Cedric Dawnhawk

Thanks for further responses. Jill, your suggestion about PTE 9 did occur to me. I know you can download it from the "old versions" on wnsoft.com but I wonder if the licence for version 10 would cover it? I'll maybe ask our new member to investigate. Luckily he seems very clued up on computers! Ronnie, yes I am aware of VLC player but the problem was I was taking a show to another club and was going to run it on their equipment. As I am sure you know, it is very unwise to assume anything about someone else's gear and what they may have installed. However I was confident it would run PTE exe files. As it turned out even that confidence was misplaced. One AV that had run on a Windows 10 laptop and my desktop refused to run on their Windows 10 system!

Thanks Lin and Dave for the suggestions and for not telling me I am an old stick-in-the-mud (Probably using that outdated phrase confirms that I am!). Yes we'll probably end up looking into upgrading the laptop. We have 11 members so we could raise a bit if everyone chips in or we could put up the annual subscription. There are good-looking deals in the UK, on ebay for instance, but there's always the worry that it's been put on ebay because it has some nasty intermittent fault. I have done something similar to what Dave suggests (embedding an mp4 in an exe file) in order to launch it easily from a menu on someone else's laptop which may not have had the required player for the mp4. It worked and there didn't seem to be noticeable quality loss, although I didn't do a scientific comparision. Regards Andrew

I feared that was the case. I accept that the requirements for using PTE AV Studio 10 is a 64-bit processor. Limited backward compatibility of applications with hardware and operating systems is nothing new and those still using 32-bit systems can use PTE 9. However the need for the person viewing the AV to also have a 64-bit system seems to go against the original philosophy of PTE that the exe file could be played by others without needing to purchase or install any application on their computer. In particular it presents a problem to the AV Group I belong to which has a 32-bit laptop which we use to show our AVs. We have recently recruited a new member and he has purchased PTE AV Studio10 and produced an AV that we now find we can't show at the Group. Yes I know we should upgrade our laptop, but who is going to pay? Or he could publish his AV as an mp4 video but that reduces quality. I don't expect much sympathy but at least I have had a grumble. Anyone care to send a donation towards a new laptop? Andrew Chadwick

Can someone confirm that the only exe files PTE AV Studio 10 can produce are 64-bit and therefore incompatible with 32-bit machines?

I originally used Excel and VBA as I was familiar with both and the result suited the member who made the original request. I appreciate that not everyone has or wants Excel. I'll have a look at creating a standalone version that maybe creates a text file or a csv file for import into LibreOffice. No promises as to how long it might take though! Andrew

As far as I know it was made with an early version of PTE, unless Dave (the author of the show) had tried Proshow before that. Anyway he also sends his thanks. Andrew

Many thanks Gary for successfully extracting the images Andrew

A friend of mine asked me exactly the same question today regarding an old PTE exe file so I thought I would have a look on the forum. Is the offer from either Lin or Gary to look at an exe file still open? I seem to remember there used to be a project option about allowing extraction of pictures from the exe file. Andrew

As it says in the instructions, "Blank slide" is intended to mean a true blank slide or one that is too complex for PTE Info to sort out. I agree it could be worded better. I can see from the project file that both slides 8 and 9 use 0005.jpg. Unfortunately the information for Slide 8 seems to be arranged in an unusual way so PTE Info doesn't find the image name. I thinks this is a one-off "corruption", although PTE is able to deal with it. Andrew

PTE info looks for the text [slide1], [slide2] etc in the project file etc to find information about each slide. Prior to version 9 this was written [slide1] in lower case. In version 9 it appeared from my trials that "slide" was now capitalised ie [Slide1] etc so I modified PTE Info to look for this in version 9 projects. However it appears that this is not consistent, and in your project both capitalised and uncapitalised versions appear. I have modified PTE Info so it does not bother about text case and it extracts the information from your project successfully. The only issue is Slide 8 which it indicates as a blank slide. The information for this slide is in a strange order and so the name of the image is not picked up. As stated in the instructions PTE Info is not guaranteed to work with slides with numerous objects. It would take a lot more effort to do this. The revised version can be downloaded below. Let me know how you get on with it. PTE Info_1_3.zip

Sorry you are having problems. If you could you send me one of the project files that don't work, I should be able to tell you the cause and possibly sort it out. Regards Andrew

At Peter's request, I have updated the routine so it is compatible with PTE version 9. The revised Excel workbook can be downloaded below. Andrew PTE Info_1_2.zip

