mhwarner

Maureen, I guess there's not much I can add to what's already been said, but thanks again for sharing your talents. I thoroughly enjoyed the show and, as always, am impressed by the wonderful sharpness of your photos. I very much enjoy the interspersed detail shots of windows and architectural details as well as the candid portraits of the gondoliers. Another one for my keeper file.

Mark, I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your show. I did a good bit of the same trip last summer. The bears are so difficult to capture because (aside from the obvious of getting close enough from a safe position), there is often such great contrast. I did a couple of whale excursions and got a few tails and one good breech. Here is the link to a blog I did: http://www.mhwarner.com/alaska/index.htm. Although I ultimately put together a show for friends and family (2 of them actually), they were much too large to post. Anyway, thanks for sharing your show.

Andrew, I enjoyed the show and your wonderful photography. I liked the way you added the video. My only comment would be that the photos all seemed to be of slightly different sizes, which was especially obvious looking at the two pages side by side. Also, they were not always aligned evenly (i.e., the margins were not the same on many of the two adjoinging pages. I would have cropped all photos to the same size and had the same margins on both left-hand and right-hand pages. Otherwise, great show. I still hope to get there someday. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks to all for the suggestions. Just thought I would post a follow-up with my actual solution. A straight solution in Photoshop does not seem to work as PS, like PTE, has no ability to automatically do text wrapping. What I have done instead is paste my text into MS Word and used its capabilities to modify font type and size, line spacing, centering and/or alignment, as well as to set page breaks as necessary. I have about 30 "pages". I then "printed" the document to PDF (using free open-source PDF Creator). Then I went into Photoshop and opened the PDF file (PS will only bring in one page of the PDF at a time and asks you to choose which pages -- which is somewhat of an annoyance)so it has to be done multiple times. The pages are actually imported with a transparent background so it was not necessary to remove the background. I then added my shadow layer style and "saved as" a .png file. I think this method gives a lot of flexibility with regard to the stylization of text because it is possible to alter the color, bevel, shadow, or whatever interesting effects you want. The basic (and of course the original Word doc) remain intact should you need to make future changes.

Thanks for the suggestion, Dave. It's exactly what I needed!

I've searched here but haven't come up with an answer. If I've missed something please point me in the right direction. I have a project that requires me to enter large blocks of text on slides (actually just the text on a white background would be the contents of the slide). I already have an entire narrative in a text file and I need to add pieces of it to slides in between my pictures. Cutting/pasting into the PTE text box is a bit of a pain as there is no automatic word wrapping and line breaks must be entered manually to fit the format of the slide. The only thing I have come up with is to create .png files in Photoshop of the proper size with a white background and enter the text there or to enter it into a Word document and do screen captures and save to .png. (I'm thinking .png so I could take advantage of shadows in PTE or overlay the text on pictures if I decided to go that route later.) If anybody has a better suggestion, I'd love to hear it. Thanks in advance.

Hi Jeff, So glad to see you back on the road again. I've missed your shows! Southern Utah is such an amazing area and I am fortunate to live only a few hours away myself. I thought the music was a good match and I liked the video sunset at the end. I envy your minimalist travel routine. It certainly affords you the ability to camp at some scenic and solitary places. I'm more the RV type, but we do two a 4-wheel drive so we get lots of opportunity to explore the back country. Thanks again for sharing this.

Maureen, It is obvious that Mark has inherited your fine eye and photographic skills. I have watched this show 3 times already and I am still awed by the photography. The waterfalls are exquisite and he has done a fine job of capturing the silky smoothness. I loved the ruined structures (churches? abbeys? castles?). Is there some place I can read about them? However, by far my favorite photo was the hay bales in the setting sun. What gorgeous light! And, last but not least, your masterful assembly of the photos into the slideshow has done them (and your son) credit. I personally thought the music was perfect and I liked the way you took us from one season to another. You should both be very proud of what you have accomplished. Thank you for sharing it with us!

Patrick, Thanks for sharing this wonderful show of a beautiful area. The photos were top notch and the music was perfect. I especially liked one photo in particular -- the one with the church in the lower right corner completely dwarfed by the towering mountains. Outstanding job and I thoroughly enjoyed the show!

Jean-Claude, The videos were great! I watched the non-HD versions over a wireless connection and they ran very smoothly. Your English (and your tutorial style) are very understandable. I do hope that you will honor us with more tutorials. I learned a few things about the music track that I didn't know. Thanks for sharing these!

