TonyFalla

Peter I am puzzled now because I can't reproduce the fault. I had been working on a project closed and saved it. I then opened another project and ran a preview to show my wife, didn't change anything in that project. When I tried to reopen the original project that is when I got the Floating Point error, I didn't, and should not have, receive a save message as I hadn't changed anything. After having cleared the fault as in my second post, I have just repeated the above and it worked without error!! I am beginning to think that this message is a catch all for any little glitch encountered. Tony

I have just had this happen again and I think I now know why it is happening. This time I even restarted my PC and couldn't clear it. Again I had opened up a project and run a preview, again when I tried to open a project I got the "Invalid Floating Point Message". After several attempts to clear I found that what I had to was create a new project then close, then open the project I had just previewed. I then saved this project, even though I had made no changes to it and then I found I could open any project I wanted without problem. Thinking back on it I think this is what I may have done originally. It appears therefore that the problem occurs under certain circumstances when you open a project without saving the current project. For the moment I will get round by trying to always remember to save Tony

I have seen several references to this "Invalid Floating Point Operation" that members get at various times and wondered if it had ever been explained as to the cause. Today I was using PTE 5.5 and had just done a preview of a project I was working on. I then went into "Open Recent Project" and got the "Invalid Floating Point Operation"message, clicked OK and then the thumbnails and the main screen went white. Tried to Open / Open Recent several times and still got the same message. Closed PTE and reopened and again Open / Open Recent "Invalid Floating Point Operation" message. I finally cleared it by starting a new Project, closing it and then opening the project I want. There must be a reason for this message so what is causing it? Tony

I have now solved the problem myself but don't understand how it happened in the first place! I was looking at each of the slides in O&A view and looked at a tab that I have not used before called "Common". On this I found a box called Mode which I noticed that some slides had "Fit to Slide" others had "Original", all the slides that were reducing in format had this set to "Original", I have now set them all to "Fit to Slide" and solved my problem. What I don't understand is what set this to the two different values to start with, as I say I have never used this particular tab before. Does anybody have an explanation?

I have obviously done something wrong but I cannot find what it is and would like some assistance. I created a tutorial using PTE, for which I loaded about 20 images each 1920 x 1200 pixels. In Project Options I set 90% of slide to show for main image for all images. With the exception of the first and last two images, under O&A I then moved all the main images just slightly left by the same amount and then added some navigation buttons at the side. I also used an arrow image that moved round the image to point out various things in the image for my tutorial. This works fine as a PTE exe file. My troubles started when I tried to convert this to a DVD, I noticed that as the process ran through the MPG2 conversion on the second and subsequent slides the main image was reduced to about 25% - 30% of its size. I let the process complete and looked at the MPG2 file that had been created. This reduction has not taken place on the first or the last two images but has taken place on the main images that have been moved slightly left. The arrow and navigation buttons have not been reduced in size. Closer inspection reveals that 2 of the screens where the image has been moved left do appear at their 90% size. I cannot be 100% certain but I believe that both of these images were ones I added to the sequence at a later stage when matching images to the soundtrack. Any suggestions on how I have managed to mess this up would be appreciated.

Thanks for the advice I have now tried both Original mode and Windowed Mode and both give the results I wanted so I now know how to proceed. My copy of Photoshop is a single licence and so rather than keep activating and deactivating I change my desktop display settings to 1024 x 768 while I do the screen dumps and then revert back to 1920 x 1200 to produce my final images and PTE. Thanks again for the advice Tony Falla

I am trying to produce some Photoshop Tutorials using PTE but have hit a bit of a quandary on screen resolution. I have 2 PC's available a laptop with a 1024 x 768 screen resolution and a desktop with a 1920 x 1200 monitor. What I have been doing is using Photoshop in full screen mode and then using "Screen Copy" to create my JPG files for use in PTE, also in Full Screen mode. What I have found is that if I use the desktop at 1920 x 1200 when I run the resultant PTE on the laptop the the wording on menus etc has lost clarity and is unreadable, I presume that pixels have been discarded to reduce the resolution. If I run photoshop in 1024 x 768 mode and create my JPG's this size, the resultant PTE is fine on the laptop and but is now blurry when I run it on the desktop, I presume because extra pixels have been added. I wondered if anybody else had done something like this and what they found as the best compromise resoltuion? Tony Falla

Well having slept on it for a couple of nights, and getting the OK from her who holds the purse strings, I have ordered myself a Zoom H2. So I will be starting to climb a new learning curve so expect some elimentary questions being asked on this forum in the near future. Thanks to everybody who contributed, the information provided gave me a lot of food for thought and helped immensely in making my decison. Tony Falla

Peter No problems running on my PC I thought the show was brilliant apart from the fact that I am now a little bit cross-eyed. What made you think of the idea in the first place? Did you start with the music or the Kaleidoscope? I love the way that images and the music are so well synchronised, did you find it difficult? One of my criticisms of PTE5 always has been that in the O&A window you cannot show the timeline and thus align keypoints accurately. Tony

