kenm

Thank you very much for the reply. I have finally got the sequence working properly - and it wasn't the English, just my reading ability. What I had done was to set the images to 'Original', but omitted the 'In Pixels' bit. Correcting that error has fixed the problem. As an aside to an earlier bit of the conversation, I copied the files from Desktop to Laptop as part of my back-up regime. It was incidental that it then allowed me to edit the sequence on the laptop to help isolate the problem. Thank you again for your help. Ken.

What you suggest is exactly what I did. The desktop screen is 1600 x 1200 and the file worked fine there. The laptop is 1280 x 768. When I ran the .exe file to test on the laptop, I noticed that the top of one particular shot was missing in the scanning process. (It's easy to spot when the top of a big wheel isn't shown!) The only way to check what was happening was to transfer ALL of the files to the laptop and see what was happening. That is when I found the cause of the problem! It seems to be impossible to build a file that actually does what is supposed to happen. I'm starting to wonder if it is a graphics card problem - since I can't think of anything else. The desktop machine has an NVidia GeForce 5700 card and so can use 3D acceleration. The laptop has just the integrated Intel card and I'm not sure what that can do. I left the box ticked (for 3D accel.) as I haven't noticed any problems before. Ken.

I have just been following the advice in this section and particularly the quoted bit above. I was having trouble as my intent was to use the animation bit of PTE to scan portrait images rather than have size changes in my sequence. The advice seemed to work well - then I copied all the work from my desktop machine to my laptop! Obviously - a silly thing to do!!!! What I have now found is that I need different setting for the start and end positions of the animation!! Remember, I am using exactly the same files - images and masks and the .pte file - that worked fine on the desktop machine. I don't have to change the zoom, just the start/end position for the animation. Has anyone any idea about what is happening here. I was trying to end up with a show that would run at 1024 x 768 on any monitor, with a black surround if it had a higher resolution. This seemed to be what the quote above suggested was possible - a sequence that would run on (more or less) any monitor at or above the mask hole size. Ken.

What I found was that the transition timing WAS transferred, but not the slide duration! I actually did another test and found that some random earlier set slide durations WERE transferred to the Timeline, but only a very few and not the current settings. I have to say that, from my background in Computing, this smacks more of a programming bug/feature than anything else. Inconsistencies are usually donw to the side effects of errors, in my experience. Reading the defaults from one section of a program when starting another section is not a difficult task. I'm therefore surprised that this feature has not already been implemented properly. Ken. PS: I decided to reply directly to this post even though I think the above comments may not go down well with some. In my defence, I first used a computer in 1966 and have recently retired from teaching Computer Science at a UK University. My areas were Programming and Software Engineering.

As one respondent suggested, I've done some further testing - and have even stranger timings to report! I used 18 slides (to make timings easier to calculate - see later). I then used the project settings dialogue to set the slide duration to 5 seconds and the transition effect to 5 seconds (again, to make timing calculations easier). My first gess for the duration was therefore 3 minutes in the light of previous experience. I then Previewed the presentation and it lasted for 2min 55 secs (co-incidentally, the length of the music chosen). Obviously, the first 5 second transition was missing - understandable. I then clicked on the Timeline button to see what it made of the timings. It had set the slide transition times to the default 4 second mark, but with my own transition time of 5 seconds. A quick Preview then showed that the timings were exactly as before looking at the Timeline - 2:55. I then chose the synchronise option and, as expected from the Timeline, no slide stayed on screen fully visible and the timings were about 4secs times 18 slides. This may seem logical to old hands with this software, but to me it seems inconsistent. To transfer the modified effects timings to the timeline but not the modified slide timings seems illogical. Logic would seem to suggest either using all the defaults or all the changed timings rather than a mixture of each. I hope others can both follow these comments and reproduce them. Any further comments/feedback would be appreciated. Ken.

I am a relatively new user to PTE, but was encouraged top have a go at a new presentation following a lecture at my camera club. It was here I found out about the Timeline and how it might be used - which was the start of my problems. I hope someone here can help, as the support people either don't understand my problem or think a gross difference in presentation timing, depending on a simple button click, are 'normal'. Their reply to my second attempt to make sense of my results was: "We have never received such complains. Please, could you ask for an advice at our forum: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php" Hence I am here asking for help/explanation. My problem: I created a presentation using 66 slides and using the global settings dialogue to set the slide display time and the transition times between slides. My understanding was that the controlling factor was the slide display time with the transition time eating in to this. This should have given a presentation time of a little over two minutes at 2.5 seconds per slide. When I ran the music of this length, it lasted for just over HALF of the actual presentation time. I thought this was my understanding, being a newcomer. So I decided to adjust the timings using the Timeline button, having found a longer bit of music. Imagine my surprise when I found that the Timeline did what I originally expected!! A two and a half minute presentation was there, not the four and a half minutes of the same presentation before I clicked the Timeline button!!!!!!!! Has anyone any idea what is going on here, 'cos I haven't the faintest! How can the same set of global options give two completely different timing on the same 66 slides before and after a button press???!!! Ken.