MikeL117

Hi Lin I'm sure that Brian's solutions will clear your infection but for others who may have caught one of these particular nasties, I found Prevx available from www.prevx.com to shift at least one of these. It is free to install I recently caught one (my own fault, I was relying on the anti-nasty software and was complacent) that used two system dlls I had identified the problem files but could not remove them manually, no anti virus or antimalware software could even see it except Prevx which painlessly removed it. Mike

No problem Al It is what I thought but hoped for more. It would be a very useful enhancement for version 5.1 and start to bring it up to the power and usefulness of Adobe Encore but with the convenience of all being built in. Thanks Mike

Thanks Alrobin Sorry I didn't make myself clear. I wanted to have that same (or similar) facility when writing a DVD. Setting up a single show with a menu was very easy to play from the .EXE file now we have the "Loop this slide" option, although I did find the music didn't work well for the first slide when synchronized (needs a lot more care in setting the timing of the slide and music length to loop in the first slide) If the menu is the first slide then the "Home" key takes you back directly to the menu from anywhere in the show - great - and with a suitable matching separator slide it can be a very smooth and professional looking show. It is only the DVD version I have a problem with. Thanks again Mike

Hi Is there any way to add multiple chapters to the title menu for different entry points in one PTE show without splitting the show into several smaller PTE files? I would like to be able to add buttons to take the viewer to different parts of the show and have the remainder of the show play after and the sound track consistent. Thanks Mike

Hi Love the ease of use of the O&A timeline, I have found my way around most of the features. Is there a way to select multiple keypoints to, say, move them together on the timeline. I was trying to get a sequence of images moving along the screen together and doing various opacity and scale effects (about 5 keypoints). All images doing the same but offset by a set time. Thanks Mike

Thanks Guys A surprisingly effective and simple technique. I had forgotten how well it can work. With a little more twiddling the edge can be made to move ever so slightly and fade in and out a little more slowly to reinforce the feeling of rotation. I found the "Main Image" tick box. I like it. Mike

Thanks Ron. That is very similar to how I run small competitions in my club but this can seem daunting to those who are not so familiar with PTE. For a large competition it is prone to errors and slow to have to sort from a hand written list and generating an accurate list from a randomised entry is tricky. Igor has this in hand for a future version so I am content to run my small comps manually until then. Thanks Again Igor

Hi Igor Something to think about when you are happy with version 5, if I dont mention it now I am sure to forget. You have a superb engine for display and a simple yet powerful interface and PTE is being used in more and more diverse situations. Have you considered building in some sort of "plug-in" facility that would enable users to customise even more how PTE is used for the smaller numbers who need these specialised features. For example: there is a growing interest in digital projected images competitions and PTE is almost perfect for this. With the addition of some sort of scoring facility it could be a complete solution. The number of people that would use this would at first be quite small and probably not worth building into PTE also this type of enhancement may complicate the interface for the AV users who do not need this facility. Keep up the great work Mike

Hi folks To put the record straight. RGB is a colour MODE where the image is stored as Red, Green and Blue data. There are others: LAB, CMYK etc. for display using AV software including PTE we all use only RGB. sRGB (sRGB IEC6166-2.1 to give it its full name) is a colour profile this tells the computer how to interpret the actual numbers stored in the RGB file to the colours displayed. sRGB has what is known as a restricted gamut profile which means that not every colour that can be displayed exists in its tables. This may seem to be a bad thing but it also means that most devices can display all the colours that sRGB knows about so there should be little or no CHANGE in colours between different devices if they are properly calibrated to sRGB. sRGB is very well supported and even if it is not directly supported it is likely that its own proprietary colour space is very close to sRGB. sRGB was designed as a display colour space. If you are producing images ONLY for AV it is a good idea to work in sRGB throughout. That said if you want the very best quality then one of the wider gamut spaces should be used for all the processing then converted to sRGB on a flattened copy before re-sizing and final sharpening for display. AdobeRGB (1998) is a good profile to use that will give you much better reds and this is now directly supported by some of the better digital cameras. If you are using a RAW workflow then ProPhoto RGB is the widest commonly available, this knows about more colours than can be generated by most output devices. If you are likely to be doing much messing about with your images then ProPhoto RGB will preserve more colours so that when you finally convert to your output profile you will still have all the colours you need (like using 16bit files there is more headroom to play with). Others have custom profiles made depending on their particular workflow. Hope this makes some sort of sense. Mike PS There are no hard and fast rules about sharpening only guides. That is why there are many heated debates on when and how much to apply. If you can see that an image has been sharpened then it is probably too much unless it is used for an effect. All images from the present generation of digital cameras need some sharpening at some stage unless you want the soft look. It is usually a good idea to sharpen last but there are many places in the processing of an image when it is apropriate to apply some sharpening (like just after re-sizing).