Hi Lin, Thanks for the inspiration on some ways to incorporate the new PTE features. The wolf pups were adorable! FYI, Xara Web Designer 7 was released about 2 days ago. I have downloaded it but have not yet had time to play. I did not see anything in the "What's New" regarding preloading, but hopefully it's there somewhere.

Hi Lin, The pan was very smooth on my screen also, and I have an older video card (ATI Mobility Radeon X1400). There was one slight jerk just as the house started coming into view and before the hawk "flew" across the screen. I viewed the pc wide pano version. Lovely shots of the front range.

While the size of the file in pixels is an issue I struggle with (currently my laptop, while not "old", has 2 GB of memory and is dual core, but doesn't have the speediest graphics card), the issue I find most troublesome is the crop factor. I really am not crazy about the amount of top and bottom that must be cut off to fit the 16:10 or 16:9 proportions, particularly since it is almost impossible to do a batch of images that way with some sort of automation. I find that I need to manually crop so as not to lose important parts of the image. While I love to see images (and slideshows) full-screen, most of my latest shows have ended up being 3:2 so that they only require downsizing. But if I am making a DVD for sale or for family distribution, then I tend to go with 4:3. Ultimately, it just seems impossible to come up with a one-size-fits-all show. On the subject of file size/resolution, I am currently working on a show using full-size images. The show has quite a few slow pans and zooms and seems a bit jerky on my computer. I am in the process of downsizing but am having to figure out the optimum size for the zooms so that they don't pixelate. I don't have a hard and fast rule as to what I would download, but my internet connection (like a good number of people I know and meet in my travels) is wireless (a Verizon broadband card). I don't believe it is safe to assume that most people (unless they live in metropolitan areas) have high-speed connections. I would probably balk at downloading anything over 100 MB, and would need to carefully consider even that. Another consideration is that most folks (at least those on satellite or wireless) have some sort of data download metering so they will be selective about file size maximum. (I know that most young adults probably don't give it much consideration, but then I doubt many of them are downloading slideshows.)

I really enjoyed the show but I personally would have liked to see it as two different shows. To me it seemed logical to end the first half at the end of the initial train sequence and make the part with the vineyards and grapes and historical people/festival pictures an entirely different show. (Sorry, I couldn't understand the text comments so perhaps I missed something.) Also, I don't think the outside beige frame added anything to the show. I would have preferred to see the pictures full screen. Other than that, I loved the animations. How very clever to have the passing scenery animate by the train. I think I would have made all of the animations just a bit slower. Some of them were a bit too fast to truly appreciate. The music was great and very suitable to the photography. I love riding old steam trains and this looked like a fun excursion. Thanks for taking us along.

Fantastic show, Bert! I loved it! The music was right on and the animation was perfect. I felt as if I was peering over your shoulder as you walked through the building. I am not normally a fan of overdone HDR but in this case I think it lent exactly the right touch to the photos. Which program did you use for the HDR? The only negative, and this is not directed to you, but it is so very sad to see such a magnificent building allowed to go to ruin. At least with your show, though, perhaps it can live forever. Thanks so much for sharing this interesting show. I look forward to seeing more of your shows.

As a skier, I very much enjoyed this show. I have skied a lot of the Utah areas but I'd never heard of this one. I was impressed by the luxury of the dining room where you were photographed. Doesn't look like the typical ski area cafeteria. I assume it's an upscale restaurant or a private club? You've got me thinking about putting together a show of some of my Colorado ski trips. Thanks for sharing.

Perhaps somebody else will jump in with a better solution, but in the meantime ... It's not really automatic, but it seems to me it might be easier than adding a comment to each slide. Go into objects and animations and add a text object to a slide. For the newly added text object, click on "Insert text template" and <%SlideIndex%> will show up in the text window. Set the text parameters (color, size, font, etc.) as you wish. Then select it down in the objects window and copy (Ctrl-C) to the clipboard. Now in the upper corner of the O&A window, click the right arrow key to advance to the next slide. Now paste the text object by hitting Ctrl-V. Press the right arrow again to advance to the next slide. Not automatic, but with a few keystrokes you could work through quite a number of slides.