No problem – I can work round it Andrew

It was a bit late at night and I had forgotten that I could edit your transition and see how it worked. I was surprised why there wasn't an associated mask but I see that because you used a standard PTE rectangle object as the mask, this is not necessary. Anyway I understand what you are doing and see that it gives a sharp clear border but I don't think this method is easily adaptable to my transition. One problem is that the visual centre of my 'keyhole' mask isn't exactly in the centre of the mask image, so the border doesn't expand equally. I have tried moving the centres of the two mask images to correspond to the visual centre but It's fiddly to get it accurate. The other thing is I don't particularly want a sharp border. I've attached part of the sequence where I use this transition and you will see that a blurry edge is probably better. It also explains why the mask starts at about 5%! However I do appreciate your response and your suggestions may well be applicable to another transition in the future. Andrew Urban Legends demo 2_Dec24-2018_10-10-04.zip

Thanks for your interest No I agree I can't see why sharpening affects the transition but I'm sure Igor and his team will find a simple explanation. I don't want to use unsharp mask to sharpen the mask or any part of the transition. It's just a convenient and lazy way of sharpening up the images in the rest of the sequence. It took me a while to realise that it was applying the sharpening to the project that had upset my transition. I tried your diamond transition and yes it has a border and it doesn't seem to have any associated outline or mask in the transition definition. So how do you do that? Yes I saw 9.0.21 but none of the fixes seemed relevant and presumably you have tried my transition on 9.0.21 and it still has the same effect.

I've looked into this a bit further and realise that it is a Windows XP problem. Just in case anyone finds this post, I thought I ought to clarify the issue. In Windows Vista and beyond a totally different Windows driver model was introduced and with these operating systems "Run Application" and "Run Slideshow" can both be used. "Run Slideshow" gives a smoother return to the menu but at the cost that both menu and launched show have to be exactly the same version of PTE. With Windows XP if there is animation in both the launching show and the show that is being launched, "Run Application" doesn't work. (It's OK if there is only animation in the launched show.) In this situation only "Run Slideshow" works. I've upgraded the Windows XP nachine to Windows 7 so there is now no problem.

I created the attached custom transition which is a sort of keyhole mask effect with a border. This works fine until you change the Unsharp mask setting in Project Options to anything other than zero when the border becomes a different shape to the mask area. Any explanations? I'm using PTE 9.0.20 Andrew PushPin.pteeff

Thanks for your reply. I appreciate that for a simple launching show then menu "Run application" works fine. The problem arises if there is animation in both the launching show and the show that is being launched. I don't understand the details but I think it is to do with allowing both shows access to video resources. Andrew

If you want to launch another slideshow from say a menu slideshow and both use animation then you have to use "Run slideshow with return". (Correct me if this no longer applies.) For this to work, all slideshows have to have been created using exactly the same version (not just major version) of PTE. Why is this very specific (and annoying) requirement necessary?

With version 9.0.16 I could not get the Exif or IPTC templates to work, even if they were typed in manually. However version 9.0.20 seems to have sorted the problem. Andrew

Yes that seems to be solved. Thanks Andrew

Yes that seems to work thanks. A very minor issue with the fix is that if you already had a custom window called "help" in the v8.0 project file you end up with two custom windows called "help" in v9.0 and you can't access the original help until you rename the custom one. However this is an unlikey occurence! Andrew

Jill By misunderstanding the meaning of Left, Right etc I meant you are expecting them to behave as in Word etc which they do, but only with reference to the text box. The text box behaves like other objects. Yes it might be convenient for text objects if the centre moved automatically but this wouldn't be consistent. I don't think there is a great problem in setting the centre of one object to -100, -100 then copying it. May I respectively suggest that you must have an idea of the number of items you are going to add before you start. Similarly for the longest text. If you like dragging, then use the grid. You can divide the screen into any number both vertically and horizontally. just uncheck "In pixels" and enter your desired numbers in the boxes. The orange lines just mark every tenth division. As Dave points out you have to be reasonably near the grid for the snap to work To quickly realign a number of text objects select them all, drag them as a group until the top one snaps to the grid, hold the control key and click the one you just aligned so it is deselected, drag the remaining ones so the top one jumps to the grid etc Regards Andrew.

In order to show a help window in PTE 9 when the F1 key is pressed, I assume you check the box "Show help on F1 keypress" then select one of the Custom windows and check the box for this window that is labelled "Use this window as help". However it seems to be possible to check the "Use this window as help" for more than one custom window. Is this a bug or is it possible to have different help windows? If so how do you use these? Andrew

I tried to reproduce this but there didn't seem to be a problem. Is it possible that you changed the option on one of the slides to "Show next slide..." rather than "By default.." in which case it would ignore the Project Option setting? Andrew