JudyKay

I love it!! What a wonderful place not only for a bunch of guys..but for a family and children to go sit on a blanket in the sunshine, swat mosquitoes and eat cheese and crackers. Maybe we should think about categories of slide shows. You know? There are the... 1. Lovely artistic shows. 2. Creative shows / animations / etc. 3. Shows that tell a story from real life (Like this one) --and let us peak into another person's world in a realistic way 4. Teaching shows 5. Nature Shows 6. Weddings /special events etc. Perhaps we could do even better at encouraging people at all levels to openly share what they do. Anyway, Thank you Mr. Lux...I LOVE this slide show I can smell the damp good earth, hear a stream trickling among the willows and feel the ice cold snow water trickling down my throat. I imagine rolling in a thistle patch and nibbling wild onions. I imagine sipping pennyroyal tea while singing songs around a campfire.... Fish are jumping somewhere while a doe with 2 fawns wades into the water. A marmot with big buck teeth chirps earnestly at us oblivious to the eagle souring overhead in the sun. Rubbing the soggy bruises on my back side from sliding down icy snow slopes and tangling with a bush uprooted by an avalanche. . ...sigh... Thanks again for sharing. jk

You can use a text editor and... 1. copy/paste/adjust Slide#'s. 2. Set opt_slidescount= to the highest number slide. This assumes you can figure out the .pte file. It even easy for me so you can do it! There are some REALLY SMART Programmers on this forum. I wonder how long it will be till someone just makes a little merge program that will do that? jk

Ken: The Valentine show is really only 7 images duplicated 8 times (total 56 images) to fit a midi file in length. Every 3-5 slides I added some random effects to keep it from being overwhelmingly boring. It had to fit the midi length and I wanted it to be under 1 mb for Email. More time and more imagination always help...but I already invested several hours making those Valentines and effects! Xaver: For the Kiosk--yes your method would work is many cases. Sometimes I want the music to be synchronized--for example it would have been nice to better match the music rhythm with a spinning/beating Valentine heart. Thanks to you all and Happy Valentine's Day! jk

This question may be related.... I sometimes make a show run repeatedly as a kiosk. Is there a way to add a sound track, such as a short loop, so that the show can run continuously without having to restart the soundtrack with the first image? Presently I have to tinker with the sound to make it exactly fit the length of pictures. jk

Here are some pictures mostly of children taken across China. The show is a bit long--almost 14 minutes. Hope you enjoy it. http://www.mediafire.com/?8jznyelxzjg JK

I am trying to post at Beechbrook, but am having trouble (due to a bamboo firewall)--so here is my Valentine to everyone. Updated Link...fixes a few minor problems: http://www.mediafire.com/?cne0usnynyz jk

I suspect there was more than one v5.1, however if you reinstall the latest v5.1 download that should fix it. Also note that if you happen to install 4.48 or 4.49 over the top of v5.1, the program defaults to the most recent installation. Just reinstall 5.1 again. jk

You are all immensely helpful. Its like having lots of pockets and walking around in a diamond mine. Thanks! jk

Yes, like being young and free and running barefoot in the soft dew-covered grass and looking way up to feed a horse a sugar cube and hearing a tractor out plowing early in the morning. Your pictures are beautiful. My favorite transition is about 1/2 way, and transitions from one field to another field with two horses....the horizon lines up between the two images...I just liked it really well. Here is a tiny thing hardly worth mentioning, but the small black gap (frame) at the top of some of the pictures was a slightly different size than others. Very careful zoom by hand might fix it. Sometimes I wish there was a "cover object" option--perhaps with % of coverage. Then you could create a frame and place unevenly dimensioned images in the frame very quickly and accurately. Now we can only carefully zoom each image and hope we get it right....or does someone have that figured out? jk

Brian, How do you get from analog to digital? From your cassette to your computer? My best attempts introduce hummmmmmzzzzzz. jk

Thank You. I am very impressed. This is 1) Very useful 2) Very instructional. Some of us like to do things the hard way (like make cake scratch--or image shows from scratch), but sometimes all we want is a quick, quality way to present pictures to friends which are not necessarily art exhibit masterpieces -- or a quick tutorial about something we simply forgot how to do. This is the answer to both. Can't wait to see what you will think of next! jk

Absolutely beautiful, Peter. I like the way you see and think about what you see. It helps me see more. This is one to keep and show my family! Thank You, jk

Thank You! This really helped me. jk

SCJ, I believe that that you waited a long time to get technical assistance. Still I'd like to offer this reassurance, waiting a long time is by far the exception. My experience has been entirely different. I have never had to wait more than a few hours to have a question answered completely and to my satisfaction. I think you will find the same here. Maybe you experienced an anomaly, but the team of people here are like no other place I have ever seen. Be patient and you will be well rewarded--that is what I have to offer you jk

