Peter S

I have been trying to develop a tutorial to teach people the basics of croquet. I want to use a mix of images from my digital SLR with diagrams. I produced the diagrams in Photoshop using shapes such as filled circles and rectangles and lines with and without arrow heads. These look perfectly good on my PC but as soon as I burn to DVD the diagram quality deteriorates very noticeably. The colours seem to bleed into the background and all the lines loose sharpness. I would be interested to know if anyone else has any expirence with this or can suggest how I might improve the quality of the diagrams on the DVD. The digital images are fine with just the degree of softening you would expect. Peter

Since seeing the discussion on "Save for web" in Photoshop I have been experimenting and found I can choose to save PNGs as PNG-8 or PNG-24. PNG-8 seems to produce very jagged outlines and I assume that when using the normal Save as function in Photoshop it chooses 24 automatically. The PNG-8 files are about half the size of the PNG-24 but I can't see much use for them with the quality I seem to be getting. I would be interested to know if anyone can suggest the best setting in Save for Web for PNGs. Peter

Hi Morasoft, I apologise if my comment offended you. That was not my intention in any way. I really did enjoy your work and I'm sure you put a lot of thought into it. Please also see my reply to Ron. It is possible to put across a serious message with humour but it is VERY difficult to achieve this. I may have missed the point but I thought this was just a very good entertaining AV. Peter

Well Ron, I was amused by Barry Beckham's comment that he would not come in out of the rain to watch many "serious" AVs. I would have come in out of the rain to watch this as I thought it was great fun. I guess it all depends how you choose to interpret "serious". It was not intended as criticism just my little joke. Peter

Lin, This is an excellent effect. Panos is certainly prolific and the number of downloads on his site is an indication of how well his work is regarded. It's good to see the results of your collaborative work. Thanks. Peter

Dom, Meilleurs voeux pour votre anniversaire. May your new ideas for PTE this year exceed the candles on your cake. Peter

Hi Ralph, Thanks this looks like good advice. I do have the full edition of Nero and I have been testing the menu creation in Nero Vision 4. It seemed to offer lots of options for creating attractive menus with a wide variety of installed templates, backgrounds etc and the facility to use your own backgrounds .... but VB will probably be better all round when Igor has finished its development. I may well be better off just using Nero Burning Rom and not getting too involved with Nero Vision. Igor sent me a trial burner that does burn all formats, with one exception, so the burner team seem well on the way to a solution. It is obviously only a trial programme as it requires the video files to be put on the root of the C drive but it works. Peter

Hi Morasoft, Most enjoyable. Not a "serious" AV but great fun coupled with some very colourful images. Congratulations. Peter

Hi Al, I had found the "Return to menu" option and that works fine. What I wanted to allow the viewer to do was stop during one part of a multi part show and then move to another part. I couldn't crack this but this evening I discovered that if I hit the players menu key when a section is playing, rather than the stop key, it does stop and return to the root menu. So I'm happy with this. I have also tried with Chapters on and off but this does not seem to have any impact. As far as I could see in Nero it was only a means of splitting one long video clip and I dont understand its function in VB. Have you find a use for this yet? Thank goodness for RWs. Peter

I have managed to burn (still DVD+RW only) using Video Builder with the PTE 5 menu creation and burner. I have also burned DVDs (after some help) using the VOB files and Nero with a Nero created menu. What I have not managed is burning a DVD so that a viewer can stop part 1, go back to a menu and start part 2, 3 or 4. I have tried and tried but failed so far. Can anyone please put me on the right track with either Video Builder or Nero? I am also puzzled as to how I can burn using Nero while I utilise a menu created in Video Builder. The Video Builder menu creation is terrific - it is so easy but the burning process is still a problem with discs that Nero has no problem with. I found a good tutorial on burning with Nero at http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/Ner...uide_print.html I still did not manage to create the navigable menu inspite of this Peter

Hi Maureen, Intrigued by your post I thought I would try "Save for web". Useful, I thought as I was just about to try to put two images on my (first) newly created web site. http://dorsetimages.googlepages.com/imagesofdorset I only set this up so that I could get some help from the experts on "rolling balls". Having achieved this it had served its original purpose and I thought I would take the next step. I was surprised when the site reported back "uploading your picture but most browsers will not be able to view it! Mine did not so I uploaded a jpeg. This was fine. So what is the purpose of the "Save for Web" in Photoshop? Have I done something wrong? I did notice you talked about "Save TO web" is that something different? Sorry this seems like lots of questions Peter

So I went away and ran some test of my own. I have a 19" monitor at 1280 x 1024. I cropped a picture originally 3072 x 2048 180 ppi tp 1280 x 1024 with ppi se to 72, then, 89 (from the Wantage site), then 9 and then blank. I looked after the blank crop and it had reverted to 180ppi. I saved them all as JPEGS at quality 6. I have always used this setting as it was in all the tutorials I mentioned in my last post as giving a sensible file size. The files were all the same size 366 KB. I added some text to the images after they had been cropped. I added text to the images before cropping and recropped them. The text increased the file size to 382 KB. I saved another copy, with the text, at JPEG quality 12 and it increased the file size to 1,485 KB. There was nothing to choose between any of them when I looked at them as a PTE show. I could not even see any difference between the quality 6 and quality 12 JPEG. I tried to convince myself I could but in reality if there was a difference it was very little. Now I'm convinced. Peter

