Slide timings changing in Preview and Create

[dale.blamire]

I've just created a new show in 5.5 and have been syncing the slide changes to a regular beat in the music using the waveform viewer. I've now got it to the point where it is playing perfectly in the mini player but when I preview or create the slideshow the slides are going out of sync by up to 0.5 seconds.

I am using one music file on the whole project.

Any solutions or thoughts would be appreciated.

[xahu34]

Hello DaleB,

Did you try to use for the show copies of your images which are re-sampled according to the resolution of your monitor/beamer?

Best regards,

Xaver H.

Munich

[Flying Scotsman]

I've just created a new show in 5.5 and have been syncing the slide changes to a regular beat in the music using the waveform viewer. I've now got it to the point where it is playing perfectly in the mini player but when I preview or create the slideshow the slides are going out of sync by up to 0.5 seconds.

I am using one music file on the whole project.

Any solutions or thoughts would be appreciated.

Hi DaleB,

What size are your pic. files? You could try reducing your pic. file sizes. I had this problem and taking the action I suggest eliminated it in 4.48 and 5.5. Large pic file sizes (in excess of 1.Mb) I found the software doesn`t seem to be able to read in the files in fast enough when you want a bit of speed in your slide changes.

Or it could be that you have small file sizes already except one early on in your sequence which is introducing the delay and thereafter there is a knok-on effect. I reduce my pic file sizes using Photoshop down to anything between 500k to 700k.

Best wishes.

Flying Scotsman

[Lin Evans]

Hi,

As others have suggested, it sounds very much like a hardware resource issue. If there are very fast changes it forces your video card to attempt to create the necessary stream of images quicker than your hardware configuration will allow.

Unlike DVD, AVI, MPEG or other video formats, an executable file doesn't contain all the images required to play your show in a pre-created library. This is why executable code is relatively tiny compared to video code. The executable file contains the initial images you used to create your slideshow and an instruction set of code which tells your hardware to create the intermediate images necessary to achieve the desired pan, zoom or rotate on the fly. PTE will instruct your system to create on average 60 new images per second which gives you that incredible smoothness compared to the maximum of 29.97 images per second in a video mode. But to do this takes more resources when image dimensions are large than when they are smaller. So if you are using original captures from a digital camera, for instance, and these are quite large in both pixel dimension and file size the video card is sometimes taxed beyond it's resource allocation and it slows down or skips frames. Remember that even though a jpg may have a compressed storage size in terms of kilobytes or megabytes, when it is played on your computer it expands in memory from this compressed state to its full uncompressed size - the size of an uncompressed 8 bit tiff file.

To make a complex situation oversimplified, just reduce the dimensions of the images to a point where the hardware can keep up with the demand and you should get proper synchronization. The reason the mini-player can keep up is that the images created use but a fraction of the hardware resources that the full slideshow usese.

Best regards,

Lin

I've just created a new show in 5.5 and have been syncing the slide changes to a regular beat in the music using the waveform viewer. I've now got it to the point where it is playing perfectly in the mini player but when I preview or create the slideshow the slides are going out of sync by up to 0.5 seconds.

I am using one music file on the whole project.

Any solutions or thoughts would be appreciated.

[ksf]

Hi Dale,

I'm glad you have encountered and reported this issue because a friend of mine has also mentioned it to me a few weeks ago. I didn't understand his problem because I could not reproduce it. We have been using PTE for some time and are well used to resizing images as Lin and Flying Scotsman have suggested so I did not regard this as being the cause of the problem. we have been puzzling over it and it is something which only seems to have crept in to PTE since 5.1/5.5. Looking at the responses above, it now makes me wonder whether anything has changed behind the scenes when generating the intermediate images Lin refers to?

Anyone shed any further light on this?

Keith

[dale.blamire]

Thanks for your replies. All the photos are 3+ Mb so I'll try reducing the size to see if anything changes.

For those looking at this possible issue my configuration is:

Vista Home Premium

4Gb Ram

Intel E8400 CPU

8800GT Graphics

[Lin Evans]

Hi Dale,

You have plenty of resources for normal shows and an excellent graphics card but the large originals are too much for really quick changes. Set their pixel dimensions, except for slides with deep zooms to the normal resolution of your monitor such as 1200x1600, etc., whatever you are using and you should have perfect synchronization.

Best regards,

Lin

Thanks for your replies. All the photos are 3+ Mb so I'll try reducing the size to see if anything changes.

For those looking at this possible issue my configuration is:

Vista Home Premium

4Gb Ram

Intel E8400 CPU

8800GT Graphics

[dale.blamire]

I haven't had a chance to reduce the size of my photos (can anyone suggest a program to make this job easy) but does this make sense:

On another slide show I'm doing the first slide timing is set for 7 seconds. Again in the mini-viewer this works perfectly but in preview and create the first transition starts happening after approx. 2 seconds. If the problem is supposedly about the size of images causing (presumably) delays in loading in full preview why are they loading quicker in preview than in mini-player?

[Lin Evans]

Hi Dale,

Two parts to your answer:

1. I would suggest the freeware program Irfanview. Also download and install the Irfanview Plugins:

http://www.irfanview.com

Irfanview can do batch resize. You determine the pixel dimensions and the amount of compression and Irfanview does the work for you. Just give it an entire folder, make a folder to hold the copies and you will very quickly have what you need.

2. The mini-player resizes everything to a very compact size for display. This takes a bit of time because it's done on the fly. For the preview mode an actual exe temp file is created which instructs the computer to create the files at whichever size you have chosen for display, but remember large full-sized files are going to slow down the hardware.

Just download and install Irfanview and the Irfanview plugins then look for "batch conversion". Irfanview comes with instructions in the help files and once you understand how it works you can do the task very quickly and efficiently. The resample algorithms in IrfanView are very good. If you have problems, zip the PTE file using PTE and post it. I'll be glad to downsample them for you and load your images then post them for you to test.

Best regards,;

Lin

I haven't had a chance to reduce the size of my photos (can anyone suggest a program to make this job easy) but does this make sense:

On another slide show I'm doing the first slide timing is set for 7 seconds. Again in the mini-viewer this works perfectly but in preview and create the first transition starts happening after approx. 2 seconds. If the problem is supposedly about the size of images causing (presumably) delays in loading in full preview why are they loading quicker in preview than in mini-player?

[dale.blamire]

The latest update - 5.52 - seems to have fixed the problem with large photos throwing the final timings out.

More checking to be done over the weekend but a tentative well done!