Adding my plea for one or two improvement ideas in the next version

[photoflora]

I'm hoping some of the following are not too late to make it into the next edition:

1. I keep thinking it would be handy to have a marker on the timeline in O&A which I could set (maybe more than one) which doesn’t do anything except sit there without moving, as an aid to synchronising different bits of animation. At the moment I do it using the figures in the blue boxes associated with the keypoints, but static markers which could be placed and then removed as required would be a real help – quicker and more intuitive....
2. Could filenames which have had only ‘subsidiary’ use (i.e. in Objects and Animations) also be shown in bold, or better still apply some other distinguishing feature such as a different colour, or show in italics, or both. Ideally two different typographical characteristics could show when it has been used in both situations – ‘main’ and ‘subsidiary’. (I think I have offered this before, and I believe others have made similar suggestions, so... “Pretty Please” Igor!).
3. Could we have a facility for moving all the sound files ‘en bloc’. As an example of the need, I have nearly finished a very complex sequence, but have not put a sufficiently long black frame at the start. If I want to increase its length I have to shuffle all the sound files along, in all the different tracks, each independently of the other. This could easily cause problems with some of the quite critical bits of sound that have been very precisely synchronised with a particular image or animation. Again I think this has been suggested already, but I’d like to add my voice.
4. Files with long names, especially sound files can look very much alike, as they are truncated when the icon size is small. Peter Appleton (pers. comm.) has reminded me that the full path of the currently highlighted file appears at the bottom of the screen, but could the filename be made a bit more conspicuous please – I’ve been using PTE for years, and failed to notice it! (Yes... okay! Don’t say it!)

[MUR]

For the point 3.

Although not the solution, you can add a blank slide at the end of the AV and put a link to that slide, for the first soundclip of each track. is not much work and if yout move the slide, the entire block moves together. You can then delete the links and blank slide.

If you move the slide 2 (after the first blank slide), all the project moves as a block

You must delete any other link, before doing this or get unusual behavior

See my post "Is something usefull hidden here?"

MUR

[photoflora]

Thanks MUR - I'm about to try this out! Looks like a useful interim solution.

I suppose the technique will also work for just the latter part of a track or tracks that need moving en bloc...?

photoflora

[MUR]

Yes, if you makes the link to the blank slide, for example the sound clip 2 of track 1 and sound clip 3 of track 2 , the block moves from these slides to the end of the project and leave the other motionless.

Experiment with these ideas.

Indeed, it is much better to do or remove the links in project options and not in timeline because it is easier to visualize the whole project and prevents the risk of when selecting an audio clips, accidentally move it

You can see the basic idea in this screen capture, but there is much more;

MUR