SCROLLING TEXT OVER MULTIPLE SLIDES

[orizaba]

Dear PTE experts!

I should thank a little help!

I can not believe that it is not possible to create a long vertical scrolling text which runs over multiple slides, but I still didn't find the way!

I know how to create a normal vertical scrolling text running during 1 slide, using -pan to +pan, etc..

My problem is that I have a very long text which I should need to scroll during some 3 minutes (time of music), and so, I must use some 40 slides during this process.

How to make text scroll from 00,000 second till the end of the music, so, overlaying some 40 slides in between?

Thanks for your help.

Jose

[Lin Evans]

Hi Jose,

This is possible, but depending on your hardware may be limited by memory. The way you can approach this is to place one slide in the slide list and the others as "objects" of the first slide in Objects and Animations. Set the display time for the slide to the length of your music.

Turn your slides on and off via the timeline with opacity control. This will limit you to fades between slides but you will be able to do this if your hardware can handle the size of the slides as objects so better to keep the pixel dimensions to a minimum.

This is, of course, not an "elegant" solution, but it will work if you have sufficient memory in your video card so be sure you keep the image dimensions down to about 1024x768 or less to conserve memory. You may be pushing the envelope if you use 30 slides.

Here's a quick sample using a few slides: About 35 meg zipped PTE sample....

http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sampl...crollsample.zip

Best regards,

Lin

[orizaba]

Hi Jose,

This is possible, but depending on your hardware may be limited by memory. The way you can approach this is to place one slide in the slide list and the others as "objects" of the first slide in Objects and Animations. Set the display time for the slide to the length of your music.

Turn your slides on and off via the timeline with opacity control. This will limit you to fades between slides but you will be able to do this if your hardware can handle the size of the slides as objects so better to keep the pixel dimensions to a minimum.

This is, of course, not an "elegant" solution, but it will work if you have sufficient memory in your video card so be sure you keep the image dimensions down to about 1024x768 or less to conserve memory. You may be pushing the envelope if you use 30 slides.

Here's a quick sample using a few slides: About 35 meg zipped PTE sample....

http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sampl...crollsample.zip

Best regards,

Lin

Dear Lin Evans,

Do you remember your article dated April 27, 2007, posted in Luminous Landscape Forum / The Coffee Corner?

I never saw a so decisive opinion on a product!

I was working with Soundslides trying to build my first slideshows. Soundslides is good, I must say, and the owner never let me down with my questions and doubts, I must thank him. However, I was looking for something more sophisticated when I entered in Luminous Landscape Forum and found your article.

At once I looked at your site and saw some of your slideshows, I tried PTE, and some days after I bought it and I am now building my first slideshows. What a pleasure is working with PTE and look at final results!

Thanks Lin!

And thanks as well for your quick reply to this actual problem of mine. I never expected to receive an answer directly from you, a true expert! I am lucky!

I understood your advices, I already tried some quick approaches, I think I will be able to manage the situation, but I will need some time.

Do you mind if I will come back to you in case I have some difficulty?

Thanks again and best regards,

Jose

[Lin Evans]

Hi Jose,

I do remember! That was about when beta 5 of version 5.0 was available and I was letting folks on other forums I frequent know about the great new PTE features.

Please feel free to ask any questions you might have and be sure to visit the Tutorials section of the forums where there are PTE Made Easy tutorials available for download which might help answer some questions as well.

Best regards,

Lin

[orizaba]

Here I am again with same problem, one step forward!

How to start first music not in second 0,000 but only on second 14,500 (example)?

In other words, how to position music(s) where we wish (not necessarly at start of the show (if we wish to have silence during first 2 or 3 slides)?

Thanks for your help.

[Lin Evans]

Unfortunately there is no way to choose where music starts in your case without modifying the music itself. Because of the scrolling of text over multiple slides, the slides were placed as objects of the first slide.

