forum AV

[cottage]

I am delighted that Maureen has agreed to provide some direction with the World Peace AV project. I had asked her several weeks ago to consider the offer. Again, I'm delighted that she has said yes. Maureen will do a wonderful job in managing the production of this project. However, it is up to the forum membership to provide material with which to work with.

The upload site remains open to everyone - World Peace AV Project Submission Link. I hope you will take the opportunity to submit images to this worthwhile project. A link is provided at the bottom of the submission page which will allow you to review what has already been submitted to the project.

Regards,

Bill

[Guest damor]

Whats this? Do I detect accord ( if thats how you spell it) Peace at last. What a difference a day makes, as the song goes. Yesterday I was ready to throw in the towel, but you guys are something else.Today I feel like its Christmas again. How can anyone now ignor our plea for peace? Ive been singing John Lennons "imagine" all evening! Thanks All, for making one concerned man happy,

This project will have some effect one others as well as ourselves.

Maureen-- You do have the correct avatar Im gonna make a new for meself now.

Dave

[d67]

Patrick, my comment about stirring up discussion was meant to be a joke (hence the ) I thought from the sound of your comments that maybe you were playing "devil's advocate" (sorry, I don't know if you use that idiom in French).

Sorry for the misinterpretation

This comforts me that text can be a source of error and this problem could be easily bypassed just with a self explanatory photo.

"devil's advocate" .. we have the same in french, word for word ; "l'avocat du diable"

... my intervention can also be interpretated so

[Maureen]

Peace to all !

Don't know if you'll all like the finished sequence Folks.

Time will tell!

It would be awful to disagree about Peace, wouldn't it?

I'll be starting it on February 20th, the day after I finish organising the 321 Challenge at Aldbourne

See www.maureenalbright.com/321challenge for more information about that International event which has 15 countries taking part.

You can still enter if you wish - closing date Feb 10th- sequences must be under 3mins 21secs.

Anyone is welcome to come along and watch the judging at Aldbourne.

I have a few ideas up my sleeve for "peace" and I will incorporate my own images as it progresses, hence my delay in submitting images (waiting for someone else to "volunteer" ). All images welcome so have no fear.

I gave one AV group a challenge to produce a five minute sequence from 35 images I uploaded - only rules were you have to use at least 20 images and you cannot use any other images!

see here

Meanwhile keep sending in your images to Bill

Best wishes

Maureen

[JohnFeg]

Maureen,

Many heaartfelt thanks for taking on this worthy task.

If you need any additional pictures, of a particular genre/style say, to help you develop your ideas and to facilitate co-ordination, I'm sure that many of us will be able to come up with something constructive.

Just shout.

John

[JohnFeg]

I went into the Cottage Upload Page again today, to have a peep at all the new pictures sent in since the last visit.

But, counlt not find the preview facility. Has sonething been changed?

John

[cottage]

I went into the Cottage Upload Page again today. Has sonething been changed?

John,

Perhaps you caught the page just as it was being updated. Today I received several new submissions. As soon as I updated the system with the new images, another submission was received. To prevent this from happening in the future I've created a 'Temporarily Offline' type page during the transition process. Hope this helps. Sorry for any inconvenience.

All pages are available here - World Peace AV Submissions

Regards,

Bill

[JohnFeg]

Thank you Bill,

quite like me to be at the right place at the wrong time.

Best wishes

John

[Maureen]

Let There Be Peace

The joint Forum AV is now finished and should be up on the web soon.

Best Wishes

Maureen

[Barry Beckham]

Ken

If copyright music is required I will purchase the CD and donate it to whoever puts this show on the road.

Just let me know what he/she requires.

Barry

barry@beckhamdigital.co.uk

www.beckhamdigital.co.uk

[Maureen]

Hi

The sequence is on the web since I finished it at 5.30am.

See Beechbrook link.

However please be patient ...

when I downloaded & tested the zipped version this afternoon,

the credits jump (Thanks Ken for the feedback)

and there's some distortion with the sound.

SO I have put a temporary block on the download for a short while as I'm correcting a few niggles.

Thanks

[JRR]

Maureen:

I downloaded it this morning. Yes there are a few minor "glitches" but a really good job taking images from many different people and melding them into one great show. That is not easy !!

Thank you very much !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Ken Cox]

little bit late Barry

Maureen has already put show together

maybe you could have a look at this one tho seeing as you are back from your vacation

http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3971

we tried to cover for you but one can only do so much -- forum members should get a deep discount for directing people to your site for training videos, sources of music etc:)

ken

[ronwil]

Wow! That was terrific Maureen. You have made something special and tasteful from the images we submitted. Best wishes.