You are right, of course Igor. Even the most intelegent of cache systems has a limit. From what I have seen of actual sequences it is only a very small number of closly spaced slides that cause a problem. There is often a slower sequence before it that could be used to pre-cache the offending ones. Good luck with the new engine. I am sure you will find the optimum balance Thanks again to you and your team for all the excellent work.

Hi Igor. While you are working on the new engine, have you explored using an intelligent cache to preload later images that may have not enough time between transitions to successfully load at the correct time, while things are quiet between slow slide changes? This could eliminate the occasional glitch when playing the more demanding quick change sections of a sequence or when the files are larger than usual (as pan and zoom slides are likely to be) and give you more processing time for the more complex transitions. Keep up the good work. The new time line features are superb Thanks

Hi Ron Most modern projectors will now flip (and/or invert) the image to allow back projection (and ceiling mounting) without changing the presentation content. Any projector that was not capable of this feature I would consider inadequate for general presentation use.

Same time scale as myself. Two 4500 SXGA projectors 5.5m x 2.5m screen, back projection. Live performance on stage in front of it. Good Luck it is going to be a long week . I shall check in each day, let me know how you go on, if you have time. If I can be of further help... email me if it is urgent.

Yes, you are correct, the quality will be better if you save back to DV rather than transcoding to DVD. That is going to be the best quality you can get from the video (as it should not be re-compressed except for the modified parts). Unfortunately this will not give a significant improvement in the quality of the stills and offers no improvement to the flicker. As for permanent damage to the slides, a lot depends on the capabilities of the video editing software. I believe that Final Cut Pro, which is one of the standard video packages for a Mac, is quite advanced and capable. So I suspect that you should be able to generate a non-interlaced and, posssibly, higher resolution version without the flicker and a good compromise between video and stills. There are video packages that are restricted to editing DV and if this is what you have to use you may not be able to better the quality. If not try to render a short sequence with video and stills at various sizes and with different codecs and see what the laptop is capable of showing reliably. I would suggest you try MPEG2, Quicktime MPEG4 and Sorensen. This part may require several attempts before you get a suitable solution(if you are resizing up remember to keep the pixel resolution divizable by 16). You want a file that is not too compressed to show the compression artifacts but not so big that it can't be retrieved from the hard disk fast enough (laptops have slow hard disks). The higher the resolution the better the stills but this means bigger files or more compression. Another thing to juggle with is the MPEG codecs are very complex at decompression time so they also require a lot of computer power. If all you manage to do is to de-interlace the final movie you will have removed the flicker which means you do not have to soften the stills to make them watchable. I tend to use MPEG4 a lot for non-standard size video and even at highest quality it seems to play very well on computer as long as the image size is not too great (I am working on a presentation that is 2048x1024 and I haven't got that to play smoothly yet ). Good Luck and let me know if I can shed any more light. When is the presentation? I am amidst the rain (but not today) and the Pennine Hills .

I use a simple cataloguing programme called 'WhereIsIt' to keep track of where my images are. IMatch sounds interesting, though.

Hi Freddie The safest way, which quite a few of us use when playing with betas is to install it in its own Beta directory (you will have to give it the registration information you have saved on your computer). Then you can use either version, although I can't remember a time when I have had to go back to a previous version after starting with a beta. I wouldn't recommend using both different versions at the same time but is is probably okay. When you start PTE it will run the latest version you have installed. If you install the beta in the same directory as your previous version it will over-write it but you can always re-install the earlier version. Try it, the new beta is worth the effort.