Thanks everyone. This is a goldmine of good info for me. jk

Jerry, If you don't need PZM, you might get slightly better results with V4.49. As a side note: I notice that (V5.1) under Projects Objects | Effects there is no "Quick (No Transition)" option. If you de-select "Enable Transitions" you get the same result as "Quick (No Transition)." Another method in some cases is to select the slides you want, and then choose "Customize Slide." From there you can select "Quick (No Transition)" and the result will affect all selected slides. jk

Thanks you guys. Is there a way to do this to increase quality without spending quite so much money? A digital recorder is US $300+, a cheap preamp is $200+, a cheap good mic is $100. I don't need soundroom quality, I just want a little better quality. Now don't laugh... Actually I have a couple decent mics. but no preamp. I do have a karaoke amplifier, but it has no digital output to connect to my computer--there are no dumb questions right--can I use it as a preamp somehow? It does have "line out," but if I connect that to "line in" on my sound card--nothing happens. jk

So, what do you professionals do? Leave everything in RAW? Convert to some other format? Does anyone use Dng conversion? What format do you save in? Do you just "trust" Lightroom for the foreseeable future? (I don't). Does anyone use Canon's Digital Photo Professional? Don't laugh, but I am honestly impressed with Picassa's capability when I want to browse quickly, and have been quite impressed when it did a better "automatic" job of adjusting a picture than my 5 minutes of manual labor. Presently I tinker with pictures using Lightroom, then keep the RAW images and jpg's, and occasionally tiff's. The rare really good pictures may get tinkered with in PS. So there are original images, adjusted images, special images and back up copies, and you know how much hard drive space that consumes? There's got to be a better way! Can anyone suggest a workflow for the future?

Thank you Alan. I really liked it. You put a lot of work into the show and it is very good. The pictures are very interesting. Here is a question I am aching to ask...why was that man standing on top that big gold ball? How did he get there? jk

Thank you Lin. I understand your "Examples." That solves my problem for some situations. Thanks! In other cases, I think rotating on the z axis--like The Dom's "Photo Pile" will work acceptably for now. In his Envelope demo, he uses a shadow effect which further contributes to the illusion of 3D distortion/perspective. I had thought he was using some kind of free transform, but after using my space bar to stop and go, realized it is simply rotation and shadow that cause the illusion. I can do that! Thanks jk

I'll be right in line waiting to study them. Simple cut and paste, fade out, etc...that stuff is easy. The whole business of quality recording, applying filters (high/low pass) and compressors is important but eludes me. How to eliminate hiss and hummmzzzz without producing robot results; Aligning multiple tracks, knowing what settings to use for adequate quality (Hz, bits, etc)...all that stuff eludes me. jk

How can I create an effect so that a vertical zoom of a "flat" object seems 3D as it appears to rise from horizontal to vertical? I imagine a free transform where the top of a rectangle is narrower than the bottom to create perspective. The transformation would have to be able to zoom as well. I don't think such a free transform is yet possible, but is there an another way? Seems like this had been discussed before, but I haven't found a solution. jk

Thanks Barry. I thought I responded to this a day or so ago, but I guess it didn't "stick." Anyway, You helped me think differently--something clicked in my brain. Generally I don't like to oversharpen pictures because those teensy, contrasty, noise dots are so annoying. But....in AV, they matter less. Less than transitioning from a soft image to a sharp image that never gets sharp. I get it! The hardest part of all is throwing out perfectly good pictures...but your encouragement helps. Thanks again, jk

I agree with everybody above. One thing I might add is that the rich colors were something I could almost taste. With every picture (including the anomalous fire picture) I could smell it! Add that to the pretty music and wonderful photographic images and it is perfect! Something else: It is so....Kansas. You capture the essence of rural KS very well. Thanks for sharing. jk

Hi BB, You are amazing!! The subtle colors in the stone define the meaning of "petina." They also make them alive and cause them to transcend time. I would love to know the story of that old Abbey--if you have a minute to spare PHOTOGRAPHY/GRAPHICS (Out of 5) Easy 5 SOUNDTRACK (Out of 5) Perfect 5 TIMING (Out of 5) 5 PTE MASTERY (Out of 5) No show off stuff, just done right - 5 WATCHABILITY - Couldn't finish / Watched Once / Would watch again / Would watch many times OVERALL SCORE AND COMMENT (Out of 20) 20 I have a question: In another post you talked about fading from soft to sharp--and that if you do that you should really "sharpen" the picture? Can you elaborate a tiny bit? Do you actually make a one picture soft and another that is over-sharp (or very sharp)--if so, how much? jk