Ron [uK]

[sospan]

What a wonderful presentation, something for us newer members to aim for. A big thank you to all who contributed and especially Maureen for the final presentation.

Ray

[Ken Cox]

It was like pulling teeth but we accomplished it .

A big vote of thanks for all who worked on "Peace"

ken

[Grumpygrandad]

Just watched "Peace", fantastic show, Well done everybody who contributed.

George

[JEB]

Folks,

Firstly I must start by stating that I am a total novice but I am keen to learn.

Secondly I should state that I have only watched this show once so far but know I will watch it many times more in the future.

I thought that it would be of value to me and hopefully to others if I were to give some instant feedback that may induce debate.

I have been watching the discussion during the past few months with some trepidation. I feared that this show could turn out to be a bit “corny” and OTT. How wrong I was! The music and techniques used were excellent in my view and I am now impatient to have a second look to try to figure out how some of the transitions were achieved.

However I would make one criticism and that is that I would have liked to have seen many of the images on the screen for longer than they were. I have found this to be the case in many if not most of the shows I have watched since taking up this obsessive hobby. I have noticed myself that I always face the dilemma of not making the show too long but trying to include as many images as possible.

What are the views of others?

Thanks to everybody who contributed.

John Barnett

[Maureen]

Hi

Hope Damor's had a chance to see his "Baby" idea and likes the result.

A trully International project & glad to be a part of it too.

Of course I keep seeing bits I want to "adjust & change" in my part but that's my personality....

Look forward to viewing the next one.... that someone else'll paste together

It'd be good to see the variety of styles presented on the Forum.

Well done on bringing everyone together Damor. hope you're keeping well.

We'll be down in Swansea on the 18th for the week so maybe catch up with you then.

Also visiting Sospan Ray, so may catch up with you at the Club on Wednesday night. You can't travel anywhere without tripping over PTE members these days - great to put faces to the names. Maybe more members should now post their mugshots up on the PTE Rogues Gallery?

Also bumped into The Oldie in Northumberland the other week. Hi Alan !

I know the French Diaporama Forum have special large badges they wear at AV events to recognise one another, or maybe we'd just do a strange secret signal like one hand over your eye and one over your ear to show we're true PTE buddies! Just on April 1st maybe ?

Glad to get the feedback about production.

Negative helps the beginners and my skin is tough !

Well until they chop it around ...

My own comment is....

the actual music is too short for the number of images - if I'd created this for my own personal use I'd have used much longer slower dissolves to get a much better effect and done more pruning.

Not that I felt anyone's work wasn't welcome here etc. Thank You everyone.

This would have given more time for the credits too at the end.

I could've added some silence to let them roll over but feel it'd lose the atmosphere.

I wanted to get this one finished,

... so I didn't do as much sound editing as I'd hoped.

So I could've for example put in some sound effects at the start to really get your attention,

gone into the song and finished with some of "Give Peace a Chance" (which I'd have editing & played with a bit.)

Then it'd get into another dimension and level

& that "ol' chestnut *********" would've been involved .

Can add more notes if required,

BW Maureen

[e.b.west]

I just got around to downloading the World Peace show. Veeeery nice job. Thanks you for doing it and thanks to everyone who contributed and thanks to Damor for the orginal idea.

E.B. West

[Ed Overstreet]

However I would make one criticism and that is that I would have liked to have seen many of the images on the screen for longer than they were.

What are the views of others?

John Barnett

I would like to thank Maureen for the having undertaken the challenging task of pulling together some pretty disparate images into a nice show. Having worked on "group" shows before, I appreciate how difficult that can be.

I would second John Barnett's comment above, however. I felt some of the images needed more time on the screen to be appreciated (and not just those of mine , and I felt some of the transitions were a bit too rushed. Some of the transitions, especially the Buddha/lotus ones, I thought were quite effective, but I'd have liked to have seen a similar gentler pace in some later parts of the show. Also, I think the credits at the end need to be up a couple of seconds longer, I didn't have time to read all the names before the slide disappeared.

However, one can always quibble with Av productions, and there are different tastes in how to do these things. I'm sure if I'd produced a show with these images, others would have reservations about some of the things I might have done, and that's probably true with most of us.

