PTE WISH LIST

[starfish]

Hi,

PTE is a wonderful program. I have a suggestion which would make the program much more versatile.

I have been experimenting for some time with using PTE for .gif and .avi animations. PTE potentially can do a wonderful job with this with a rather minor enhancement to the program.

Basically, if you can break down the .gif or .avi into individual frames, PTE can handle them as animations if the display is set to a few miliseconds with no effects chosen. And it does this well.

BUT...to do this in the form of useable shows with multiple animations per show, the frames need to loop. This requires the user to manually exit the loop with a mouse click, and it makes it impossible to match music length with the animation.

This is where my Wish List request comes in.

I would like to see one of two possible enhancements to PTE:

EITHER

1. The ability to declare the length of a looping show---say for 30 seconds (or whatever an appropriate time is) at which time the show would end. This would allow the user to call another .exe at this point so that a multi animation show or a show that combined regular slides with animations could be created. It also would allow a music selection to be matched by time with the running animation.

In other words, instead of the program looping endlessly, it would loop for a specified time period and then end.

A timer set at the beginning of the loop, would, I think, do the trick. At the end of the time period, the program would call its End Program sequence.

OR

2. Allow the user to tell the program to loop a given range of slides for a declared number of cycles before continuing with the rest of the show.

This last would be preferable, because it would allow the show to be contained within one .exe file instead of many, and the show would probably be faster and smoother.

Without either of these changes, the only workaround at this time that I have found is to copy/paste a number of animation slide cycles into PTE end to end. If the animation is to run within a regular slide show, then each animation slide as well as other slides must then be set --by hand-- for its specific timing in milleseconds. This is not only a laborious process, but a hit or miss way of doing things. Since even very short animations are often made up of dozens of slides, this workaround increases the size of the show immensely.

The enhancements I outlined would allow shows that look much better than they would if .avi files were simply ported in, because the shows will run without the window, slider, and controls that show when an .avi files is played as an .avi, allowing a much more enticing-looking screen.

Another plus is that a looping show could be set to run for a reasonable length of time instead of the very brief time an .avi runs. If you have a show which loops, such as a kaleidoscope of photos, or a photo montage, or whatever, or if you want to run a looping animated .gif (most of them loop) then the changes I outlined above would make this possible.

Sharon