Help with slideshow sync AFTER burned to CD

[heyape]

Hi there,

I will first say I'm sorry if this is not the proper palce to post this as I am new to this forum. I just bought Pic2 and have made two slideshows. Both slideshow I spent HOURS sync'ing them to the music. I know there is probably a WAY faster easier way....but I'm new and it took me forever to do it manually. Anyway, after I previewed and it was perfefct I hit the create button and saved it onto my hard drive. When I run it from file on my hard drive.....it's perfect. So I then burned that file to a CD and that's where the problem is. Thank goodness I check after burning just the first one. The sync of the music with the slides are now off by several frames. This has happened both times with both slideshows. What am I doing wrong?? It's so frustrating that after all that time I spend on them...it was like a waste. I really hope someone can help me out here cuz I'm puling my hair out, crying and ready to delete the program entirely! Thanks in advance. April

[Mike Reed]

Hi there,

I will first say I'm sorry if this is not the proper palce to post this as I am new to this forum. I just bought Pic2 and have made two slideshows. Both slideshow I spent HOURS sync'ing them to the music. I know there is probably a WAY faster easier way....but I'm new and it took me forever to do it manually. Anyway, after I previewed and it was perfefct I hit the create button and saved it onto my hard drive. When I run it from file on my hard drive.....it's perfect. So I then burned that file to a CD and that's where the problem is. Thank goodness I check after burning just the first one. The sync of the music with the slides are now off by several frames. This has happened both times with both slideshows. What am I doing wrong?? It's so frustrating that after all that time I spend on them...it was like a waste. I really hope someone can help me out here cuz I'm puling my hair out, crying and ready to delete the program entirely! Thanks in advance. April

Hi April (Is that your name or just the Month)?

Tell me are you running the CD on another computer or testing it on the originating machine but running from the cd. We find that most times it is best to paste the cd's content to a new file on the hard drive and run the sequence from there. The reason being that the hard drive can be read more quickly than the cd drive. If you are running it on a different computer then if the specification is much different from the one you constructed the sequence on then it can happen that it will go out of sync.

Whatever you do don't give up.

Mike

[heyape]

Mike,

Ha....to answer your first question BOTH. April's the name and happens to be the month:) And yes...I was born in April and that's how I got my name.

Okay....I am playing it from the same computer....just testing it as you mentioned. Now, I don't know if I follow what you mean by "paste". What I did was find the Exe file from my hard drive, copy it to the CD drive and burn it. Are you saying that when I highlight the file I should see if there is an option to paste it and not copy it?? SOrry if this is a super dumb question...I just don't get it. Thank you so much for your time in responding..because I was starting to give up!!!! HOpe to hear from you soon and see if you can help me through this. Sincerely, April

[Ken Cox]

April

see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy-and-paste

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...fulltext=Search

ken

[Guest guru]

Hi April !

As Mike said, the problem is the difference of speed between a hard disk and a CD (much slower). In general, PTE slideshows run well from a CD too, but probably in your slideshows there are too short times between some transitions and the followings. Please control in the timeline the intervals between transitions, and correct this time if it is smaller than 0,3 or 0,4 sec.

[Mike Reed]

Mike,

Ha....to answer your first question BOTH. April's the name and happens to be the month:) And yes...I was born in April and that's how I got my name.

Okay....I am playing it from the same computer....just testing it as you mentioned. Now, I don't know if I follow what you mean by "paste". What I did was find the Exe file from my hard drive, copy it to the CD drive and burn it. Are you saying that when I highlight the file I should see if there is an option to paste it and not copy it?? SOrry if this is a super dumb question...I just don't get it. Thank you so much for your time in responding..because I was starting to give up!!!! HOpe to hear from you soon and see if you can help me through this. Sincerely, April

Hi April

When you make the EXE file from PTE you have the choice of keeping it just on your Hard Drive or making a CD which should play on any other computer without the need for any additional software. If you try to run directly from the CD it can sometimes cause problems due to the speed of reading the data as has been mentioned previously. It you run it from your hard drive and it is ok then be happy with that. The sync problem may only arise if you take the CD to another machine. What you have to do in that case is make a new file on the Hard Drive of that computer and transfer the data from the CD into that new file. I suggest you find a friendly neighbour and put it to the test.

Mike

[heyape]

Thanks for your responses. Ummm...the only "effect" I am using is the fade in and out and most of the slides are in the 4-5 second range with a few in the2 1/2 - 3 range, and a few to 6 seconds. I had resized the images in PS7 to a recommend size of 1024 x 768 with a medium compression of 6. My slide show is three songs long (about 13 minutes) and has 160 images.