One curious thing, possibly more a function of my computer (or whatever my system was doing in the background when I ran the show) than of the show itself, the first time I ran the show, I was very disconcerted to see some images appearing, disappearing and then re-appearing jerkily for no apparent reason (especially in the afore-mentioned Buddha/Lotus sequence). However, the second time I ran the show, this didn't happen, and things went a lot more smoothly (though I still found some of the later images weren't on the screen as long as I'd have liked). I say this in case anyone else plays the show through and sees what might be some glitches in the early sections; wait a couple of minutes and try running it again, it should look a lot better the second time through. Or maybe my aging eyes were playing tricks on me that first time through Or maybe I got the perhaps-buggy version that was alluded to above, though by the time I downloaded it several hundred others had done so, so I'm not sure ... But something definitely didn't look "right" the first time I ran the show. I'm glad I waited and tried running it again later. Maybe I'll go back to the site in a few weeks (I'm away on a trip shortly), re-download it and run it again.

Thanks again to Maureen and to everyone else who worked on and believed in Damor's idea.

[d67]

One curious thing, possibly more a function of my computer (or whatever my system was doing in the background when I ran the show) than of the show itself, the first time I ran the show, I was very disconcerted to see some images appearing, disappearing and then re-appearing jerkily for no apparent reason (especially in the afore-mentioned Buddha/Lotus sequence). However, the second time I ran the show, this didn't happen, and things went a lot more smoothly ....

Similar behaviour for me but runing it twice doesn't change something.

The numerous jerky slides of this slideshow make it very difficult to see and I confess that I didn't see it up to it's end by reason of these phenomenons !

[Ken Cox]

Patrick if i remember right you copuld not play LumenLuxe's last show with your main system.

Ed - show runs smooth on my system -- the budda sequence is a variety of fades i believe

I guess anybody that is having triouble with the show will not have the processing power for the pan and fade of ver 5.0

ken

[d67]

Patrick if i remember right you copuld not play LumenLuxe's last show with your main system.

You are right, but with Lumenlux'slideshow, things went better after removing all background running softwares.

That is not the case here.

I guess anybody that is having triouble with the show will not have the processing power for the pan and fade of ver 5.0

Probably, but as things come up till then, I most likely will have upgraded my PC largely before the release of ver 5.0

[Ed Overstreet]

I'm glad that Patrick replied; so it's not just my eyesight or my system alone.

My laptop is a fairly powerful computer, in fact it was the top-of-the-Dell line (or arguably one small notch below the very top) when I got it a year and half ago, it has 1 GB of RAM and a 128 MB video card that is one of the high-end ones listed by Igor in his survey of peoples' video cards. Yes I know that many of today's higher-end systems have more than thise amounts of RAM and video memory, but ...

Saying that we'll have to upgrade our systems to use the new features isn't gong to encourage many people to rush to adopt the new software; I for one have no interest in having to upgrade what was a very powerful computer only after eighteen months, I can't afford that kind of buying behaviour on my pension. If that's what it takes to do pan and zoom, well I'll just do without pan and zoom -- probably not a great loss, given the generally tacky and tedious over-use I've seen some people make of that feature in some other software lately.

I'm concerned and disappointed that a show that a lot of us believe in and cared enough to contribute to is going to run so un-smoothly on some systems that some viewers, like Patrick, will exit and move on to something else before the show even ends. That rather defeats the whole idea, IMO.

BTW I thought maybe the problem was with my screen resolution (I generally run my system at 1600x1200, my eyes have grown accustomed to the tiny fonts but I love working in Photoshop on images in that resolution). So I reset to 800x600 and re-ran the show this morning, and there was still some jerkiness especially in part of the Buddha/lotus sequence. So I don't think it's a screen resolution issue. And the credits at the end still race by too fast for me to register all the names; maybe on the fourth or fifth viewing I'll have figured out who all the people are. But what's the point of having a text slide on the screen so briefly that you need multiple viewings to figure it out?

I would hate to see many shows (and version 5) become something that only a relative handful of the technically (and financially) inclined can afford to use properly, because that will limit not only the market for the software but also the market for the shows it produces. Yes, eventually I'll replace my laptop with another one with more bells and whistles, but I'm not doing that for a few more years yet, 'cause I can't afford it and am not interested in constantly feeding money into the computer industry. There are a lot of folks out here (many of whom belong to my photo club) who are very interested in producing and viewing shows like this but who can be very put off by anything that requires frequent, expensive, and sometimes technically-intimidating hardware upgrades to get it to look right. Please, don't market-marginalize a wonderful medium and some great software by making it too esoteric or overly dependent on high-end, expensive systems! (Sorry if this isn't the most appropriate thread for that last bit, but I think the comment needs the context of this show as an example.)