Theme question

[SeismicGuy]

I couldn't quickly find the answer but I am sure there must be a simple answer.  I have a decent understanding of styles and often will apply various styles to various slides and then tweak here and there using the Objects and Animation process.  I also understand that a Theme is just a collection of Styles and you can create your own theme(s).  The question is that when choosing a Theme (e.g., Ken Burns) it shows that there are 8 styles in the theme.  But is there a way to see exactly what those 8 styles are?  I know that when you are creating a theme you choose the styles and the list of styles shows up at the lower right as you are choosing them.  But once saved is there a way of again seeing what that list of styles was?

[SeismicGuy]

So I take it there is no way to "deconstruct" a Theme?

[Barry Beckham]

This is just a personal view.

I think themes are great, but probably they lend themselves more to those who need to repeat a slide show many times. In that case the theme used is more likely yo be made by the author and therefore its known what slide styles are contained within the Theme.

Probably, the way to see what styles a theme contains is to quickly apply that theme to the number of images the theme states.  That should take just a few seconds to set up and what better way to see if the theme meets your needs, better than a full screen preview

[mhwarner]

As far as I can tell, the answer is, if you have created the theme yourself or it is another user created theme, you can click on a slide, select "Themes", select the theme you are interested in, click on "Tools" and then "Edit Theme".  You can scroll to the bottom of the right-hand part of the dialog and see the various styles which have been included in the theme.  This DOES NOT seem to work for the default themes supplied with PTEAV as the "Edit Theme" button is grayed out in those instances.  I only have one non-default theme which I created myself.  I am only assuming it would work for other user-created themes but I don't think I actually have any.  If you have some, try it.  

[SeismicGuy]

Yes that seems to be the case.  The reason this came up is that I was applying the default Ken Burns theme to a number of slides.  The theme has 8 styles which are typically horizontal mild pan with some zoom.  But a couple of the styles are apparently vertical pans and sometimes pans with rotations that I did not care for.  So I just figured I could modify the "offending" styles in that theme to do what I wanted.  Of course there is no option I could find to either edit the theme or look at or alter the styles that make up the theme.  It would be nice to duplicate the theme into one where edits could be made but I guess another workaround is just for me to create and entirely new theme and built it up with styles of my choosing.

 

[mhwarner]

8 hours ago, SeismicGuy said:

Yes that seems to be the case.  The reason this came up is that I was applying the default Ken Burns theme to a number of slides.  The theme has 8 styles which are typically horizontal mild pan with some zoom.  But a couple of the styles are apparently vertical pans and sometimes pans with rotations that I did not care for.  So I just figured I could modify the "offending" styles in that theme to do what I wanted.  Of course there is no option I could find to either edit the theme or look at or alter the styles that make up the theme.  It would be nice to duplicate the theme into one where edits could be made but I guess another workaround is just for me to create and entirely new theme and built it up with styles of my choosing.

 

That's exactly what I did.  Maybe my custom theme will be helpful.  I first modified the original Ken Burns styles supplied with PTEAV by default to remove any borders and set the chosen image to "cover" the screen.  Then I added these to the theme.  You can tell by the names what they do.  Feel free to modify further to suit your needs.

MW Ken Burns.ptetheme

[SeismicGuy]

Thanks--I'm looking forward to trying it out.  The thing is I don't do short 5 or 10 minute projects intended for competitions or judging but, rather, mainly travelogue-type shows meant for friends we have have traveled with and/or other family/acquaintances.  Our best friends have also been our traveling companions and after our trips for the last almost 20 years I always put together a fun show.  The one I am working on now is from a recent cruise and so far includes about 300+slides that include mp4 clips as well and is now about 50 minutes long.  So far have also included more than a dozen different musical audio selections that are pertinent to the various locations we were in (and placing and modifying the musical clips and synchronizing them is a chore in itself).  Going slide by slide to apply a style is tedious so applying a theme to a bunch of slides is somewhat easier.   By and large I like to use a moderate Ken Burns effect on most slides and the program I had been using before PTE allowed for applying this to a bunch of slides and then automatically "randomizing" the effect.  I would still need to eventually go through slide by slide with some tweaks but the ability to have a decent starting point applied to umpteen slides was a bit of a time saver.  And then there is the occasional slide or group of a few slides that I end up combining mainly to achieve some humorous effect and of course those take more time.