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Thanks, yes the tab function occurred to me just after I posted previously. I agree, one set of user preferences under View>Preferences with tabs for the various areas in PTE that the preferences relate too, a la photoshop preferences.

Dave and Peter I agree about the value of having a User Preference dialogue. My only comment is that all/most of the suggested settings concern the O&A area. I think there is a need for a User Preference dialogue button in the O&A screen and another General Preference dialogue in the main screen, (perhaps under the "View" menu), for the more general PTE settings.

Peter indeed you have it. The audio editor would remain an important tool for those that wish to do more complex audio work just as photoshop is still the tool for most image manipulation. My work-flow would be the opposite to yours where I would do the preparation of each audio file in my audio editor and then the timing and final mix in PTE using MP3s, this is just personal choice. The mix would be achieved with the creation of the EXE file just as now when there is a audio track attached to a slide and also audio on the whole project. Of course for just a basic music track positioning and fade in/out would be quick and simply done in PTE alone, and again I agree with you there is nothing wrong with that. Xaver I except you point.

Along with everyone else I must say "what a wonderful show" and I agree I think it is your best yet Dave. A perfect combination of intelligently used sound effect to add atmosphere, the right choice of music and some wonderful images with careful use of the PZR effects. Yes the prop could be taken with a slower shutter speed and this would be a nice touch, but all is not lost Dave I believe you could create the effect in photoshop if you wish. Trying to recreate total reality in an AV I think is a lost cause, if we want that we can buy a video camera. The still image combined with sounds gives an extra dimension to reality that I believe is the spice of our area of the AV spectrum. You have achieved that here very well. This one will go in my "Other Peoples AVs" folder in the "Best Ones" sub-folder. Thanks.

What I have requested in the past and am proposing now is not a Sound Editor built into PTE with all it’s functionality, but the addition of very basic audio file adjustments a few already exist in PTE but could be improved. An example of these would be-- -The ability to simply fade in/out a track with user specified timing. -Volume adjustment for the whole track or user specified part of the track. -The ability to add more than one sound file to a track so they play consecutively and join seamlessly. There are many ways of doing this in PTE, one would be to add a second audio track to the timeline and have the ability to manipulate the audio file waveform display just as we currently do with the images in the image track. Just some functions could be-- Adjust the transition timing on the audio file just as we do on the image, (that is fade in/out). Add and remove audio files to a track, and position them very accurately with a drag and drop, (again just as we do with images). This would have the added benefit of bringing all the audio functionally to the one area in PTE which would simplify the program for the user, not complicate it as some fear. We currently have the various audio adjustments spread throughout many different menus, fields and under different tabs which creates confusion for new users, (and some not so new), as can be witnessed by the repeated requests in the same audio areas on this forum and from my experience with users of PTE. Igor has indicated that these functions are possible and he will introduce them soon, which along with some rationalisation of the existing audio functions would be a vast improvement to PTE, in fact I see this now as the area where a small addition of functions would give PTE a large improvement for new and current users alike, keep PTE up-to-date with the competition and maintain its place as the best AV software available today. Remember the A in AV stands for Audio.

As standard practise I always install any update, new version, etc of any software to a different folder and leave the current working version intact. When I am happy with the newer version I can then delete or uninstall the older one. To many times I had updated a good working version and found it then was full of bugs, problems, would not work at all or had modifications that I did not like and was unable to revert to the original. (PTE rarely causes these problems). So I am happy with the installer working as is. Better to be safe than sorry.

I enjoyed watching your wedding presentation very much Mark. You showed you are a master at this very difficult art, I think there is no more difficult form of photography. As someone who, for a short period, photographed weddings I understand how difficult it can be. There were 2 cardinal rules - Know your equipment thoroughly, back-wards, inside-out and thoroughly again. - Take many, many, many images. It also helps greatly if you have an assistant who can direct people and organise props, locations and people while the photographer can concentrate on the photography. Not to sound sexist but I found females always made better assistants for this. Again very well done Mark it brought back lots of memories, thanks.

I hope that was a correspondence course Barry, or you will be doing a lot of expensive travelling from OZ in the next 2 years. LOL Now I am off to select a nice bottle of red wine to have with our dinner, guess I will be doing some Fluid Dynamics study of my own. Totally agree with you all, thanks Prof Lin.

Thanks for the very informative and useful tutorials Tom, much appreciated and well worth the download. I had to download the TSCC.exe file from here: http://www.techsmith.com/download/codecs.asp to make the video run, I thought I had all the codex etc I would ever need loaded. Link enclosed in-case anyone else has a problem. Error message was "cannot find 'vids:tscc' decompressor" Just a small hint for the future Tom the volume was very low on playback, maybe a little more on record next time. Then again it may be my ageing hearing going out the door. LOL

Ron, There was a bug in one of the Beta versions of v5.5 that caused a problem very similar to your description when "View > Timeline Options > AutoScroll - Style 2" was selected. Igor fixed this in a later beta, so if you haven't got the latest version I suggest you download it and give it a try. Here: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....c=8400&st=0 Peter, I too get the behaviour you describe but only when AutoScroll - Style 1 or 2 is selected. When Don't Use Auto-Scrolling is selected the timeline reacts correctly, (it does not jump). This may be a small hangover bug from the previous one I suspect. It certainly isn't the desired behaviour in the timeline for me and hopefully Igor will address it in the future.

