TonyFalla

I found what I think is a bug in PTE 5.1 today. I created a show the other day and today I wanted it in a different folder so I did a "Ceate Slide Show as". At the end it came up with a window saying "Bitmap Image is Invalid", I OK it but then found out that PTE was frozen. I had to close PTE using Task Manager. I realised after a while that it was my fault, the other day I did some tidying up and had move the show Icon into a different folder so the message was correct. I deleted the Icon and replaced it with the correct folder and had no problem then creating the show. Has anybody else experienced this problem? Tony Falla

Thanks for that I had missed seeing the Animated Menu Check Box, will have another go. Tony

I have recently upgraded my PTE to PTE Deluxe so that I could use Burn DVD-Video Disk. I have been experimenting and have encountered a problem with the menu I created. It is to do with the frame I am using on the menu. My first slide is a completely black slide not very suitable for the menu. I decided to use my Title Slide but find that when I play the DVD the frame selected keeps changing on the menu as though in a small loop of the actual presentation. Is it something to do with the fact that the slide I have selected is subject to Objects and Animation? I chose a time frame after the the animation was complete but the menu appears to show the remainder of this slide then the next slide, before returning to the title slide again. Am I missing something? Tony Falla

Hi Lin Thanks for that I hope what you say is correct and that in 5.2 you can synchronise to keypoints. As you say there are always ways of getting round problems but the easier it is to achieve an effect the more productive you can be. From your reply I can now see that to continue working the way I like to work is to split any objects and animations into as many steps as possible I can then synchronise at least the start and finish of each on the timeline. Keypoints in between I would have to note from the timeline where I want these to apply and then go into objects and animation and adjust the keypoints accordingly. Thanks again for the information Tony

Thanks Ken have already downloaded and printed the guide and using it to expand my knowledge. It is a very good reference Tony

Sorry if this topic has been raised before but I have been out of action for about 6 months and have only just started to explore PTE5 in any detail. One of the reasons I bought PTE several years ago was for its ability to synchronise slides and transitions with the soundtrack using the timeline and waveform. I may be missing something but it appears that I have lost this ability with PTE5 if I use “objects and animation”. If I use the timeline facility, after I have performed objects and animation then with the slide(s) that have undergone this process, I only get the start and finish point. There does not seem to be a way of displaying the waveform in “objects and animation” so that I can synchronise keypoints against the waveform. Have I missed something? A further point which I have been investigating to try to get over the problem above is recommendations for “objects and animation”. How much should you do in one slide? I can see that I could actually using this facility to create a whole slide show which would just in effect be one slide. It doesn’t seem to be a sensible option to me but got me thinking suppose I had a sequence I wanted of a slide with 4 images on it and what I wanted to do was zoom each individual image to full a full screen and then zoom back to 4 image screen. I could do this with one “objects and animation” or I could split it down into 8 “objects and animation”. The 8 would be 2 for each image, first zooming to full screen and second zooming back to 4 image screen. Apart from giving me more synch points on the timeline what are the other pros and cons of 1 slide against 8 slides?

Do you have to set something up to get this REPORT button as I do not have it on mine Tony Falla South Wales

Having exactly the same problem assume there is a problem with either the site or server.

Am I the only one still using PTE4? Since PTE5 Beta was introduced a lot of the discussion in this forum and the majority of new shows that appear either here or on Beechbrook Cottage are showing techniques that you will be able to use under PTE5. Whilst I can understand the enthusiasm for PTE5 and people wanting to experiment / test, yes I have played with it myself and love some of the features that will be provided, currently it is not a fully functioning piece of software and I cannot produce proper show with it. This was brought home to me by Jean-Pierre’s show of Versailles which as he said “is almost a show”. I don’t know when we are going to get the first full version of PTE5, but I presume that it could be several months before Igor and his team are able to release it. Are people not preparing new shows until PTE5 is available or are they like me still happily using PTE4 and will switch to PTE5 when it is available? Tony Falla South Wales

Am I doing something wrong or is it a problem that is already known about? I have been playing around with PTE5 over the past few days and have noticed I get a problem when I try to insert a slide. What I am finding happens is that the following slide reverts to the standard transition time and time on screen. If the following slide has a longer time on screen then when you run a preview the show goes to pot. So far it hasn't been a major problem as all that I have to do is reset the transition time and on screen time that I had previously and everyting works fine, including all objects and animation that has been set. As I am just experimenting at the moment I have only had to reset one or two slides, but it could become a problem if there were lots of slides to reset. Tony Falla South Wales

Igor Thanks for quick reply Tony Falla South W ales

I may have missed this as I am only just staring to play about with PTE5 but what is the size of the black rectangle when you enter objects & animation. With PTE4 I have set myself a standard that a full screen picture is 1024 x 768 pixels. Using this in PTE5 the width seems right but I get a thin black line above and below so it must be 1024 x 768+. Does anybody know the exact size before I start experimenting? Tony Falla South Wales

Igor Both run exactly the same on my PC with a GEForce FX 5700LE. The only problem I noticed a slight judder mid way through the two floating pictures moving acroos the screen Tony Falla South Wales