Hi Again These things do tend to creep up on one and suddenly turn into a panic. There is a fairly comprehensive answer in the recent post started by Barry Beckham DVD quality http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums//index...&f=2&t=2819&hl= A simple® answer: Flickering is almost inevitable with sharp detailed stills because of the interlacing in normal video and the only way to avoid it is to soften any fine detail particularly horizontal (or near horizontal) lines or to use a format that is not interlaced. I am not sure from whence you hail, but will assume from the time difference that you are using NTSC video. That resolution of the projector is, to be frank, wasted if all you are doing is giving it video to eat. The best you will get from NTSC DVD is 720 x 480 pixels with the vertical information being displayed as two sequential 240 pixel interlaced fields. Regardless of the resolution of the projector you will not get any more information out than that. Yes, giving the video editing software too big an image is rarely a good idea as it has to throw away the extra information and it may not do as good a job as Photoshop and its ilk AND it has to do it for every frame which is quite a burden on the processor. For incorporating the still into the video you are best to resize and crop it to the final size used in the video (make sure to allow for the pixel aspect ratio if you want to eliminate any distortions – Photoshop CS can do this for you{most people will not notice if you do not do this}). Take great care with sharpening as this can increase the flicker (it may be best to soften a little). For full screen stills the size should be 720x480 with a pixel aspect ratio of 0.9. For any zoom or pans make then the largest size that you need and hope the video editing software (never used the Mac versions) will use all the pixels you give it. It may be worth having the editor apply a little blur during the move to again reduce the flicker which is likely to be worse than when still. You will need to experiment somewhat to find the best degree of softening and positioning (sometimes nudging the image up or down by one pixel can reduce the apparent flicker). As I mentioned in the other post if you can use a computer to drive the projector you could convert to a non-interlaced format and, depending on the power of the computer, up-scale it to better make use of the available resolution of the projector. In this case the video is not likely to be improved (if the de-interlacer used is not a good one it could make it look a little worse) but the quality of the stills would be enormously better with no flicker. Final file size of the edited video is irrelevant as long as the total playing time is less than two hours it will be squashed onto a 4.7GB DVD. Hope these pointers are of use. Getting the best out of video is still a black art. When it works it can be very effective, when it goes wrong… If I can help further, don't hesitate

Hi The simplest answer is include the video in with the PTE show. In practice there are many factors involved. A lot depends on how you are projecting and also how the two parts (video and stills) are to be intermixed. First a few questions and my assumptions. Are you using a computer to drive the projector? (I will assume yes) What type of projector are you using and can it switch cleanly between computer and video sources? (for that size of audience I would expect you to be using a screen of about 3m wide or larger which will need a projector of about 5000 ANSI lumens, a modern three chip DLP will give a superb image. Even the high end projectors seldom switch cleanly.) Do you have any other hardware to switch computer and video? (I will assume not) Are you using any other software/hardware to mix computer and video (Watchout/Spider) (I will assume not) Using PTE as the base dramatically improves the quality of the stills but as PTE does not directly support showing video the difficulty is cleanly switching between PTE and video and back. Using video as the base means compromising the stills quality, although by carefully selecting the appropriate codec this can be minimised. In the end it will be the content that decides which method you choose. If the two shows are completely self-contained and separate then it is a matter of finding a method to acceptably switching between the two. If the two are intermixed it does become very difficult to smoothly go from the PTE to the video and back. A couple of changes would probably be okay but much more than that and it would get in the way of the content, unless you can find a way of incorporating the change into the show. Some of Boxig's utilities may help here. If the two are to be intermixed the only slick solution is to incorporate the PTE sections into the video. This will allow a smooth transition between the stills and video. The problem then is how to display the best of the stills from within the video. I guess that the video is shot as DV which is a form MPEG2 with no temporal compression to make it ease to edit but it is interlaced. The best for the video is to show it in its native form (DV) but this would not be good for the PTE. It would be better to de-interlace and scale up the video before you add the PTE files. This is an area that needs a lot of experimentation. There are lots of codecs available, but few can work at large size and non-interlaced. There is also the problem of what the display computer is capable of playing without stuttering or losing sound sync. The formats that can, from memory, are Quicktime Animation (lossless compression, huge files, simple to decompress so does not put strain on CPU, good for intermediate files), MPEG2 (can be forced into 'different' formats, lossy compression, many and difficult options for compression, needs lots of computer power to play), MPEG4 (simple to compress, can work at lots of sizes as long as the pixel count is divisible by 16, higher quality than MPEG2 for the same compression, needs lots of computer power to play), Windows Media 9 (flexible sizes, lots of options for compression, needs more CPU power than any other, high quality). I think the Sorensen codecs may also do non-interlaced. ... I hope the above has not confused you too much. The video option is capable of very good results but is quite complex as you need to work with more esoteric formats to get the best out of the PTE bits. The easiest way to show the presentation without compromising either video or PTE is to have the two parts completely separate and having a natural break in between (a coffee or comfort break). Show the video in one part in its native format (do not transcode to DVD unless you really have to) then switch to the computer to show the PTE (produced at the native resolution of the projector)

