alrobin

Thanks, Ken! I expected to see a whole new set of faces, but it looks like most of the experienced members are still here. Yes, for sure! Same problem with 3 different selections. Must be the operator Will try your other suggestion later.

I have not been very active in creating AV's lately due to other interests (I found one can't do everything, at least not well), so I apologize for not reporting this sooner. When I create a slideshow with the new PTE 7 on my relatively new laptop with Windows 7, there are glitches in the sound, whether associated with a particular slide, or used in sync mode. I have tried to minimize the number of processes open at the same time to no avail. The same slideshow runs perfectly on my Win XP-based PC. Also, the same music file plays perfectly in Windows Media Player, even with PTE running simultaneously without sound activated.. Anyone else with similar problems or with any suggestions? By the way, I have the same problem using PTE 6.5. ........Al

JP was indeed a great friend of PTE and this Forum. He spent so many hours working on ingenious ways to apply PTE, and then in trying to explain how they worked for the rest of us. We will truly miss him.

Sorry for ignoring your questions over the last year or so - I was getting involved in some other pursuits, and as Ken says, was not visiting the forum on a regular basis, and when I did, I must have missed your queries about the "Adjustor" model. As I indicated to 'mightec', there have been some changes to the Visual Basic used currently by Microsoft in it's Office and Visual Studio products which I have not had a chance to apply to Adjustor, and as it involves a considerable amount of effort, I don't expect to have time to update the model to make it compatible with these changes - not only in VB, but also in PTE. Also, my latest version of Excel is 2000, so it is difficult for me to test changes to the model in newer versions of Excel. My apologies to those who relied on Adjustor in their AV work - maybe Igor could be persuaded to add a "debugging" or "summary" feature to the program sometime in the future??

Adda, I'm sure you meant to say "treats", not "threats" I agree with you on the point about plug-ins, and also am very appreciative of Dom for sharing his tutorials/experiments/etc. with us here in the forum. IMHO, this is not "marketing", as no personal gain or request for remuneration is involved. We are very fortunate that Dom and JPD and JC and Lin and others are so clever in applying the new features of PTE, and also so generous about sharing these results with us. Keep up the good work, everybody!

Daniel, I, too, do not have any problem running Brian's test of the three examples of button action. However, as Ken pointed out, the French site referenced by "button 2" is very slow-loading. A lot of people would be put off by this and not bother to stick around until it finished. The other two websites open almost immediately.

The purpose of the "blue" area on the O&A timeline is to control the visibility of an object, whether at the beginning of the timeline or at the end (the end cutoff does not work in Preview mode either). It does not make sense that it would work "correctly" in the O&A window and not in the preview or the finished show.

You're right - I experience the same result. However, if you move the "visibility" slider completely to the left so that the text starts at the beginning of the sequence, it shows up in both the preview and in the O&A window. Something not working quite the way it should.

Thanks, Peter - I knew there had to be an easy explanation! Works fine now.

Igor, Thanks again for a much-improved version of PTE - it is very smooth! I noticed one little problem however - when I select a slide and try to preview using the "little slice of toast", the music starts from the beginning but the preview starts with the slide selected. Also, when I clone a keypoint using the "+" button, I can no longer edit the pan or zoom parameters for the keypoint which was cloned - sorry if this has been discussed already, as there may be a reason for this. However, I can still edit the "opacity" and "rotate" parameters for the cloned keypoint independently of the new keypoint, so it seems strange that the pan and zoom parameters would have to be greyed out for the cloned keypoint and no longer available for editing. Other than that, I love the features of the new program!

Lin, Along with all the others who have expressed sympathies here, I, too, am very sorry to hear about your wife's health problems, and sincerely hope that everything will work out positively for you both. You will be sorely missed here on the forum - your dedication and patience in assisting others come up to speed on new features of PTE, your suggestions for future improvements, and your ingenious examples of ways to implement all the new features have been an inspiration to us all. Come back soon!

Igor, At one time I was very interested in the use of MIDI as background sound and music, directly, for PTE productions. However, although I still use a MIDI system as the basis for a lot of my sound effects, and also some "original" musical compositions, I find that the results are much more consistent and reliable if I convert everything to an mp3 file before importing into PTE. So, I agree with you that there is very little need to continue to make PTE compatible with the MIDI system, itself. It is very easy to convert everything to mp3. Some users may not have all the tools to do this, but they are not very expensive, and are quite easy to use.

Igor, You have been more busy lately than St. Nick! Thanks for all the work you have done on our behalf this year! I haven't been very active in AV lately (other interests and activities have taken over momentarily), but I've been following your progress with great interest, and I look forward to experimenting with all the new features of v 5.6 in the New Year. All the best of the Season to you and your staff and to all the Forum members, especially the ones who so diligently tested and provided feedback on the new features in PTE!

For small audiences like you describe, I have found my Logitec Z-10 USB speakers very effective. They will fit in a briefcase, and the sound quality is great. Very handy - can control sound volume from the laptop as well as the touch-screen on one speaker. Also economical, especially for the sound quality - I paid around $140 CDN for mine at Costco. You will need a USB cable extension, though, in order to position the speakers where you want them in relation to the laptop. http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/speakers...02&cl=us,en As an added advantage, because all the information from the laptop to the speakers is digital (USB), this solution eliminates noise picked up from the screen, or an inferior laptop sound card, a problem that pestered me to no end with two of my laptops.