In a normal slideshow where slides are separately placed in the slide list you can insert sound three different ways and limit the sound or background music to beginning with a certain slide, but since the additional slides are inserted as objects to accommodate the scrolling of text over multiple slides, the only way I know to do what you want is to take your music into a sound editor such as Audacity and add silence to the beginning of the mp3 equal to the amount of time from the beginning of the show until you want the sound to start. This is not difficult to do, but it does require modifying at least the first part of the background mp3.

As an alternative, you could create a silent MP3 playing for the duration of time you wish at the beginning of the show. This could then be your first music selection. Place the regular music as the second MP3 and it would then begin after the silent MP3 had played. However, for more precise timing it would be better to do it in the first suggested way.

Best regards,

Lin

[wideangle]

As an extra comment to supplement Lin's last paragraph, I have a collection of 'silence' files of 1,2 5 secs duration which I created with Audacity.

I can use different combinations of those inserted into PTE before I insert the 'real' music. 1,2, 5 replicates coinage and various combinations give you any total. I suppose you could work in units of 0.1, 0.2, 0.5 etc or whatever, if you wished.

Regards,

wideangle.

[orizaba]

Unfortunately there is no way to choose where music starts in your case without modifying the music itself. Because of the scrolling of text over multiple slides, the slides were placed as objects of the first slide.

In a normal slideshow where slides are separately placed in the slide list you can insert sound three different ways and limit the sound or background music to beginning with a certain slide, but since the additional slides are inserted as objects to accommodate the scrolling of text over multiple slides, the only way I know to do what you want is to take your music into a sound editor such as Audacity and add silence to the beginning of the mp3 equal to the amount of time from the beginning of the show until you want the sound to start. This is not difficult to do, but it does require modifying at least the first part of the background mp3.

As an alternative, you could create a silent MP3 playing for the duration of time you wish at the beginning of the show. This could then be your first music selection. Place the regular music as the second MP3 and it would then begin after the silent MP3 had played. However, for more precise timing it would be better to do it in the first suggested way.

Best regards,

Lin

Hi, Lin,

Thanks for your advices.

In fact, suspecting that it was impossible, I had already used AUDACITY to create a complete stereo soundtrack with several noises and music, synchronized with slides' timings. But mainly I decided to use my movie editor PINNACLE LIQUID 6.10 PRO, by far the easiest way to deal with slideshow soundtrack (till 99 stereo audio tracks to use, and all possible sound mixing, fading and effects!)

By the way, Lin, I am a beginer with PTE and any kind of slideshow, but I work for a long time with DV movies.

And this makes me think how PTE could be improved, if possible, by some small utilities or details which I miss (only because I am used to DV editing), such as:

1. Each used slide in timeline should be "marked" in the list as used.

2. In text, font size should be numeric defined, not through zoom (draging corners) effect. It is dificult to adopt exactly same size from slide to slide.

3. Is it necessary that "objects" are "connected" to main slide? I mean, for example, a text on a slide "suffers" the same zoom or pan as the slide itself. If we want to zoom the slide but keep text still, we must correct the text introducing an oposite zoom, is it not?

Sorry for such "impertinences", may be it is not possible according to program's structure, but I should like to hear your opinion.

Thanks again and best regards,

Jose

[Lin Evans]

Hi Jose,

Slides on the timeline are marked as "used" by their identity on the list changing to "bold".

The fonts are often rasterized to PNG (your choice) and they are not embedded. Size can be made uniform by observing the "zoom" numbers for the text object. For technical reasons it's difficult to use a fixed size font. One of the problems is that different computers have different installed fonts, thus the reason for having PNG rasterizing which makes the actual font a "picture" of a font and thus not amenable to precise sizes except via the zoom factor. It is less convenient in some ways than having a numeric association or font "size," but infinitely more flexible.

