jfa

Yes Please!!

Wonderful work Chris. thanks for posting. However it is hard to really appreciate it in this form, (images are far too small), any chance of a full screen PTE EXE file? If you need somewhere to post it mediafire offer a free file hosting service for any files smaller than 100Mg here-- http://www.mediafire.com/

Absolutely right Brian. Also with an external SSD running on USB3 many functions which are a little problematic now will be a breeze. Bring it on.

Eric I noticed in another thread you are moving to Win7 64bit OS. Audacity v1.2.x is not recommended for this OS, however v1.3.11(Beta) is. It has run without fault for me on that OS for 8 weeks now. So far so good. General For many years I used an audio editor called "CoolEdit" and found it excellent for all my audio needs, one off very reasonable price, great forum, good support much like PTE. It was then purchased by Adobe and became Audition and became very expensive with not a lot of improvements. So I continued to use CoolEdit until I moved to Win7 this year. CoolEdit was difficult to install, (not impossible), on Win7 so I looked around for something else. Goldwave did look very good but lost out because it only handled one track at a time. For now Audacity looks like the best choice until the next version of PTE is released with the expected audio adjustments then a review of my decision may be needed.

Barry No problems with that statement in general I agree. However in agreeing that some information should be provided by the author here, I was thinking along the lines of an author who is asking for comments/help to improve their AV. If we know the intended audience and/or the purpose of the AV it is possible to better target our assistance/comments. If the maker is not getting the technical side of the work right some technical details may be useful in pointing them in the right direction.

Mark - Peter You know the old saying--- "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink".

G'day Nick welcome to the world of PTE AVs 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. On the 8th of January I purchased a new PC loaded with Win7 Pro 64bit OS and shortly after loaded the latest version of PTE on it. From then till now I have spent approx. 10 hours working with PTE and have had no problems, so far so good. I have not used the O&A area in any depth but all else has been fine. The link Ken gave you is useful and shows a small handful of users are having problems somewhere in the Win7-PTE-?? area. I suspect there is a large number of users who like me are not. It would be useful for users like you and perhaps for the developers to know how many PTE users are running PTE on Win7 without problems. Maybe the moderators should consider a poll here along those lines.

Sad news indeed. I learnt much from him as we all did. He will be greatly missed. My thoughts are with his family and friends.

I like Marks original idea, particular posting who the intended audience is, (eg family, camera club, competition, everyone), and the purpose of the production, (tell a story, entertainment, preserve some history, work of art, display my photography, test a new idea, all of the above and so on).

Don I have been using the Topaz plug-in bundle for about 8 months now and think it was money well spent. The results I am getting may be achievable in Photoshop alone but I could not get them, (it maybe just my ability's in Photoshop), and I think even if I could get the same results the speed and ease of getting the end result with the Topaz interface is one of the big advantages of the plug-in. I would recommend it. MiKe Apologys for jumping in and answering a question directed to you. I was not aware you had a Topaz tutorial on your site, I am off to look at it now, thanks in advance.

Don For a first PTE AV you have done very well indeed. A novel and interesting idea done in a creative way with excellent sound effects/music and images. Well done. Did the show display properly on your screen? My screen is 1920x1080 and the 1920x1200 AV displayed with a small black area on the left & right of the screen which is to be expected with this screen and AV dimensions. I find this quite acceptable. Are the images sharp enough? Yes. Does the file size seem reasonable given the length of the show? Also, I was surprised that zipping the file only reduced its size by 2%. Is that to be expected? Yes I believe so. The file size, (zipped and unzipped), will not only be determined by the duration of the AV but also by the effects used in the show. Panning, zooming and other effects will increase the size. Did my attempt to provide navigation control to the viewer succeed? They all worked fine for me. Some authors indicate these controls are available at the start of the presentation, for anyone not familiar with PTE and its functions this may be a good idea. I did use them on the second viewing. Does the mixing of portrait and landscape orientations jar the viewer? This is one of my hobby horses but in this type of show and the way you presented them I found the orientation of the images OK. Did the Mac version work? Not a Mac person so cannot answer this. I'm sure others will. I'm looking forward to viewing more of your work.

Joanne In regard to PC housekeeping I think you are on the right track. My 30+ years in the IT and Telecommunications industry has taught me that a clean, lean machine is always a better PC. Like you I have recently moved to a new PC, my old one gave excellent service for almost 10 years due mostly to this practise. It was only pensioned off due to hardware problems. Windows 7 has been problem free so far for me too, I think Microsoft may have got it right for the third time with this operating system. Win 3.1, then NT, (XP was just a tarted up version of 2000 which was NT+), and now Windows 7. It is more than 12 months since it became available to the public to try and break so it should be mostly sorted by now. I think "if it ain't broke don't fix it" should be read in the very broad context. If something is broken I always try and mend it to a higher standard than it was before it broke. The thousands of hours we men spend in our sheds are not just spent fixing things we are improving things too. Some may not think so. LOL Yes we all should try and improve ourselves and the world in general Joanne. EDIT LATER:I also decided not to move Nero from my old PC to my new one. I had a number of problems with it and the 2 CD/DVD units inter-working.

Eric Another point -- I have 9 USB ports in use on my PC and 3 spare. Make sure you are happy with just 6.

Eric This is a good point, check it has high-speed SATA Revision 3.0 compatibility which is 6Gbps link speeds and twice the data transfer rates of SATA Revision 2.0. Also you should check if your motherboard has USB3, (with speeds of 4.8 Gbit/s maximum data rate. USB2 has a maximum data rate of only 480 megabits per second - USB3 is x10 faster than USB2), for future proofing. The solid-state HD will get cheaper and bigger in capacity. An external solid-state HD running on USB3 will be an excellent future choice. You didn't mention if your RAM is DDR3, try for it if you can and the fastest speed possible, I believe it is up to/or faster than 2000mbps now.

