Show is too large

[garrry4]

This is great software, just registered it last week and I love it.

I'm a photographer. I want to break my slide show into parts and then have a welcome screen with buttons. "Click Here" to see Part A, "Click Here" to see part B. etc etc.

Also a button they can click and have each part of the show run consecutively.

I'm still working on the show so I haven't had a chance to try and figure it out myself. I suspect I will need another piece of software to do it but if anyone has any ideas I would appreciate it.

[Ian]

Hi Garry

You can do this from within PTE without having to use another piece of software. There are two ways of achieving what you want:

1) Make one show with all your images, then on the first image and some navigation buttons by pressing the "Object Editor" button. You will then see the Editor page - click the small "OK" button on the top left corner to add a new action button. You can drag it round the screen to position it where you want. Then right-click it, choose "properties" and you can customise the action to jump to the picture number that is the start of your next block of images. Then add more buttons to the relevent pictures as required.

2) Make several smaller shows with each block of images. Then make a show with a single slide, and add all the navigation buttons you need as per above. This time make tha action "Run application of open file" and point to the saved exe file you want the button to open. If you intend running these from a CD, delete the path that looks at your hard disk so that the button will point to the relative location on the CD you intend to make. When the show is run from a CD, the "menu" show will stay in the background as each new show is called up, so that when the launched shows exit the original menu page re-appears ready for the user to press the next button.

Ian

[garrry4]

Thanks, I should probably send you a check for all the time you just saved me.

[Ian]

Happy to help! One thing you'll notice as the new forum builds is that there are many users from all over the world who are only too happy to share their wealth of experience with new users. When the archived "old" forum gets merged with this new one, you'll be able to search a database of 11Mb worth of Q&A on PTE and related topics, so you'd end up sending cheques to loads of people worldwide!!

Regards

Ian

[ronwil]

I agree with Ian and use his Method 2. As a development this last week I gave a show of eight sequences, which were triggered from the last image in an opening sequence as follows:

First of all I produced a set of eight slides in Adobe Photoshop with a logo as a centrepiece, but with a change of colour for each background, using the gradient tool. These were loaded into a new project and the following settings were used in Project Options – under Main>Show Settings select “When show ends keep last slide in show on screen” and display each slide was set at 500ms; under Advanced did not check “Hide mouse cursor during show” as this was needed. (For my actual sequences I always hide the mouse); for under Music I used a piece which was about 60 seconds long; under Comments I added the same wording on a few of the middle slides so that it superimposed during slide changes; and under Effects I used Fade In & Out and adjusted the duration so that the music finished on the last slide. Then on the last slide I used Object Editor and Ian’s Method 2.

I am experimenting now using an image from each sequence instead of the button, but I am not happy with the resolution of the reduced size I am producing in Photoshop and I am hoping Ian might answer that one for me.

Ron [uK]

Mid Thames AV Group

Sutton Camera Club

[Ian]

Ron - when I've used images to trigger actions the method I've used is to cut out the required image, re-size it down to a thumbnail in Photoshop and save it as a small gif file with a transparent background so that it blends in with the background image. The image quality always look fine. I'll e-mail you an example to look at.

Ian

[ronwil]

Thanks Ian. I have just tried that and the result was most satisfactory. Wasn't quite sure which settings to use when saving as *.gif but what I did use was OK.

Ron [uK]