When I first raised this question I thought I knew what I wanted to do but having followed the various links given to me and reading the replies posted I am beginning to wonder if I should rethink my position. Following the links provided by Ken and looking at other things, I at first thought was that all I needed to do was to buy a decent microphone. I then got to thinking that if I did that, in a few months time, would I be saying I wish I had bought a solid state recorder. To say the least I am now umming and aahing between the two options. Can I ask another question which may help, or hinder, my decision. If I were to go for a solid state recorder would I also need a microphone or are the built in ones adequate for most purposes? Peter I thought I knew how to use Audacity until I read your User Manual, I downloaded it yesterday and have read through it twice already noting things that I was not aware of. It is a fantastic guide, would you mind if I sent you a personal e-mail on a query I have long had with Audacity to see if there is a solution? PTE really keeps your brain working I find that every time I want to do something new I have another learning curve to climb. Tony

Thanks for the replies it is very interesting what people have to say. I think however that recorders costing £150+ cannot be justified for the use that I have in mind. I only intend to make voice recordings at home, I have no need for location recording, like Peter says I find it difficult enough carrying my camera and lenses without adding any more to the bag. How with a microphone do you eliminate background noise, do you position it well away from the PC with a long lead or is there some other trick? One of the reasons I am attracted to the use of Voice Generating Software is that it eliminates all need for voice training and regional accents. Has anybody any experience of these? Tony

Up to now with one exception I have not used any voice recordings in my AV’s. The one exception I used a very cheap microphone and Audacity to record one sentence, it was not totally successful but I did eventually after about 2 hours get a reasonable recording. I am now considering doing some more AV’s that will require voice but am not sure how I should tackle this as I want something quicker than my previous method. Thinking about it I can come up with 3 ways, there may be more, in which I can make a voice soundtrack. 1. As before using Audacity and a better microphone, which one would people recommend? The problem with this, as I see it, is how you eliminate background noise, my current PC has a very noisy cooling fan I can see difficulties with that and other noises in the room the PC is housed in. 2. Use some kind of recording device that I can speak into and record my voice sound track and then load on to the PC. I presume that such devices exist but have not investigated. Is this the way to go and if so what equipment would people recommend? 3. To use Voice Generation software where you type in some text and an audio track is produced. I have found an AT&T website that allows you to do this plus several vendors of packages on the Web. Is anybody using this method and if so what has been their experience and which package are they using? As you have most likely gathered I am still feeling my way on this subject and would be grateful for any advice that can be offered Tony Falla

Having started this topic the comments I have received have made me think about this issue and I have come to the conclusion that if the music is copyrighted then it is not right and is illegal for me to put it on to the net for people to download even if it is part of an AV. I suppose in some ways we are all artists and I know that suppose one of my photographs was accepted for an exhibtion, then I would be pleased. If however I found that the photograph put into the Exhibition was then put on the net so people could download I would not be pleased as I would have lost control of that photograph. Thinking of it in these terms make me appreciate the position the CD artists are in. Tony Falla South Wales

Thank you everybody for all your replies, I think that the one conclusion that I have reached is that this area is a minefield. I found Peter's reply very useful and I think (I also am not a lawyer) that his interpretation is correct. I already have an IAC/MCPS licence and I do not believe this covers me for putting AV’s on the net to be downloaded. The licence states that it is for Exhibition purposes either privately or in connection with a club or society. I think that the problem we have is on the term exhibition. When an AV is downloaded, we do not have control on who can download AV's and what use they will put them to after they have been downloaded. As Peter said these downloads are not even restricted to members anybody on the net could download an AV and then do what they like with it, even sell it on. I am sure that a lawyer would not see this as exhibition but as distribution. The only way that I think it would be possible to overcome this would be to have AV’s which were not downloadable but displayable, i.e. the AV would only run from the host but would not be copied. I do not know what the practicalities of doing this are and again even this may still breach the terms of IAC/MCPS licences and copyright laws. I think for the moment I will have to play it safe and only exhibit my AV’s locally where the control remains with me. Once again thanks to everybody who has replied. Tony South Wales

I have never uploaded any of my AV’s to Beechbrook Cottage or other similar sites because I have always obtained my music from copyright CD’s. My understanding of copyright laws is that it is illegal for me to distribute my AV’s this way, it is just the same as if I put the CD on to a website and allowed people to download tracks. I notice however that when I download AV Shows from Beechbrook Cottage and others that sometimes the music is attributed to an artist and I assume that this must again be copyright music. Is there some licence you can obtain which allows you to do this? I have an MCPS licence but that only allows me to show my AV’s to an audience. I know I can use non-copyright music but the music I want is never copyright free and my own musical talent is non-existent. Tony Falla South Wales, UK

