dagrace

I'll second that. Actually, I noticed that the very first time I used PTE, but then I got caught up in all the wonderful additions you were making and I forgot about this "little" thing. In general, I think the ability (not the requirement) to do mass updates (one action or parameter affecting a user-selectable set of slides) is a good thing and a valuable time-saver. Thanks a million, Igor and Team!

Igor, I have been gone for a few weeks and very busy the few times I am at home, so I have not gotten to "play" since beta 2 or 4. Every once in a while, I come to the forum and read a thing or two, and download the latest beta. I am simply amazed. As I may have mentioned in earlier posts, this is exciting to me as I have never had any influence on any commercially available software product. You and you team are SO responsive. It's incredible! Thank you for fixing so many things, caring about all the suggestins and bug reports, and listening to your customers. I hope to get "back in to it" very soon, as I have the images for 3 slide shows in the queue now. I can't wait to try the new features. In the mean time I'll have to rely on all these great folks to ask for the right things. Thanks again.

I've had Breeze Browser for a while and don't use all its features yet. But it's a solid program. I think you'll be happy with it.

Al, to be honest, I've never gotten the hang of your Adjustor. But I was "designing" what I thought might work in PTE. Glad to know I'm not in left field. I'm a little embarrassed as I am a computer systems geek by profession, and I thought I knew a bit about Excel, but I just can't seem to make your model behave. Hopefully, SuperIgor will come save the day (again) and I won't have to be embarrassed much more (on that front, at least!)

I'll add my 2 cents' worth and vote for an evolution of the ideas here, as I understand them: 1) take slides x - y and distribute them evenly over time w-z, where none of the values has to be the "first" or "last" (slide or time). Is Al's "pinning" a different feature or just a version of this? What about the inverse of #1: -1) fix slide x at time w and slide y at time z and evenly distribute the slides 1 thru (x-1) over time 0 thru w, and / or slides (y+1) thru the end over time z thru the end. Hmmm, thinking out loud: Slide 1..........2..............3.........|X...............Y|...................Last Time 0.....................................|W..............Z|...................End |.....Zone 1......................|...Zone 2.....|....Zone 3.....| So by pinning 2 slides, you can then ask to "distribute" any of 3 "zones"? Not sure I would use every instance in every show, but I can see the need for each of these. I think this reduces Carol / Alan / Al's ideas to one "feature". I still don't have my head around the stop bit yet!

Welcome to the Forum! I really think the easiest and best way for you to solve this is to do searches in this forum. When I first joined, I read most of the whole forum and learned so much just by reading other peoples' comments and questions. It was great! If you don't have the time right now, do a search on "different computer" or something like that. I can almost guarantee your answers are here already. From reading your symptoms, I can think of one thing that might be wrong right off. Putting together the slides is different from creating an executable. The commands to put the slide show together are very small and are stored in a text-like file. When you do a "Save", that's what you saved. To make the show viewable on any computer, you have to do a File \ "Create Slidehow. This packages the whole thing together in an executable (hence the name) that is self-contained and can run anywhere. Sounds like you may not be creating the slideshow, and instead you are copying the ".pte" files (very small, like a few K). Give that a try.

Nice images. I particularly like dthe one with the bee. I will agree with others on the transitions. They were a littel fast for the subject and the music (for my taste). And perhaps the duration too. I know it's pretty easy to have an image stay too long on the screen, but these seemed a bit brief in some cases. I also agree with the last sequence. The first couple were interesting (I really like this technique and am learning myself with it.) But the purples and blues didn't work for me. Also, I think I noticed some "outlines" or "edges" of the flower petals themselves when you made the selction. I'm struggling with this myself and I'm not sure how to cope with it all the time. Perhaps that's why I noticed (because I'm very sensitised to it now.) Nice first show, however, overall. Beautiful choice of music.

Mary, I can't verify that it is indeed a requirement, but many of the threads here suggest that the mp3's all be combined into one before using in PTE. That seems to be the wisdom of the experts. I have done it and it works. Can't say that I've tried making the bits work.

OK, I should learn to trust you all!

If you have the 10D setting to auto-rotate, and then you try to rotate them yourself, might the software get confused? I have several different viewing, sorting, editing pgms, and sometimes the viewing (thumbs) looks "sideways", but whenever I open them in Photoshop, they're correct, and when I save the results and load them into PTE, they're correct. I have the Auto-rotate set to ON on my 10D. I've never tried to turn it myself since I turned that switch on. Hope this helps.

Many years ago, I did exactly what you describe. I went out to "photoillustrate" The Boxer, by Simon and Garfunkel. I had some ideas and as I listened to it more, different things would come to me. It worked out very well, in the end, I think. This was loooong before computers, much less PTE, but I still have the slides bundled, in order. Hmmm, might be cool to scan tme in sometime and bring that show into the 21st century.