Just to complete this. After several e-mails between myself and my ISP, they have confirmed that they have a problem downloading from Dave Morton's site. Surprise, surprise however they are saying its not us it must be Dave's webserver or network. I have passed this information to Dave but it is one of those that I don't think much progress will be made Tony Falla South Wales

There are some beautiful images in this presentation but watching the entire show, I must admit towards the end I kept thinking, is this ever going to end! I think it would have done better as several shows as I found that it was confusing as to exactly what was happening there seemed to be 3 or 4 different things in the show. The people (volunteers) who were there, the various projects, (schools, hospitals,etc), scenery & wildlife of the area and the local people. I personnally would have added a few pieces of text to let the viewer know what was going on, eg painting the hospital at ?????, meeting the school cjhildren at ?????. I didn't even realise that it was Peru until half way through. Hope this is useful Tony Falla South Wales

Igor These are absolutly brilliant, both run at screen resolution of 1280 x 1024 using a NVIDIA GeForce FX5700, with no problems and no jerkiness. Cannot wait for the features to be available, ideas already tumbling around my head. Tony Falla South Wales

I have tried again this morning and failed again, so I tried another on Dave's site, Dorset's Jurassic Coast, and experienced exactly the same problem. I downloaded in both cases about 10MB before it stopped. I then went on to Beechbrook Cottage and downloaded Lions of The Massi Mara Kenya (32MB) with no problems, so I don't think it is a download limit. I pay my ISP extra to have unlimited downloads. The thing I did notice is that when downloading the Lions it seemed to download a lot faster than either of the 2 from Dave's site. I think that there may be a problem between the two ISP's, I will contact mine and see if they can let me know what is going on. Tony Falla South Wales

I don't think my problem is anything to do with WinZip, I have tried again tonight 4 times to download, twice from Beechbrook Cottage and twice from Dave Moore's own site. In all cases I get some of it downloaded, varies between 8 MB and 20 MB. Then, it is as though the connection is lost, nothing happens for a while, ie the download counter doesn't update, then it says Download Complete but I have only a portion of the 28MB. I have downloaded quite a few presentations from Beechbrook Cottage in the past week with no problems. Perhaps I am not paying the toll on the Severn Bridge!!!!! Tony Falla South Wales

I tired about 6 times to download but had the same problem the file would not open Windows telling me it was invalid or corrupt. I discovered that for some reason everytime I tried to download, I got Download Complete after about 8 / 9 MB, I think it is about 28 MB. At the the time I was going away for a couple of weeks so I forgot about it. Tony Falla South Wales

I tired about 6 times to download but had the same problem the file would not open Windows telling me it was invalid or corrupt. I discovered that for some reason everytime I tried to download, I got Download Complete after about 8 / 9 MB, I think it is about 28 MB. At the the time I was going away for a couple of weeks so I forgot about it. Tony Falla South Wales

Hi John I have gone throught the same myself and actually did a tutorial for my club on PTE and Audacity about 18 months ago. I am relatively inexperienced but I did a talk showing 4 or 5 of my AV shows including my initial one that was done in Powerpoint. I then went through building up a presentation with PTE, fades, titles, synchronising to the music, etc. I also included a short tutorial on Audacity which I use for producing my sound tracks. I now have more experience and am about to start to prepare a second talk on some of the more advanced techniques I now have learnt and used. I live in South Wales but if you would like to know more please contact me. Tony Falla Monmouth Photographic Club South Wales

This just proves how useful this forum is, it just saved me a lot of work. I run my PC under XP Professional with different user codes for different members of the family. A few months ago we had a problem and I had to reformat the hard disk and reinstall everything. Being fairly new to PTE I am still on a steep learning curve, so yesterday I decided that I would revisit some of the backed up sequences from before the reformat to see if they could be improved with my new knowledge. I had great problems doing this as when I had reinstalled I had changed my user code. When I tried to run PTE on the restored files it was looking for the images and music under the old user code, so it came up with a series of errors. To get it to run my old sequences I had to recreate my old user code and copy the backups under that user code to get the PTE to start up and find the images and music. I was wondering how I was going to transfer these sequences to my new user code and thought that I was going to have to replace the images one by one from the old user code to the new. Before I started that task I thought I would search the forum to see if it had any solutions and found this topic. I must admit it is another new learnt feature and now I have saved all my projects in a templates folder and have saved my self a lot of work Many thanks Tony Falla South Wales

I agree with Geoff the discussion is floundering on which forum it should appear in rather than the merits of his original suggestion. As this is an important topic why not post it to both forums so that maximum coverage is achieved, I would never have seen it if it was in the How to Make Videos section as it is an area I rarely visit Tony Falla South Wales

Thanks Igor I will look forward to the new version, anything that helps make it easier to recover when you make a mistake is always welcome. Tony, South Wales

I wasn't even aware that Jesus had a laptop / PC, just shows how useful this forum is for adding to my knowledge. Thanks for answering the question, Jeff, looking back I think I was in "panic" mode and pressed OK, I would most likely have been able to recover and only lost a few transition points, if I had Cancelled. One of the joys of life is that you live and learn. Tony, South Wales