If I understand what you are saying correctly, the black rectangle pixel size is determined by your monitor resolution and will use the maximum possible for the chosen aspect ratio. My monitor is a 1920 x 1200 thus the maximum 4:3 is 1600 x 1200, if I used 16:9 the maximum is 1920 x 1180, 15:10 1800 x1200, etc. That helps my understanding a lot, I was preparing some 4:3 images but only using 95% of Slide to show main images. I had a semi-transparent image moving over the top of this but found that when I previewed the effect the top image appeared around the edges. I therefore carefully made a 1600 x 1200 mask with a cut out of 973 x 730 (95% of 1024 x 768). It was when I found that this didn't work no matter whether I set the mode to original or fit to slide, I asked the question. It was fairly easily solved by zooming but I like to understand what is happening Tony

I may be missing something but as my shows are in 4:3 format I have always sized my pictures for the projector at 1024x768. I recently discovered however that in O&A the black rectangle is 1600 x 1200 pixels, so my carefully sized masked did not fit as I expected when I used Original Mode instead of Fit to Slide Mode. Not a major problem and I soon got around it. I was just wondering as I haven't used 16:9 or any of the other formats yet, is there a list of the pixel sizes for these various formats anywhere or is there the facility to set up the pixel size you require? Tony Falla

As a temporary measure this is absolutley brilliant. One of my reasons for buying PTE in the first place was the timeline facility and being able to synchronise transitions with the music. I was very disappointed when this facility was not included with O&A and see that this will be of great help Thanks again Tony Falla

I had exactly the same problem with VLC on the Tutorial Xara Xtreme, it would not play on Media Player, sound only no video. I tried to download using http://www.click-to-download.com/vlcmediap...ID=120997483512 Using this link you are asked to subscribe and play a fee. I found however that I had no problem getting a free download using http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ Both of which appear in PTE for Smarties pinned item. The tutorial worked with VLC when it wouldn't work with Media Player. Tony Falla

Unfortunately I have also seen this trend that if it is just music and slides then it is not a proper AV show, one of the speakers we had at our photographic club referred to them as being just Photo Harmony. I have very little experience with AV only starting when I first went to digital but to my mind an AV show covers a wide spectrum be it simply a set of images set to music or a set of images with a complicated soundtrack consisting of some combination of music, poetry, sounds, voice, etc. At the end of the day when I watch an AV it is whether or not I enjoyed the show and whether or not the show kept my interest. It is purely personal, I am sure there are shows that I don't like that others think are wonderful and vice versa. It will be a sad day if AV's start to get compartmentalised according to how it is made and what it contains. The writer of the note is going to miss out on a lot, if they are only going to watch AV Shows that are more than just "pictures and music".

Thanks for all the replies they have been most helpful and I can now see how I can improve the quality of the scans. I apologise for typing dpi when of course I meant ppi, the senility must be worse than I thought! I was however using this to reduce the file size of my images, I know I could have cropped the image to a fixed pixel size and could have achieved this by either the Crop Tool or the Image Size Tool and agree that the Crop tool is best for this if you want all your images to be the same pixel size. In this case however all of my scans were different sizes as I was scanning anything from a small headline to a half page article. I had scanned them all at 600ppi therefore it was sensible and convenient to reduce them using the ppi setting as I would then retain the relative size of each image. It so happens I produce all my shows in 4:3 format as that is the format for the projector I use and on top of that I personally dislike the 16:9 format. The articles on scanning that Ken informed me about I have found very useful and have shown that the poor resolution I am getting was due more to the way I was scanning than the degradation of the image due to resizing. I am going to try rescanning and see how I go from there. I do need the PNG transparency for the AV I have in mind. Once again many thanks for the help Tony Falla

I am trying to set up an AV Show, using 5.5 Beta, part of which I want to use O&A on some newspaper clippings which I have scanned in. The originals were scanned in at 600 dpi and saved as TIF files, after which I did some manipulation to get what I required and then saved as PNG files. I loaded these images into my O&A sequence and then had all sorts of problems, PTE crashed, Preview stopped responding, I then realised that the PNG images were very large 5 - 15 MB so it was a problem of my own making as they were still 600dpi. I then got my PNG images and in Photoshop used the image size command to reduce them to 100 dpi which gave me much more reasonable size images. I now find however that when I load the 100 dpi images they have lost definition and appear to be slightly blurred. Can anybody point me to any articles or offer advice on how to scan in newspaper clippings and create small PNG files without this loss of defintion? Tony Falla

I have found this subject very interesting as up to now I have not got a very sophisticated set up for the few times I have shown some of my AV's to an audience. All I have done is connected a couple of speakers into the headphone socket on my laptop and this has worked but the sound quality and volume is not the best Do these Aego M speakers connect in the same way? One person also mentions using an amplifier, can somebody point me in the direction of obtaining more information about setting up audio on a laptop to improve sound quality when showing AVs to an audience in a large hall. Regards Tony Falla

Beautiful show music and pictures fitted together perfectly and the introduction set the scene. I do have 2 questions:- 1. What is the music you used. 2. What is the white deposit left by the water in times of flood? Tony Falla

Sorry Jean-Claude it is not only older PC's I have a recent Quad Core QX6850 running Vista Ultimate, I can open the PDF file OK. Trying to run GUS produces the Access Violation and the only way to terminate is using Task Manager Regards Tony Falla