Boggo Road Gaol

[mcarthur]

I've been using PTE and GlobFX for some time. It happens that, with my newest show, I needed to show multiple images on the screen at once and have them fade independently, and I also had to pan a bit. So I used GlobFX (until hopefully the new v4.4 effects and multi-image screens :-). I hope people don't feel I'm bagging PTE or anything - I'm not - I just think this is one of the best digital AV communities and want to support it.

Our camera group organised a visit to a gaol which is now a historic site. Photographs from this shoot as well as me coming back late one night with a good moon, make up the show.

http://staff.dstc.edu.au/mcarthur/boggoroad2.exe (5.4MB)

Robert

[Marianne]

Hello Mcarthur,

I watched your show and though I saw several pictures I was very charmed of, I don't think the quality of the output of this program reaches anything nearby the quality of P2E.

On my system (Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz, 1024 RAM), the transition effects where really jerky. On one occasion, don't know whether it was on purpose or not, the transition from black and white to color was jumpy.

I really do hope the new P2E transitions will be much more smoother, otherwise I'm not even considering to use them.

In my opinion your photographs deserve more than this.

Maybe I'm a little bit harsh, but I would like to see your photo's also put together in a P2E show, just to see the difference. I just think you don't really need that much transitions and fading several images one by one can also be done in P2E just by preparing your photographs in an image editing program like Photoshop for example.

I liked the photographs and the music was very well chosen. No information on the music though....

[Ken Cox]

Robert

transitions were smooth on my

xp home sp2 - p4 2.8 ghz - 1 gig ram - 1 gig fixed swap

i have the free GlobFx Swiff player plug in so maybe that is the secret

very sad show and the music makes it more sad

Alan Lyons has a real sad one -- nearly made me bawl - -I immediately thought of Alan's piece as your show progressed

makes one appreciate Canadian Thanksgiving today

ken

[alrobin]

The show performed well on my system, too (also a P4, 2.8GHz, 1Gb RAM). Don't think I have the GlobFx plug-in.

Some of the evolving Moire patterns were interesting during the zooms (esp. for the broken window, and some of the images with sharp vertical lines).

Didn't like the attempt at the start of the show to access the internet - my firewall blocked it. Seems to happen with every GlobFx show.

I felt the dissolves were just as smooth as PTE but the images maybe not quite as sharp (hard to tell without a side-by-side comparison). Some of the pans were a little "wobbly", due probably to the line by line refreshing of the images.

One feature I really like is the ability to control the position in the show with a movie-like slider at the bottom.

[LumenLux]

On this 750mhz pc, but plenty ram - the show is unreasonably jerky. The good photography, and good artistic intent, perfect music, are all swallowed up by the poor performance on a least this relative slow machine. Thank you for sharing this presentation.

[mcarthur]

Thanks for everyone's comments. I found GlobFX much easier to work with as a workflow - I tried to do the show in PTE before I realised I needed GlobFX's transitions and even without these it was taking 3+ times as long as for PTE I had to do a lot in Photoshop to prepare multi-images onscreen with separate dissolves.

However, I much prefer the quality of PTE's dissolve and the fact it uses the actual image I give it. I suspect the reason GlobFX's version looks less sharp is that it *is* - their software seems to take your image and apply compression (even when turned off from what I can see) and something else. The result is definitely less sharp and constrasty than the original images and that whcih PTE gives. I also liked the ability to do the music on the timeline in GlobFX, but I haven't played around in the new PTE so can't compare that feature.

I'm sorry about the thing trying to connect to the Internet - nothing to do with me and I wish it wouldn't! I don't know at all what's happening there.

The information on the music should have been at the end - it's a track called Fyvie Castle from an album called Fyvie's Embrace by Chris Duncan, one (if not the) best Scottish fiddle players in the world. He's also a motor mechanic! :-) Chris says it's the best ghost music in the world.

I put the show into a local inter-club competition here as my first entry, and it won 3rd (out of 8; 2 analogue, 6 digital). All of the digital were done with GlobFX, mostly I think because of the use of easy to produce multiple image onscreen with seperate dissolves, and the flexible pan/zoom effect. From talking with others, PTE is seen as a lesser option, partly I think because they took a look at it once and haven't come back, and partly because of workflow/functionality. That's a pity because, apart from what I said above, I think I've seen some beautiful shows from PTE as well as GlobFX - it's the images, music, narration, mood, author, etc. that make a show rather than just the software (although it certainly helps!).

Thanks again for the comments, and thanks for this friendly forum!

Robert

[ContaxMan]

Maybe this is too late but I also found that the transitions were jerky on my new system with a good specification.

It's a nice show but I wouldn't watch it again with these "iffy" transitions.