As a relative newbie, I echo Alan's comments that I usually sit back and wait for the final version. But I am SO excited that I actually have some influence on design. I agree with the comments about separating the wave form, and "memorizing it" so it doesn't have to re-calculate (that takes a while on my machine). As to how big or how far, I'll leave that to the experts. I'm a bit nervous that Gerard uses a 22" monitor. Don't forget about the "little guys". Hope it looks good/works on many size monitors. I also echo Alan's sentiment that this is the best design team and best forum out there.

Welcome Mehmet. Congratulations on completing your first project! I'm sure you'll get lots of viewers and many comments. Let us know when it's up on the Beechbrook site. Some people get notified, but posting here would be a good clue too.

DaveG, Wow! I never profess to be a Photoshop wizard, but I use the crop tool a lot and I've always wished there were a way to do what you just described. I usually use the info box to see that my current crop selection is 1456 pixels wide, so if I want to rezise ultimately to 1024 x 768, I divide 1456 by 1024 and multiply by 768, yielding 1092 for the height. Then I adjust the height of my selection. This looks so much easier! I'm curious at the statement "you are offered the option of inserting the required dimensions for width and height". Where is that? On the tool bar? A seprarate window? I'm not at a computer that has PS on it right now. I'll have to look. Thanks for the great tip!

Well done. I'm sure I'll have more to say after I've seen it a couple more times.

Renaming is not nearly as important anymore since new new release. Any feature adds to the richness of the program, and its value to someone, but I'd rather you spend SuperIgor's energies on other things!

Thanks all for the wonderful English lesson! In my work I have cause to deal with many Brits and have some dear friends there. Whenever we get together, we continue to be fascinated in the differences in our "common" language. We get past spanners and torches and boots and lorries and jumpers very quickly, but I still find terms every time we talk. Even if I completely understand, it's interesting how we construct sentences a bit differently, or the slightly different uses of the same word, e.g., "bit", "clever", "the" (really!). So thanks again. One of the side benefits of using an internationally known/used program with a forum of truly friendly people. If anyone wants to take this discussion to another level, we can start another topic, or email me! I am quite chuffed by this exchange!

My 2 cents' worth... I never turn off "preserve aspect ratio". I'm not willing to fight the distortion Alan describes. So I either crop and do a little math (in the Info window in PS, it shows the dimensions of the crop before you actually commit to it), or if I can't crop and keep the same ratio, I deal with the pics not all being exactly the same size. Admittedly, I've only built one show with PTE, but even "before PTE" when I was showing "slides", I didn't insist that they all be the same size. There is also a command in PS (which I've heard of but never used) (and I can't look right now because I'm at work) where you can say "resize this picture to either xxx height or yyy width, whichever is smaller." So if you're going for 800 x 600, it will make sure neither dimension exceeds that, but still maintain the aspect ratio. Hope this helps. "Chuffed" must be good, but I've never heard that term before. Can you elaborate? Is it a "regional" term? If so, what "region"?

Al is still there? Send him home! He has work to do! I wondered why I hadn't seen any posts from him in a while. No internet access in the pubs, eh?

Welcome Gene! If I understand your question correctly, you want the last slide to fade out after a certain time. Transitions are attached to the beginning of a slide. So the way to make your show fade out is to make another slide after your last picture. This last last slide can have an "image" that is one black pixel, or 10 x 10 or whatever. Then change the background of that slide to be all black. Now when you fade from the second last slide (which the viewer perceives as the last slide) to the real last slide, which is all black, it will appear as fading out. I use that at the beginning and the end of my shows, because I don't want to fade right from the desktop or some window to my first picture. Same at the end. Hope this helps. You might also do a search in this forum for "fade" or "black slide" or "one pixel". This technique has been discussed at some length. Give it a try, and please ask again if I misunderstood your question.

Did you get the PTE 101 slideshow off of beechbrook.com? I can't recommend it enough. It's a very good first run at it. It may take you a while to download it if you have a modem, but it's worth the wait.

Hawk emailed me with the following question: I poked around a bit and answered as follows: Any takers to shed some light on these questions/answers? Thanks

I took some of the advice above and created a new folder. When I ran the setup.exe, it goes through the normal disclaimers and such. Then when it gets to "where do you want to install it?" instead of the default of C:\Program Files\Pictures To Exe, I just changed it to C:\Program Files\Pictures To Exe43b1. Everything else was the same. It copied all the files to the new directory, so now I have 2 copies. I didn't have to re-register. If that didn't happen for you, maybe one of the experts can help. Maybe uninstall everything, then re-install (and re-register) 4.2, then install 4.3 in a new folder? Just an idea. That's not official advice (yet)

Thanks all. I installed it in a separate folder. Working great!

In the PTE program, after you're all doen organizint the pics etc., pick "Create Slidehosw" from the File menu. There is a pretty good tutorial called PTE101 out on http://www.beechbrook.com/pte/index.asp?ca...egoryid=&page=4 It's a slideshow that shows you how to make a slideshow! Pretty well done.