Objects can be "linked" as children to slides thus adopting their attributes of zoom and position or they can be independent objects thus not affected by position or size (zoom) of the slide itself. Just be certain that when you add text that the main slide or other objects in the Object's List are not selected (blue) and the text will be under your complete control independent from the slide itself. This way you can zoom, pan or rotate the image and text independently.

Best regards,

Lin

[JEB]

Lin,

I appreciate your explanation, below, as this is a constant irritation to me and I suspect others.

"The fonts are often rasterized to PNG (your choice) and they are not embedded. Size can be made uniform by observing the "zoom" numbers for the text object. For technical reasons it's difficult to use a fixed size font. One of the problems is that different computers have different installed fonts, thus the reason for having PNG rasterizing which makes the actual font a "picture" of a font and thus not amenable to precise sizes except via the zoom factor. It is less convenient in some ways than having a numeric association or font "size," but infinitely more flexible."

Even though I am not technical I accept that there must be limits to what we should expect from PTE and that there has to be a degree of compromise. I understand the reasoning of using PNG files and am happy with that. I think I understand the "different fonts" implications. However as I see it the major benefit of some sort of number method to standardise the size of a font at the creation stage would be of great help to those of us who use titles intermittently throughout our shows. Once selected and rasterized the number used to select the font size on my computer is surely irrelevant to any other PC. Using the method of inputting the zoom numbers or indeed copying and pasting are time consuming.

Regards

John

[orizaba]

Hi Jose,

Slides on the timeline are marked as "used" by their identity on the list changing to "bold".

The fonts are often rasterized to PNG (your choice) and they are not embedded. Size can be made uniform by observing the "zoom" numbers for the text object. For technical reasons it's difficult to use a fixed size font. One of the problems is that different computers have different installed fonts, thus the reason for having PNG rasterizing which makes the actual font a "picture" of a font and thus not amenable to precise sizes except via the zoom factor. It is less convenient in some ways than having a numeric association or font "size," but infinitely more flexible.

Objects can be "linked" as children to slides thus adopting their attributes of zoom and position or they can be independent objects thus not affected by position or size (zoom) of the slide itself. Just be certain that when you add text that the main slide or other objects in the Object's List are not selected (blue) and the text will be under your complete control independent from the slide itself. This way you can zoom, pan or rotate the image and text independently.

Best regards,

Lin

I thank you very much for your help.

I am sorry for my former questions because it is my fault not to have "studied" PTE carefully, concerning "used slide bold" mark, for example. That's why friends are helpfull!

I found fantastic not to have text dependent from main slide. It was a tremendous problem to try to use same size, fixed position, etc.. Good!!! However... sorry for my ignorance, but what is that of "rasterized"? I already had found this but never worried about what it means. Now I see that it is important to understand "rasterizing" because this leads to fixed size fonts, as I understood. But I have no idea how to rasterize a font...! Could you please give me some starting procedure?

Thanks again and regards,

Jose

[fh1805]

Jose,

Rasterizing the text object turns it into a PNG format graphics file. So, even when you run your sequence on a PC that doesn't have your chosen font installed, the appearance is exactly as you intended.

To rasterize the text, simply select the text object in the O&A window, and then "tick" the check box on the Properties tab. PTE will ask you where you want the png file saving. Job done! If you want to change the text content, simply untick the box, edit the words and then re-tick the box. Simple!

regards,

Peter

[Ken Cox]

Eric should make note of this fact for his font quandry --

if the special font is not on a system it will not show as he made it

quite embarassing especially in the 3 versions when you have special text and play it in all its glory and times herald or such comes on the screen

ken

[nobeefstu]

Just a note to keep in mind.

I believe Igor mentioned to implement automatic rasterization of text to a image object in the near future. I dont know what future version this will appear ... but this will make it much easier for users unaware of the issues of using unsupported fonts and other font sizing issues. Exactly what you see ... your user will also see.

I also believe this opens the door for a few other text tricks he may have in mind for Pte.