Ian I just followed your steps in v5.5 and in v5.1. The result is as you described in v5.1 but in v5.5 it worked just fine as Peter found. If you upgrade to v5.5 I think your problem will be resolved. You can get the latest v5.5.1 here: http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....c=8400&st=0 By the way welcome to the world of PTE A-Vs and the user forum Ian, you will find lots of friendly help and advice here. This forum is a great source for advice, guidance and ideas. The sense of community here helps make working with PTE more creative and pleasurable. Have a look at Lin and Jeff's excellent PDF which you will find under the Tutorial section of the forum. It will save you hours. http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=7202 Also the official PTE Users Guide can be found here: http://www.wnsoft.com/apr/help.htm

G'day Sue and welcome to the world of PTE A-Vs and the user forum. You will find lots of friendly help and advice here. This forum is a great source for advice, guidance and ideas. The sense of community here helps make working with PTE more creative and pleasurable. Can I suggest you download Lin and Jeff's excellent "PTE USER GUIDE" PDF document, which you will find under the Tutorial section of the forum. It will answer all/most of your questions and save you hours. http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=7202 The official PTE Users Guide can be found here: http://www.wnsoft.com/apr/help.htm

Soundsnap is one I did not know about and looks like a very good source of sound effects files, thanks for sharing that with us John.

Jim, I would second Maureen's suggestion regarding deleting your email address from your previous post. When I was a new-boy to forums I too had a bad experience when I published my email address. In future if you wish someone to send you a email you should use the PM (Private Message) function on the forum to send them your email address. Or as a last resort you can publish your email address in the following format: Fred+INTERNET-net where +=@ and -=. as most trawling software tools used to find email address on forums etc will search for the @ symbol, so if you use any other symbol to substitute for these it is more safe, but not foolproof. Most people can workout the address from this code.

Yes I like it Tom. I had thoughts along similar lines but just had not got around to it, you have prompted me, thanks I will now.

A very enjoyable show Tom, well done. I will watch it again and am looking forward to the version you will post on Bills site. I must echo the comments about the high quality of your cutout work, particularly the penny farthing bike spokes. I will definitely be looking at your video on this technique when you post it. On the subject of the glasses I had a similar issue with one of my shows. The attached image was in the show and at most camera clubs someone would comment they were out of place whereas no one commented when the DIAP was shown elsewhere. It would appear we photographers are a fussy lot. Maybe we are just more forthcoming with our critique. I was happy with your image of the town crier and his specs.

Tom, Peter, it is so good to see other people do these thing too, I don't feel so lonely now. JEB summed it up very well in another thread on the forum when he said-- Old age doesn't come on its own !!!

Forgot to say in last post---- Great waterfall Lin, thanks again.

I also like to keep my audio files as WAV until I have finished manipulation then converting to MP3 for the final use. The same principal as working in RAW or PSD and converting the final image to JPEG for use in the slideshow.

Well put Lin.

Tested your file on 3 different systems with the following results: 1. Win Xp SP2+ CPU Intel P4 2.27 GHz 8 kilobyte primary memory cache, 512 kilobyte secondary memory cache. 2048 Megabytes Installed Memory. Nvidia GeForce FX5700 256 VRAM VideoMode 1280 by 960 pixels, 75 Hertz. DirectX 9.0c Same results as Jim with his 6200. There was a small bump when the previous object started and another when it finished its transition, still very watchable. 2. Vista SP1+ CPU Intel P4 3.40GHz 4096 Megabytes Installed Memory nVidia GeForce 8400GT VideoMode 1280 by 1040 px, 90Hz DirectX 9.0c More pronounced bumps than system 1. I would not distribute the show when I saw this level of performance. 3. Laptop Fujitsu Life-book Win Xp SP2+ CPU Intel Pentium M 1.73 GHz 64 kilobyte primary memory cache, 2048 kilobyte secondary memory cache. 512 Megabytes Installed Memory. ATI Mobility Radeon X300 64 VRAM VideoMode 1280 by 800 pixels, 60 Hertz. DirectX 9.0c Performance was somewhere between 1 and 2, closer to 1, still acceptable, just. From this I would say the issue is a mixture of the quality of the graphics card and high level of PZR effects combined with the operating system used, XP/Vista. Which operating system are you using David?

Great tutorials Lin and very timely too. Thanks for them. Just this week I give a talk to a group of photographers starting, (about 6 months experience), in the area of AV Digital Image and Audio Presentation, DIAP and PTE. I now use my H2 recorder to record a session like this so I can review and improve my performance, and I found of the 18 questions I had 9 were on the audio area of PTE. This would be the norm I experience from not just beginners in PTE but more advanced users as well. With the addition of basic sound editing in the next version of PTE I hope Igor will be able to bring together the existing and new audio functionality and make working with sound in PTE a little more user friendly and intuitive. EDIT 17:35 to correct spelling.

Colin when working in many different applications over time I have often saved my work and at some point latter realised I am on the wrong path, so wishing to return to an earlier state I pull up the file and find that point is lost forever as the save has overwritten the file at a point past the one I wish to work on. Save overwrites the file, (unless "save as" is used). Auto-save saves to a new file at regular points, thus leaving the state of the work intact at that time. The very reason an auto-save function is required and really should exist in all good software applications. Another halfpennies worth, making tuppence halfpenny in total. Peter you have made some very good suggestions, I will think them over and see if there is anything else need and comment back a little latter.

All of the above Igor, best wishers. Forget about using Proshow for making a show, we do not want you to loose all the serenity you will gain from your holiday getting frustrated by an inferior product. Have a good one.

Tom, I just watched your "Haworth 1940-2008" show and was very impressed, you have certainly spent a lot of time on it, well done. The yellow lines don't mean much to us here on the other side of the world, I would not have noticed them if it had not been mentioned in another post. As for the German solders, not sure, I think I agree with Barry. Great titles, music and quality images put together in a creative way to convey a message and tell a story, thanks for sharing and I hope to see more of your work.