SeismicGuy

On a somewhat related issue, I have created a number of mp4 shows from past projects and seem to recall that the Time Remaining for the resulting mp4 was generally around the time length for the actual overall project (my shows are usually 20-30 minutes total). I am in the Publishing step of a current project that is 21 minutes in length. The Publishing phase shows about 3 HOURS for the process which seems weird. The only difference is that I changed the "motion blur" option from disabled to enabled with the recommended settings. Is this what is causing the seemingly excessive Publishing Time?

I probably should have described my process better. Basically there are times on trips where I have a series of separate videos related to an overall single activity. For example going out on a boat for whale watching or taking a gondola up a mountain and then walking around and then back down the mountain. So the overall "activity" might consist of 4 or 5 separate pieces of video taken on my phone. What I do is load ALL of those clips in Movavi and of course leaving them all intact as originally taken results in an overall boring and too long clip. So I start snipping out pieces and deleting them (e.g., the 30 seconds of going up the mountain taken from the gondola might be reduced to 15 seconds, etc.). In the end I might end up with a number of pieces (all in one single piece) that total 30 or 40 seconds. But if I do nothing beyond that there are a bunch of jerky distracting changes from one piece to the next. So one of the Movavi tools is to insert transitions between the pieces resulting in a much smoother overall clip. So I do not have separate video slides with a transition between slides (I think that is what you were suggesting) but, rather, one overall video created from a number of clips with transitions in between each clip. Does this make sense? By the way I realize I could probably do all this within PTEAV and/or Optimizer but I wanted to end up with a resulting single video clip/slide.

Thanks for the info. I was just used to using Movavi and it has some nice transitions to insert between each clip. Is that also the case with Video Optimizer?

Ah I see said the blind man! I missed the obvious about just clicking the line to create the points and then moving those points up or down exactly like the audio adjustments. Thanks much!

I am also confused about what can be done with video clips. In my case I had 4 or 5 clips that I ended up merging into a single clip using Movavi. Now I put that resulting clip as a slide in a PTEAV show I am creating and it works fine--no problem. But after-the-fact I realized it would be nice for me to slow down a particular few second portion of that video. In Objects and Animation I open the Properties and see the Video section and a button for Trim and Adjust Speed which I click. The I see some checkboxes one of which is "speed keyframes" which sounds like something I am looking for. But I can't find a way to actually add any keyframes in the overall clip. What am I missing??

I wonder if this is similar to a feature I had asked about some time ago. The video show program I was using prior to PTEAV had a "normalize" button to account for different volumes in the various music clips I would put into the music track of whatever show I was creating. I am sure you can probably do the same thing with Audacity or some other similar audio program but having a one-step normalize option within PTEAV would be a nice feature.

Hi Alex--even with "plain vanilla" image software like On1 or Photoshop I have never completely dived into masks but have a basic understanding of what they are. Even more mysterious (to me) are the masking techniques in PTEAV in terms of the mask, then the mask stencil, then the mask contents. I sort of understand what these things are but knowing how and when to use them is the missing link for me. An analogy with regular photo enhancing programs like Photoshop is that some people can look at the starting image and know precisely what needs to be done to achieve a certain result. That escapes me.

I am always astounded by the clips you create. I wouldn't even know where to start. Thanks as always.

Bringing up the suggestion again to create a way to to have mp4 clips stand out distinctly from jpg's in the slide view. I have made the mistake a number of times now of selecting what I thought were a number of consecutive slides to apply a style or theme only to find out later that one of more of these were mp4 clips rather than jpg's. An alternative would be to have some option buttion that applies styles/themes ONLY to jpg slides and skip any mp4 slides if that makes sense.

I think what I have been doing as a work-around was to go ahead and apply the theme/style to the bunch of slides and then go back and select all of the slides in question on the slide view line and change the duration back to what I originally had it (usually 8 seconds for most cases) and that takes care of it in one step. Of course there are some slides where I wish to keep the duration from the style so I go back after-the-fact and verify/tweak once again. I have also sometimes made the mistake of selecting a number of slides for applying a style not realizing that one or more slides in the sequence were actually mp4 videos. I think I was suggesting in the past that it would be nice to easily distinguish jpg slides from mp4 slides in the slide view other than noting the longer duration.

It has been a while since creating a vacation slideshow so I may have asked this before but just forgot the answer. If I place slides in the slideview line or timeline and set the duration of each to be some consistent number (e.g., 8 seconds) but then apply something like the Ken Burns theme to some or all of the slides the duration of each changes. This works sometimes but sometimes not so I need to go in and tweak the durations on the slides. I assume the duration change is by intent depending on the style/theme being applied, but is there any way to lock the durations?

Thanks very nice as usual!

I don't have a specific answer but there are a bunch of tutorials by Barry Beckham that helped me learn more and just playing around and trying things was also useful. The program is not all that intuitive but once you get the hang of things it is very powerful. Have created a number of travelogue-type videos that have a few hundred images and videos and learn more each time I use the program. I am sure someone will have a specific answer for your question soon.

I think PowerPoint has this feature.

This would be a nice feature to add to upcoming versions. The video show program I was using before PTEAV had a "normalize" button to make all of my various music clips the same basic volume which was a pretty slick feature.

Nice--thanks!

He's right. Just after posting my last post I remembered about the styles.ini file and other ini files. Again in my case I have styles.ini in 7 different locations, probably from previous versions/installs. If you can read the ini file it basically ties together all of the weird named folders with data about what each does, author, etc.

I don't think you can just move around the folders with the styles. I think you actually have to go through the importing of each style while using the program, but I may be wrong.

Not using 10 anymore so I guess it would be best to uninstall it. I wonder if that will also delete the miscellaneous other folders.

On my machine the files are frequently in more than one location--for example: I suppose this is because I was first trying/using PTE 10 and eventually upgraded to 11. I would really prefer to have these all in just one folder location and perhaps I can just delete the ones that are extraneous?

Again sorry no answer from me but this is defintely one area that can bear some improvement with this program. The way I interpret the workings of this is that when a "*.ptestyle" file is imported it genererates the various folders with useless names: Then if you look in one of these folders you see something like this: Then if you look at the xml file you see something like this: Where you can discern that this is some circling style and that is about it. It would be wonderful if the Folder Name can actually be the name of the style or at least some hint at what it does.

I don't have an answer but have also found the slide style thing to be somewhat inscrutable in terms of where they are saved (I have found them in more than one folder on my computer) and then the ways the folders are named with a bunch of numbers and letters.

Interesting. So the "sprites" are essentially freeze frames of an image kind of like what was used for a kinetoscope as far as I can tell--yes?

Always enjoy your works but don't know what sprites are.

Beautiful images and presentation accompanied by one of my favorite songs from Alan Parsons, one of my all time favorite groups!