[orizaba]

Jose,

Rasterizing the text object turns it into a PNG format graphics file. So, even when you run your sequence on a PC that doesn't have your chosen font installed, the appearance is exactly as you intended.

To rasterize the text, simply select the text object in the O&A window, and then "tick" the check box on the Properties tab. PTE will ask you where you want the png file saving. Job done! If you want to change the text content, simply untick the box, edit the words and then re-tick the box. Simple!

regards,

Peter

Peter, thanks for your help!

I never imagined such a possibility but it's clever and usefull. I am always learning...

By the way, concerning vertical text scroling:

Is it possible NOT to see up-vertical-scroling text starting exactly in the low slide border and disapearing exactly in the up slide border? Instead of such exact border's limits, I would prefer to see such limits inside slide itself, through a fixed wipe-dissolve, I mean, like scroling text fading in and out the slide, away from the exact slide's borders? Did I make myself understood?

I think this is not possible because I couldn't find in PTE any kind of wiping mask, or so. But I never know, may be there is some trick to get this...

Thanks and regards,

Jose

[xahu34]

... I couldn't find in PTE any kind of wiping mask, or so....

Jose,

Version 5.6 will provide this feature. Let your text run inside a mask container and construct an appropriate mask (b/w-image) with your image processing program (Photoshop etc.).

Best regards,

Xaver

Munich

[Lin Evans]

Hi Jose,

As Xavier said, you can do this with masking in the Beta versions of 5.6. Remember, you can create a gradient mask so that the text dissolves gradually as it moves into the mask, so it's quite possible to make the text dissappear inside the parameters of the image itself.

Here's a sample you can use to modify the mask as you need.

http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sampl...xtdisappear.zip

Best regards,

Lin

[orizaba]

Hi Jose,

As Xavier said, you can do this with masking in the Beta versions of 5.6. Remember, you can create a gradient mask so that the text dissolves gradually as it moves into the mask, so it's quite possible to make the text dissappear inside the parameters of the image itself.

Here's a sample you can use to modify the mask as you need.

http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sampl...xtdisappear.zip

Best regards,

Lin

Thanks Lin, once again!

I am using PTE v5.52 (the one I bought), so I think I can not take any result from your sample.

I opened your project in my 5.52, and I only can see a fixed beautiful chipfriend!

I added your mask, I added some text... but nothing happened.

Am I missing something? Or should I have version 5.6 Beta?

I don't like to use Beta versions, so I would prefer to keep my 5.52 till true 5.6 is delivered.

Anyhow, I am glad to see that this effect will be possible in a near future.

Thanks to Xavier, as well.

Regards,

Jose

[Lin Evans]

Hi Jose,

Download, install and run Beta 20 of 5.6. Open the PTE file with 5.6 beta 20. Beta 20 is essentially 5.6 - there will be no "major" changes and 5.6 beta 20 will not affect your ability to use your present version in any way. You "really" need to download and use the beta so you can learn the new features - there is absolutely no penalty for doing so - the two version co-exist without interference.

In case you decide not to try the beta, here is the executable so you can see how it will work: You could do this in countless ways by using different masks. It would be easy to make one letter at a time disappear or appear, etc., depending on the type mask you devise.

http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/textgoodbye.zip

Best regards,

Lin

[orizaba]

Hi Lin,

Thanks, may be I downlowd Beta 20 of 5.6, but I have a point to clear before doing so.

You say that both versions can co-exist without interference. Does this mean that they are 100% separate installations? No "mixture" at all?

On the other hand, I am now working on a project, obviously in 5.52. Could this project run on Beta 20 of 5.6 without any problem? If so, how to "transfer" it? This "transfer" would apply as well to future projects made in 5.52, in case I would wish to rebuild them on 5.6.

Thanks again for your interest and help!