Hi Ken, I have been faithfully following the advice given in every tutorial that I have seen in magazines and on CD or DVD and they have nearly all said crop to 1024 x 768 at 72 ppi. Some of these written or produced by people whose work I have really admired. Now I learn they were all wrong! You have shattered one of my longest held AV beliefs. I could be but I've learnt something new again today so I am actually Any other myths you'd like to explode? Peter

Jean-Pierre, This work, the Hellicopter Rotor and many previous demos have made me realise how important it is to understand the use of rectangles and the parent child relationship if you wish to make complex movements. It may not be widely read but I am sure someone could write a whole book on this fascinating topic! When it is explained it all seems logical. Seeing the solution in the first place does however take a special type of thinking. I don't know how you do it but am very pleased that you do and that you are so generous in sharing your work with everyone. Thanks once again. Vous etes tres gentil. (Sorry no accents on my keyboard!)

Jean-Pierre, That is amazing. I really did think the effect you achieved on the lowest ball was impossible. I might have guessed that there is no such word in your dictionary. Could you please post the PTE file with an explanation. I would really love to know how you managed it and it seems quite quickly. Thanks very much for this and your many other insights. Peter

Hi Al, Thanks for your simulation. I think it is probably as good as is reasonable without vast numbers of key points. I think Lin's explanation is clear as to why this is such a difficult nut to crack. How did you achieve your effect? You seem to have put three balls in a frame, displaced them by a very small amount and then switched opacities on and off. Is that correct? I am sorry that you often end up right on the lip and they just refuse to drop! MOst annoying. Peter Thanks also to all the other contributors.

Hi Lin , Dom, It's not quite what I was after. These balls are spinning rather than rolling. I hope that makes sense. If you look down on a ball from above and imagine a red arrow on the top of the ball pointing in the direction of travel and a second yellow arrow following it but hidden underneath the ball. As the ball rolled forwards you would see the red arrow disappear in the direction of travel and the yellow arrow appear and this would keep repeating. I could show this in slow motion by a series of images produced in Photoshop if that would help but... I have a feeling that this is impossible to create in PTE as the rotation is in the "wrong" plane. I have however seen many other things on this forum that I would not have thought posible. Peter

Ralph, Dom, Thanks for your interest. Success - I think! With uploading files to the web at least. I have now created a googlepages web site that I think should allow you to see what my "rolling balls" question is all about. Go to http://dorsetimages.googlepages.com/ THIS DOES NOT WORK IF YOU TYPE IN www.<site name>. It has to be as shown above. I have set this site up specifically to allow me to make files available in this forum and have started with something very small and I hope it works. Although I use PTE primarily for slide shows this something differentand is perhaps an application for which PTE was not intended. I have not however seen anything else that has the flexibility to include these types of diagrams with images from a digital camera. It would be good if there is a way to simulate the rolling ball but so far I have not found anything convincing. I am hoping someone can come up with an imaginative solution. Peter

Hi Lin, I tried this in both Firefox 2 and IE6 and it worked fine in both. Interesting as I couldn't get your previous version to open in IE6. Peter

I am not sure if this is relevant but I was advised recently to go back to IE6 as there had been lots of problems reported that had been tracked to recent IE7 installations. When running Lin's swf test I also noticed that IE6 was much slower than Firefox at loading the forum pages. Peter

Hi Al, Very nice effect. With a bit more time you could probably create a Christmas tree with sparkling lights. Add a couple of Lin's snow globes and we could have a novel PTE Christmas at the end of this year. There's so much fun to be had with PTE I can't imagine how folk find the time if they have to work as well! Peter

Al, I do think Daniel has a point here. The problem is that it is probably impossible to unravel at this stage but... If there had been an entirely separate thread, or maybe more than one that included everything connected with the beta development this would have helped some people. Those who have no interest in the development would have been saved the trouble of looking through all the posts that relate to v5. They would just be able to view all the comments and latest shows developed using 4.8. This may also made it a bit easier for newcomers to get to grips with 4.8. Perhaps next time Peter

Lin, As others I found it ran perfectly in Firefox and instantaneously. IE6 I could get nothing. Saved to hard drive and it opened perfectly in IrfanView. There are no significant differences that I could see in the browser settings. The picture quality was identical in both IrfanView and Firefox. It's certainly a nice effect. Peter

Hi Dom and Hawk, I'm currently suffering from a severe case of frustration. My folders in briefcase are set to Private and stubbornly refuse to change to anything else. I keep going round and round different screens with occasional "no access" messages and cannot make the changes I need to. The instructions look simple enough but I can't get it to work for me. Peter

Hi Hawk, Yes it was but I don't think it is anymore. Briefcase takes a bit of getting used to I guess. Hopefully it will be possible to use this link to download the very small file I have used to illustrate the type of thing I was trying to achieve. I have a feeling it may be too complex to be worthwhile as I will be producing quite a lot of different diagrams. I tried to see what the movement looked like with small balls that would be used for movement across an entire lawn and larger balls for shorter movements. The 3D transform certainly looked better than the flat disc to my eyes but still rather unrealistic. Here is the link. (Hopefully) http://uk.briefcase.yahoo.com/bc/dorset_co...=bc&.view=l Peter