Making O&A easier for beginners

[wa3pyi]

Hello,

Although I have had PTE since version 5, I rarely used it and never really took the time to master some of the advanced features until a month or so ago.

From a beginners perspective, PTE is fairly intuitive for throwing together a basic slideshow - drag individual pictures to separate slides in the order you want them shown, use default transition effects or check them all and let them come up randomly, add some music in the music tab, check the "Auto spread slides along music" box and voila! - a nice basic slideshow.

But the really powerful features seem to reside in the Objects & Animation area and this is always where things became intimidating and frustrating for me. I've downloaded and watched some of the different slideshows that some of you have posted and marveled at the beautiful animation in many of them. But the learning curve for mastering PZR, masks, and the other fascinating animation features just seemed too steep. Last month, with a deadline facing me, I finally sat down and worked my way through understanding some of the basics of the animation features. The opening sequence on my show was 42 seconds long and it took me over 5 hours to create it! But it was worth it because I now feel like I have a basic idea how to use keypoints, PZR & masks.

This brings me to my feature request from a beginner. Although I believe almost any type of animation can be created with the existing tools in the O&A area, it would be a whole lot easier for beginners if pre-built animations were available. I'm thinking about all the transition effects that are available for moving between slides. Would it be possible to have these transition effects available in the O&A area to apply as either a entrance or an exit effect to each object? This would allow beginners who do not yet understand how to use all the pieces of the PZR, mask, 3D and other features to at least apply some basic (and some complex) animations to their objects.

Please excuse my ignorance if this is already built-in and I just haven't found it. Thanks for a really great product!

Lee

[Lin Evans]

Hi Lee,

Learning the possibilities which are latent in PTE can be an intriguing pursuit. It does take time to learn many of the techniques, but there are myriad helpful tutorials available and also lots of "templates" both free and inexpensive which can help the new user of PTE quickly produce some very sophisticated and impressive results.

The first thing I would suggest is that you avail yourself of the free tutorials which cover the vast majority of possibilities from simple pan, zoom and rotate through very esoteric things such a creating three dimensional rotating objects.

Let me give you two links below. The first is to my own site where I keep my free tutorials which are also available on the PTE forum at the second link. There are numerous other tutorials available as well. Browsing through these may save you many hours of "head scratch" and frustration when trying to achieve your presentation goals...

http://www.learnpte.com (click on the tutorials link)

http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?/forum/8-tutorials-and-articles/

Best regards,

Lin