's already there. Which, to me, means this isn't a high priority. But again, that's only one person's opinion

For me, this feature would be marginally nice to have, but a very low priority compared with other things that have been identified (integrated light/dark table, integrated spreadsheet display allowing block adjustments of timings and maybe transitions, shift-click moving of groups of transitions on the sync timeline, etc.). One of the limitations of a waveform display of at least some music is that the beats in the music (which normally are the points to which you want to link the transitions) aren't always obvious on the waveform, at least not in the sound editing software I've used. Even when the beats are obvious on the waveform, you don't always want the transition to begin exactly on the beat -- when you're using a slow transition, at least with some images, you sometimes want the transition to begin before the beat, because the switch-over (or the third image, as appropriate) doesn't become apparent immediately on a 4 or 5-second fade as it does on a 1- or 2-second fade for example. So in such cases one wants the transition to start before the beat, so the visual effect appears on the screen with the beat (which it won't in such cases if the transition point is actually on the beat). The amount of lag between the beginning of the transition and the appearance of something happening on the screen isn't easily predicted in advance; it depends on the relative tonalities and brightnesses in the two images as well as on the length of the fade. This is something that a waveform display won't help you with; I find that in the end the only way to set the transitions to the music exactly as I want them is to listen to the music and press the New Transition button, then go back, view the effect while hearing the music, and tweak the transition points where needed as just described. I find the present version works just fine for such purposes, and I don't think a waveform display would help much or at all in that process, at least not in the shows I do with the music I tend to use. But that's just one user's opinion. Thanks very much for asking; it is so refreshing to be involved with software and developers who ask users what they want before introducing the features.

Photoshop, at least Photoshop 7 and CS, has a feature under File>Automate called Fit Image. I don't recall if Photoshop 6 or 5.5 had this. In Fit Image, you can constrain both width and height to say 768 pixels (for a 1024x768 screen). If you write an Action to do this and run the action as a batch on a folder containing your images (and save the images on themselves or to a different folder), Photoshop will automatically resize all your images, whether portrait or landscape, to the same maximum dimension of 768 pixels (or whatever you set in the dialogue box while creating the Action).

Another nice feature which would probably be relatively easy to add, would be the ability to shift-click a block of image transitions on the sync timeline and shift them forward or backward a second or so in the time line as a group. A friend pointed this out to me at a meeting last night; there are situations where one might want to have all of a group of transitions start slightly earlier or later, and being able to shift them on the timeline as a group would save the trouble of having to adjust each of them separately. I'm not a programmer but my friend is, and he thinks it would be relatively easy to program.

At the risk of being redundant, I'd like to add my heartfelt thanks to Igor and everyone else at PTE for 4.20; it's wonderful! In my photo club alone, there are currently 53 members signed up for our AV group. A growing number of them are switching to PTE, and I expect that number will grow further when members see the shows at next week's first Ottawa-area four-club AV expo at which about half the AV shows are in PTE. The synchronized time-line with the preview button alone is worth the price of admission, never mind all the other wonderful features! I expect sales and use of PTE will continue to grow in Ottawa.

Yesterday I installed the new (non-beta) version 4.20 and checked apr.ini to see if I needed to add those two lines (FastFade and SmoothFade) -- they were in the apr.ini file that had installed (either that, or the installation didn't over-write the earlier apr.ini which I'd edited). So unless I'm mistaken, Igor has already implemented this change as a default in 4.20.

There are a number of things that could be causing the discrepancy between the sync preview window and the full-screen preview. My first suggestion to try to fix this would be to ensure that none of your photo files are larger than 150-200 KB at most (if you're using 1024x768 images, use JPG compression quality 5 in Photoshop, which keeps the file sizes manageable). My second suggestion would be to ensure that your music track has about 5 seconds of silence at the front, so the music doesn't start immediately. Begin the show with a black canvas (e.g. 1024x768 solid black image) and don't start your transition into your second image (which is actually the first photograph) until 5 seconds into the sound file ( or later, if you don't want your first image to come up with the music); this gives older or less-powerful computers enough time to finish loading the exe file before trying to run the transition into frame 2. On my 500 MHz PIII system, all problems that I've encountered with inconsistencies between the two preview displays go away if I adhere to these two principles. If these tips don't work, someone else may have another suggestion, but try these two tips first. Good luck

Wow thanks so much for this Igor After implementing this change, I find that on shows with 1024x768 images under 200 KB all trace of flickering is completely gone now, for the first time, on my old 500 MHz PIII system. There had been a slight trace of flicker on my system until now, but no more, now my shows are absolutely smooth! I've never seen anything like this on my computer before The improvement is particularly noticeable when fading to a full-screen image from a completely black screen; that is a very tough test for flickering, I've discovered with many AV programs, and this revision to PTE passes that test with flying colours, something I've never seen before on this system (but I repeat myself ) Amazing! Thanks again Igor and company!