Maureen, Happy New Year! Bravo on another success! Another appropriate title for the show might also have been "Moody" as the various slides seem to evoke a number of different moods. The music you chose is quite appropriate. I especially like the very first slide with the boats and the 5th one with the golden trees in the foreground and the rocky crags almost obscured by mist in the background. Definitely another keeper for me. Thanks again for sharing. And have a wonderful time on your northern coastal voyage. Can't wait to see slides from that one!

Well, I certainly hope no new members of this forum or new users of PTE have gotten into this thread by mistake! What a sarcastic, crabby bunch of old men seem to be lurking here this holiday season (if any of you are actually pleasant young women, I do apologize ). This discussion seems to have descended to a more personal level rather than truly a discussion of the pros and cons of Barry's slideshow (though I will admit that his opening post was an invitation to more sarcasm). In any case, threads like this certainly do not inspire others to post their slideshows here. Could we have a bit more civility in the new year? Perhaps some of the petty potshots could be taken to the private message area.

Malcolm, Outstanding photography! I love the way you mixed the landscape/cityscape images with the detailed images and the people portraits. Your photography is exquisite and you make great use of depth of field. My favorites were a close-up near the beginning of some sort of detailed fabric (almost looked like a peacock design) and the one of the three bicycle riders in multicolored raincoats going riding into the mist. I think you made a very good selection from what I can only imagine must have been a huge collection of photographs. And of course, you can't go wrong with one of Dom's templates. I'm sure your family and friends are awed by this presentation. Thank you very much for sharing. This is a definite keeper for me.

Daniel, Thank you for sharing this interesting show. The costumes were just incredible, as was the face painting. The ladies weren't bad looking either, but some of your camera angles indicated that you were aware of that. I am guessing these were some sort of "clubs" participating, much like the crewes which participate in the Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans. It's too bad the location was such you couldn't step back a bit, but everything appears to have taken place in the narrow space between the walls. As photographers, we sometimes have to take what we can get and try to be happy with it. I liked the way you transitioned the portrait shots into the show.

Thank you sir! I typically do not put spaces in my folder or file names (a carryback to the old DOS days when they weren't allowed). However, I see that when I installed PTE several versions back, there is a space in the install folder "PicturestoExe 5" which is exactly where the selection stops. I often use a number of TheDom's templates which include many objects beyond just a single picture slide. And I usually have to duplicate the slides multiple times or copy/paste from multiple versions of the template to add several hundred additional "slides". This is where a lot of the renaming comes in. Obviously, this is not something that a lot of regular users do. I typically create a copy of an existing template in a new folder in my "PicturestoExe 5\Templates" folder and go from there. So until Igor might considering implementing my suggestion, or either of the two that you have suggested which would work equally as well, I guess I will think about reinstalling PTE into a folder that has no spaces. Or maybe it would be easier to just change the location of my "templates" folder and move it higher up the tree.

Thanks Dave. Appreciate your response. I long ago developed the practice of backing up my files. I have 16 external backup drives ranging from 80 gigs to 1.5 TB (as well as a multitude of DVDs). My photos and data are backed up multiple times on different media and some are stored offsite. My photos are stored with the folder naming convention of "mwpics\2010\20101118\IMG_whatever.jpg" (the second and third folders are year and date taken, respectively and are created by my downloading program automatically). In addition, I create templates from each of my PTE shows and back them up separately as well. It never hurts to be redundant!

Thanks Dave, but that really has nothing to do with my request. I just want an easier way to manually change the filename for one or more picture objects in templates (or even pieces of templates) that I use. I know most of the tricks for keeping project files together. I am just asking for a wider file name entry box for the reasons stated above.

Hi, It's not actually a question of "seeing" the full filename, but rather one of changing it. In the simplest example, I might be copying a slide (which is fairly complicated and has many objects) and I want to change the main picture by perhaps one digit in the filename. If the path/filename is fairly long, it will only show the left part. To change just a digit at the end of the filename, I have to click into the box, then hit the "End" key, then click again to actually change the new number. Yes, I know I can click on the picture icon and bring up the file selector, but sometimes that's more of a PITA. Also, sometimes I want to copy the entire path/filename to another object on the slide and I have to go through virtually the same procedure. It doesn't seem like moving the box down one line and making it wider is that big of a deal. I understand that it might not always show a REALLY long path/filename, but in most instances it would suffice. Thanks for listening. (I might add that when I have a lot of filenames to change, I often edit the PTE file in Notepad++ and do a find/replace, which makes the job significantly easier.)