Thanks for the "heads-up", Mike. I will have a look at the Adjustor model and see how I can make it compatible with PTE 5.5.

Congratulations, Igor, and the rest of your team! Thank-you so much for all the new features! It is such a pleasure to have all of these new tools at our disposal and to have the old ones made so much more versatile and yet still remain so user-friendly. PTE is a great program, and it continues to become even better with every new version!

Sorry, Igor - my apologies. I was forgetting about the "drag and drop" feature and trying to use "add slide" instead. It works very nicely using the mouse the way you describe it. The other two features will be welcome additions to the program, too. Thanks for including them.

Igor, these are wonderful improvements to the new beta - thanks so much. The mini-player is now a very sophisticated feature, and works soooooo smoothly! The ability to tweak the duration of the last slide is also a very useful feature. Now, may I please make one more request, since we are still on the subject of the timeline? Can you please add an "insert" key, particularly for the timeline view, so that we can add a slide between two other slides, like we can in previous versions? This is still a very useful function and seems to be missing in the recent betas.

I second your observation here, Jeff, and it is another feature which I found very useful in previous versions.

Yes, I have noticed this too, even with version 4.48. In the latter, if one adds too many slides for the music, and selects "synchronize slides", the main window shows the length of time required to display the slides using the default duration time, not the time of the music currently selected. In fact I had a query put to me about this yesterday by a friend who is new to the program and who is still using version 4.48.

Igor, This would, in my opinion, be a suitable substitute for the previous capability to remove only transition points by highlighting and deleting them on the timeline. However, for some reason, it doesn't work that way for me. If I highlight all the transitions and press "Shift-Del", the points are shifted to the right, not removed, just as they are when I click on "Cut transition". And maybe "Cut transition" should be renamed "Shift transition", to avoid confusion for new members in the future.

Jeff, I agree with your description of how the two versions of PTE work. While it is an inconvenience to have all of the slides in the slide list move off to the right on the timeline, it can be used as a workaround to position them on the fly, as Igor and several members have described. To me, a "transition", as indicated by a little rectangle on the timeline, represents the point in time where the transition effect for the next slide first begins to operate, whether it be a fade, wipe, cut, etc. It's just a transition point for the slide which it represents. The slides themselves are shown on the slide list, independent of their transition times or types. As you know, there are three times which are important for any particular slide: the time of the start of the transition to that slide, the transition time itself (indicated by the horizontal grey bar on the timeline), and the duration of the slide (the time between the start of the transition to that slide and the start of the next transition. Note that, even for non-synched shows, with version 5, the duration time includes the transition time, as it always should have, as it is consistent with the timing of synched shows. Everyone has a slightly different way of putting shows together, and for some, these points about the timing may not be pertinent (for example if one never syncs a show, or if one automatically spreads slides over the timeline, etc.).

Yes, this is what I had in mind - you put it much more succinctly!

Igor, Thanks so much for all your hard work in trying to please us all in the new much-improved version of PTE. I can see that many hundreds of hours must have gone into streamlining this great program and adding in our many "must have" suggestions over the past couple of years. I like the increased flexibility of the timeline / slide views, the ability to drag and drop onto the timeline, the ability to access project ops from the timeline view, etc. However, after a very cursory trial of the new program, I have a few requests, complaints, and/or suggestions (call them what you will ) 1. I agree with Barry and Busty about the missing ability to clear the timeline of transitions and add them on the fly - moving everything to the end just doesn't cut it with me either (on my first attempt, I guess I hadn't highlighted everything, and only some of them moved past the end of the music. The new "workaround" is too easy to screw up. 2. On the previous timeline, hitting "stop" returned the maker to the very beginning of the show. I always found this to be a nuisance, as I would often hit stop instead of just pausing the show, and have to navigate back to the place on the timeline where I was working. So, the new "tape recorder" system of buttons is a pleasant relief. However, as on a recorder, there still needs to be another button to return the maker to the very beginning of the show if he or she desires to go there. One can move the slider, but that is more awkward than simply hitting a "return" button. 3. The music still gets cut off at the end of the slides unless one calculates the duration from there to the end and adjusts the duration of the last slide accordingly. This would be simplified if one could drag the vertical "end of show" line on the timeline with the mouse, just as one can drag the end of each transition to extend it for individual slides. This would tell the show to keep playing until the end of the music is reached. 4. There appears to be some wasted space on the slide view window (see attachment) when one moves the dividing bar upward to increase the size of the images on the slide list. 5. I had previously envisaged a new window with both timeline and slides visible together, one above the other. I guess this was found not to be possible. One would think that with the high-resolution modern-day monitors there would be plenty of room to include both together. This way one could drag and drop slides from both the file list and the slide list onto the timeline. In the current design it is very tedious to try to drag a slide from the end of the timeline back to the beginning. Thus I agree with the suggestion in a previous post to have the light-table for the slide list accessible from the timeline. Otherwise, while it only goes part-way in meeting my own personal wish-list, I do find the new PTE an improvement overall from the previous version, and will continue to adopt the new betas and future versions as they are produced. All the best in your continuing development!

Ken, Thanks for providing this update on Ron W. He was indeed a very cheerful, keen, and active member of the Forum for several years and many of us miss his sage advice and regular contributions. Ron, we hope that your treatments will be successful so you will be able to join us here on the Forum soon, and that you will have many more creative years with Pictures to Exe. All the best!