Regards,

Jose

[Lin Evans]

Hi Jose,

Yes, no mixture - separate installations each with its own icon and executable APR code. Yes, your project can run on 5.6 beta 20 and all you need to do to make it work is install 5.6 beta 20, click on the 5.6 icon to open PTE 5.6 beta 20, then navigate to your PTE file and open it. I have about 12 different versions of PTE all existing side by side on my system.

All earlier PTE shows created in earlier versions can be opened with 5.6. You can then use the new features of 5.6. Obviously, when you make changes using features not found in earlier PTE versions these features won't work if you later open the PTE file with 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 5.5, etc. You discovered this when you opened my example with 5.2. You could see the image of the chipmunk but you couldn't see the text effect because it was created with code not found in 5.2. But if you then open the PTE file in 5.6 you can see the effect as in the executable file I posted.

Best regards,

Lin

[orizaba]

Hi Lin,

Thanks, may be I downlowd Beta 20 of 5.6, but I have a point to clear before doing so.

You say that both versions can co-exist without interference. Does this mean that they are 100% separate installations? No "mixture" at all?

On the other hand, I am now working on a project, obviously in 5.52. Could this project run on Beta 20 of 5.6 without any problem? If so, how to "transfer" it? This "transfer" would apply as well to future projects made in 5.52, in case I would wish to rebuild them on 5.6.

Thanks again for your interest and help!

Regards,

Jose

Hi, Lin,

I just received today a post about new version "5.60 RELEASE CANDIDATE".

After what you told me, I decided to download and install this 5.60 CANDIDATE VERSION (what does this mean? No more Beta? Not yet REAL version?)

Congratulations! Some important improvements, indeed.

I was just finishing a small project with 5.52, but I concluded it with 5.60. Great! No problems at all. It is my very first project with PTE. I am glad. It is an "Invitation" for my family and friends to watch my first Blog... to "open" next 20th. Here it is for you to have a look...

http://orizaba2.powweb.com/CONVITE(comSOM).exe

Regards,

Jose

[Lin Evans]

Very nice job Jose! The only improvement I see which you might consider would be to click on Anti Shimmering (mipmapping) in Objects and Animations under Properties tag for a couple of the slides which have shimmer as they are zooming. Otherwise perfect!

Yes, this is very near the release version. The essence is that there are betas until the developer believes that the product is ready, then perhaps a couple release candidates then the release.

Best regards,

Lin

[orizaba]

Very nice job Jose! The only improvement I see which you might consider would be to click on Anti Shimmering (mipmapping) in Objects and Animations under Properties tag for a couple of the slides which have shimmer as they are zooming. Otherwise perfect!

Yes, this is very near the release version. The essence is that there are betas until the developer believes that the product is ready, then perhaps a couple release candidates then the release.

Best regards,

Lin

Lin, thanks for your opinion and advice. You are right, I never used (I never tried!) the anti-shimmering, but I will pay attention to this in the future.

Can I profit to ask you something?

The other project I am building with PTE is now with 8 minutes and 42 slides. This project I started before the "Invitation" and I will return to it now.

But... I used BMP slides and project is already some 200 MB! And it will have some 200 slides when ready...

So, I must convert BMP to JPG, all slides. Ok. No problem.

Problem is: is there any way to replace actual used BMP slides without loosing all timings, effects, zooms, pans, etc., etc.?

Please, don't say that I have to build everything again from start...

Hope to have good news!

Best regards,

Jose

[Lin Evans]

Hi Jose,

First, save your slideshow under another PTE name so you have a backup. Next save each bmp as a jpg with your desired level of compression but do not delete the original bmp or change the folder where they reside. It would be better to first copy them to another folder and work from there.

Use Irfanview or other batch conversion tool to copy all files to jpgs then open your duplicate slideshow (the one you saved under another PTE file name). Go to the main slide list and look above the mini-player and find between "comment" and "add sound" a tab which says "Change ima...." This allows you to substitute any image selected in the slide list with any other image while preserving all timings, keyframes, etc. Do this for each image.

Best regards,

Lin