Andrew Very enjoyable AV. You had the honer of being the first outside AV to show on my new Philips 1920x1080 full HD monitor, and I must say it looked great. Thanks, and keep them coming.

Dave You are not the only one with this issue, for sometime I too felt this way. I came to terms with it by looking at the maker, (in this case Davy), as the producer of the AV, not the photographer or the musician but the producer. These are the three aspects of an AV if we can do all three wonderful but most of us only do two, photography and production and in Davys case here he has done just one. I wonder how we would feel about an AV where someone composed the music and then used googled images and got someone else to do the production, I'm not sure if that is just as valid, it is the production that is the heart of the AV after all. Well IMHO anyway. Davy Following on from the comment above you have done the production and done it brilliantly. I really enjoyed this AV, music perfect choice to match stunning images. You have convinced me this is a valid exercise. I think you should put your name on the AV as the producer. I look forward to the AVs you intend to produce with your photography.

Eric Should have put this in my last post - XP Professional 64bit OS will support 128Gb of RAM. Look here for info from Microsoft on XP Professional 64bit. http://www.microsoft...ploringx64.mspx EDIT 16:50 The 64bit version of XP Pro had a very limited set of drivers compared to that of Windows 7 64bit.

Eric As I understand it a 32bit system can effectively use a maximum of approximately 3.2Gb of RAM which means 4Gb is the physical limit. On a Windows 7 64bit system running a Core i7 Home Prem. its 16Gb, Pro. 128Gb and Ult. 192Gb. Have a look here for a good write-up on Win 7 64bit pros and cons including memory use. http://zone.ni.com/d...a/tut/p/id/5709

And put the cat out. Don"t forget to shoo the pigeons too.

Morturn I found your AV full of wonderful images matched well with the moody music which created a very evocative and therefor successful show. You have achieved you aim in my opinion.The only suggestion I could make for improvement is to fade the last image to black at the end of the AV. As it is the end is a little to abrupt after the quite mood set by the AV. Also maybe cut 1-2 seconds off the last image of the pots (if that is what they are called). Thanks for sharing.

Peter A good reason to change to Vista. But when it is broke "future proofing" is a good practical idea.Yes we have similar attitudes to technology, my camera is 6 years old and still gives good results, CRT 16:9 TV is 8 years old and when it breaks I will get a 16:9 LED big one, but not until then. Stereo sound system 16 years old and still sounds great. Car is 20 years old and still going well. No digital projector, don't need one. Mobile phone 3 years old they turned off the old network so was forced to get a new one. Like you I don't own an MP3 player, iPod, or any other "hand-held" gizmo. I don't have a Facebook, YouTube or Twitter account. I don't have a website either. We are the sort of people the markets hate. Costs nothing like that here if you shop around it is about A$870, I think about £350. Upgrades are about half that. Still dear but if you keep a version for many years and don't chase the latest it is worth it. Good luck with the fuse, remember safety first we would all miss you here.

Peter Sorry but I have to disagree with you on "future-proofing". Just this week I have upgraded my desktop system, this is the third PC I have owned over 23 years. The first running Windows 3.1 was replaced in 2001 running XP Pro and it has now been replaced with a high-end system running Windows 7 64bit which I expect to get at least 8-10 good working years from.I have had 2 laptops as well since 1997 and will continue to run XP on my current one. It does take a lot of research and a good understanding of your current and expected computing needs but it can be done if one resists the need to have the latest & greatest just for the sake of it. An old saying in the industry "Your computer still dose well what it did the day you purchased it no matter how old it is, so what is new that you need to do?" Baring hardware failure of course. At the moment the Australian $ is very high and a high-end system is remarkably cheap here this was part of what made me move now I had intended to upgrade later this year. Can I ask, (this is not meant to be a criticism but a genuine question) given your philosophy why you went from XP to Vista? Everyone I can verify from my system that there are 2 program folders that work this way, so far all software I have moved to my new system works fine, (only had 2 days testing though).Had to look around for drivers but so far my lazar printer, desk-top scanner and 2 external hard drives work fine. Also if you buy your own OS you get both the 32bit and 64bit version of win7 in the box as opposed to getting it preloaded on your new PC where you only get the disk of the loaded OS, 32bit or 64bit version. This means you can start with the 32bit OS and upgrade to 64bit when you feel confident. Eric My version of Office is 8 years old and loaded and ran fine on my 64bit OS! Garry True. My new system has 2 1Tb internal hard drives which currently sell for A$99 each the cost of storage is very very small and if you practise good housekeeping not a problem.

Jim Thanks for the heads-up found this site very useful. You can teach an old dog new tricks after all!

Peter I would have thought the answer was staring us in the face -- Photoshop! Some of the rumours about the forthcoming CS5, due out in April-May, are about a fully fledged 64bit version. Now that would be something as the biggest source of problems with Photoshop is the amount of memory available for it to use. Several versions of Windows 7, (professional and Premium), have a "XP mode" which I believe will run programs that will not run under windows 7 32 or 64bit.

Colin Your project on Maidstone was interesting and well presented and made me think our Camera Club here should attempt a similar project. It was very interesting to see how much has changed and yet stays familiar. I watched the entire 20min AV and found it very enjoyable and informative, I think you have achieved your aims. Well done. A few constructive suggestions if I may. While the commentary was at the right level I found the background music a little soft particularly when the voice had stopped. There was a little hum behind the voice and while it was not too distracting it would not be heard when the voice stopped if the background music was a touch higher in volume. As someone who is not familiar with this part of the world a location map at the start would be a good idea. Also the occasional use of a street map to show the viewer around Maidstone may also be useful. Thanks again for posting the interesting AV.