Hi Barry The problems you are seeing are in, the main, problems of the present TV standard. With a maximum resolution of around 720x576 pixels and a good 10% of this lost in the overscan area the amount of data is significantly less than a normal PC. Then the image is interlaced and the whole lot played at 25 frames per second which means that any fine detail particularly horizontal or diagonal lines flicker. On top of this the TV system has a much lower colour gamut than a computer system and finally the normal consumer TVs are not even capable of displaying the best that can be given to them. Wide screen is a nuisance you either stretch it or crop it. There are ways to reduce the visible effect of some of these problems. Widescreen: Make two versions one for normal screen and one that has been pre-squashed from the 4x3 (or 5x4) aspect ratio to the 16x9 of the widescreen. Overscan: do not have anything useful or important in the outside 10% of the pictures. Flicker: soften or thicken all horizontal lines, blur any fine detail. Gamut: Reduce the saturation of the images. There is some good news on the horizon:- High Definition TV. This is starting to be introduced - slowly - with a much higher resolution. They come in two basic flavours, 1080 lines interlaced and 720 lines non-interlaced (progressive) and a horizontal resolution of 1922, 1440 and 1280 pixels. DVD or video of a PTE show is, at present, simply a way of showing your presentation to a wider audience, mainly those who do not have access to a computer or incorporating a slide show into an exsisting piece of video. It is far from ideal and until HDTV and consumer TVs capable of displaying it (at an afordable price) become available, it will be the very poor relation to computer display. Still images will always have to be compromised to work well in a medium designed to show moving images. Hope this gives an insight into some of the problems. The other aspect (can of worms ) that I have not mentioned is the extra level of compression that has to be applied to the flie before it can be put on DVD - that is an area that could give a marked improvment, possibly at the expence of reduced compatability with some DVD players.

WOW Love what you have done to the timeline window. Only had a few minutes to play. A couple of suggestions as the damage that can be done to ones carefully positioned transitions are now so great it would be wonderful to have a simple undo function and/or a save file (or even save a copy) within the timeline window - the mistake function is bound to happen just after re-arranging a load of other slides correctly. The CANCEL function does not always get you back to where you started. The Shift Points... function would benefit from an absolute time as well as the offset. Well Done Igor and Team.

Hi A lot depends on what budget you have. If, like most of us, your budget is severly limited you are going to have to compromise. For a slik presentation then combining both on a DVD is a good way. This will mean reducing the quality of both video and stills. Another way would be to capture the video as an AVI or MOV file and use one of Granot's utilities to switch between them in the computer. This is probably the most cost effective method with little drop in quality of video and none of stills. There are several pieces of software/hardware that will switch between sources some of them (the more expensive!) will do so smoothly even using a transition. The projector should be able to do this and the switch may be acceptable. Try it. As a last ditch, desparate measure there is always PowerPoint . Crude, slow but effective. Hope this is of some help.

My two pence worth 1x CD = 150KB/s 1x DVD - 1350KB/s so a 4x DVD recorder is equivalent to 36x CD recorder. Yes it does take an age to write a DVD but taking into consideration the extra time for closing each CD how much longer does it really take to record the same amount of data on the six/seven CDs. DVD drives are getting faster (8x is equivalent to 72xCD and should write just over 4GB in 8minutes, 16x you are down 1GB/min - how long does it take to upload your images of you camera?) One of the problems with reading DVDs at present is that Windows (in its many incarnations) is not overly happy with the UDF file system used by the DVD to allow it to hold files greater than 4GB each. It is possible to format the DVD as FAT32 which may make the access a little faster in the short term. Large external hard drives are fast and hold a huge amount and relatively cheap and prone to catastophic failure. Great to get the files off your working machine but is it wise to use for archive purposes? The Iomega REV "promises" to be the archive solution, we shall see. Solid state storage is likely to be the best solution in the future, but at present it is at least an order of magnetude more expensive than any other method. I save my files on CD and more and more DVD. I know it is not perfect and I may have to re-do the process in a few years time, but it is affordable even making two copies (just to be on the safe side) not too arduous or time consuming (2-3min for CD, 15 min DVD).

Best Wishes Igor from Oldham, England

Be strong Bart for your family. You can ride this storm. Remember you have friends here. Good Luck Mike

Sorry anyone who tried to download DPAGB in the last couple of days and failed. The server ran out of bandwidth. I have doubled the allocated bandwidth so there should be enough to get to the end of the month with any luck. If you want to retry please do. Thanks Mike