Mike...You're right....I should be happy if it works on my computer...and I am very happy with running the slideshow from my computer but I can't settle for that when the whole point of these slideshows were to share with my daughters grandparents and they won't be sitting around my computer to enjoy them. That was the whole point of putting on a CD. Maybe it's just me....but I like my work to be perfect!! I know...call me crazy. Thanks for the input. April

Ken...I can't find the place where we talked about cut/paste etc...but I know how to cut and paste....I guess I just wasn't getting the whole "paste it instead of copying it" Maybe you can refresh my mind. Thanks, April

[Ken Cox]

Ken...I can't find the place where we talked about cut/paste etc...but I know how to cut and paste....I guess I just wasn't getting the whole "paste it instead of copying it" Maybe you can refresh my mind. Thanks, April

April you lost me -=- the link i gave you is after Guido's entry re copying/pasting

what you should be not be doing is trying to run it from the cd - -you should copy and paste it to the other system's hard drive from the cd then try running it on the other system

this problem has been mentioned many times

ken

[lathompson]

April, perhaps you could burn a DVD instead of a CD, making it playable from a freestanding DVD player. If you have a DVD burner, that is.

You say you don't want everyone sitting around the computer to watch the show but running the show from a CD requires that it be played on a computer, so the family has to sit around it anyway. Of course, you could have a TV OUT on your computer allowing it to be watched on the television, but again, the show will run from a hard drive much smoother than a CD player can do it.

Why not give it a shot?

lt

[Tom K]

Thanks for your responses. Ummm...the only "effect" I am using is the fade in and out and most of the slides are in the 4-5 second range with a few in the2 1/2 - 3 range, and a few to 6 seconds. I had resized the images in PS7 to a recommend size of 1024 x 768 with a medium compression of 6. My slide show is three songs long (about 13 minutes) and has 160 images.

With the generous slide times above there shouldn't be any synch problems on CD vs hard drive. You mention that you spent hours setting up the slide show to be synched to the music. How did you do that? Did you use the timeline or did you adjust individual slide display times? Unless you're synching using the timeline, different machines will not produce the same result as your original machine.

[heyape]

Thanks all. I'll try the copy and pasting from the CD to the "other" hard drive and run from there to see what happens.

It's not that I don't want everyone sitting around the computer watching it....it's just that they don't all live here to watch it on my computer which right now seems to be the only one that it plays sync'd on.

This is all new to me...like I said...I've only done two of them...and they both have had this same problem. Maybe I'm just not understanding how the program works. I bought the program from an on-line vender so I have no manual to thumb through...I just jumped in a gave it a try. As far as how I sync'd it....I added all my slides to the story board, picked out my music in the order I wanted it to play, then hit preview...when it came to a slide that needed the timing adjusted to fit with what words were being sung at that exact time I would highlight the frame, and adjust the frame time...and then hit preview again...and it would start at beginning again....and I would do it all over again for each frame. It was find in the beginnning....but after making adjustments 30 pictures into the thing....you start burning a lot of time waiting for it to preview all that you've already seen just to get to the last frame you adjusted to see if ya got it right. So yes....I would say I'm doing it the hard, long way....and I'd be up for trying the easy way if anyone wants to walk a newbie through it. Thanks April

[Tom K]

...As far as how I sync'd it....I added all my slides to the story board, picked out my music in the order I wanted it to play, then hit preview...when it came to a slide that needed the timing adjusted to fit with what words were being sung at that exact time I would highlight the frame, and adjust the frame time...and then hit preview again...and it would start at beginning again....and I would do it all over again for each frame. It was find in the beginnning....but after making adjustments 30 pictures into the thing....you start burning a lot of time waiting for it to preview all that you've already seen just to get to the last frame you adjusted to see if ya got it right. So yes....I would say I'm doing it the hard, long way....and I'd be up for trying the easy way if anyone wants to walk a newbie through it. Thanks April

April, sounds like you've been doing it the hard way. It might seem reasonable that if you assign a time to each frame that they would all add up to the same total time, but it doesn't work that way. As you've found out, there will be slight variations when you play it on different machines that accumulate to throw everything out of synch. If you're doing a simple slideshow that doesn't rely on timing it doesn't much matter, but if you have a music background that you want to synch to, you need to use the timeline function.

Here are a couple of places with tutorials. Select the PTE Timeline Guide here:

http://www.bishopthorpe-camera-club.com/Re...s/resources.htm

Beechbrook Cottage hosts a number of slideshows. Download AlRobin's PTE 101 Tutorial (it may not necessarily be on the page I've pointed to so look around if you don't see it):

http://www.beechbrook.com/pte/index.asp?categoryid=&page=7

You might also download some other shows from Beechbrook just to get ideas and see what's possible.

I hope this helps but if it doesn't, don't hesitate to ask for more help. There are people a lot more knowledgeable than me on this forum. Although, sometimes knowing a lot can get in the way - it seems to me that the initial replies assumed that you had used the timeline and produced a true synchronized show, and were thinking it was a hardware problem. Unfortunately the path to creating a synchonized show is not necessarily obvious to the uninitiated.

Good luck!

[ContaxMan]

You'll find a very easy tutorial if you follow my link below, as well as the more comprehensive (but more complicated) timeline guide mentioned earlier. Look at the tutorial to see if it helps. If not contact me and I'll "talk you through" the process.

But, as others have said, running a show from a cd (particularly on a laptop) is not the way to go. It needs to be copied into the machine's memory for most reliable performance.