Ian

!!!!!!! Ian

I think that Brian was actually referring to "reviewers" in general - ie responding to

Hi Dave My guess is the same. We'll just need to see how it pans out in practice (groan)... Some people will have seen "Prince Ice and the Time" by Erhard Hobrecker at last year's Supercircuit. This used the occasional zoom to great effect, with startlingly high image quality and zoom speed. I think it was a Wings Platinum file, but the flipside was that the filesize for a 10 minute show was something like 1Gb! Ian

Igor - another question? you said above: Would it also be possible for you to amend the options for "background" so that an image background could be set to "fill screen" as well as "tiled". This would be a very useful addition! Many thanks Ian

Zooming in/out of an image in GFX Composer I find that its only sharp when the size of the image matches its true resolution. During its zoom the quality is not a big issue as the eye is fooled to some extent by the "motion". The final static image has to be 1:1 however for it to be acceptable. If Igor is able to get PTE to re-sample the file during the zoom then it should stay sharp throughout. Continuous scaling like this would probably need a reasonably good 3D graphics card to run the file smoothly though. Ian

Hi Ron You're absolutely right about the filesizes - png files are much larger than jpgs, and don't offer any increase in visible quality. The one benefit is that they can have a transparant alpha channel. So if you have an object on a transparant background, you would see the shape of the object instead of the rectangle that a jpg would give. This means that any shape of button could be used for example, or maybe in an airshow sequence you could make a plane zoom in and then fly out of a scene. Jpgs are still the way to go, with the opportunuity of using the occasional png for a special effect. Ian

Hi Igor This will be very useful if the png files will be able to use the new pan/zoom facility against a static background. diolch yn fawr! Ian

I'm absolutely in favour of keeping things simple, which is why I always advise people to forget about the 72 dpi nonsense and just use a fixed pixel dimension. Using Photoshop, there is real purpose in using any combination of "dpi" and "inches" as it isn't really necessary. All this does is introduce an extra step into the workflow, and causes one of the biggest confusions that a new user can get trapped by! When you hit "Ctrl+0" in Photoshop it doesn't expand the image to 100% of its pixel size, but instead uses an arbitrary percentage in order to fill the available screen size within the Photoshop window. This will be depend on the monitor resolution and hence isn't fixed. The dpi setting doesn't affect this at all - try it and see! Double-clicking the zoom tool will change the image to 100% (ie 1:1 pixel display) and this is a more accurate representation of how a 1024x768 image will appear in the show. If I'm reading your previous post correctly, I do think we're talking at cross puropses! You mention using a 13"x9" image @300 dpi. By my reckoning this would have to be 3900 pixels wide by 2700 pixels high. Fine for printing, but way too big for acceptable screen display! I would always advocate making a second copy at 1024 pixel width for use in PTE, and then all of the confusing dpi and inch calculations simply don't apply! This topic has strayed well off the original post, but has sure opened up an interesting debate! On another note, I would tend to agree with Malcolm's point somewhere above that the introduction of zoom and pan may very well change all the rules! If the zoom facility actually uses available pixels, then it could vey well re-sample the jpg for more picture information as it zooms into the view. In this case, then it would make sense to use a larger image so that the picture stays sharp throughout its zoom. If on the other hand it simply enlarges the image by interpolation then the quality would suffer. I guess we'll all know in due course! Ian

The 72 dpi theory will run and run!! www.scantips.com has a lot of in-depth information about resolution, including a very thorough de-bunking of the myth of 72 dpi. Some years ago I did a precis of this for AV World magazine, and for info I've copied the article HERE. Ian

Barry - you are misunderstanding the fundamental concept of image display. Your monitor or projector has absolutely no understanding of ppi, dpi or whatever you want to call it. The key issue is the actual number of pixels present in the image. If your projector is XGA and throws out an image 1024 pixels wide, then this is the only fixed element it need to address. The number of pixels displayed "per inch" in this case will vary proportionately with the physical size of the image on the screen. If the horizontal width of this projected image is six feet, then in reality your image of 1024 pixels is actually being displayed at just 14.22 pixels per inch! As has been stated above and many times previously, the whole concept of dpi is only applicable for images sent to the printer, and so long as you have a fixed pixel dimension the dpi setting is totally irrelevent! There are just two settings that are important, pixel dimension and compression level. If you have a set 1024x768 dimension, then the only effect on file size is the compression setting. If your image is bigger than 1024x786, then an XGA projector will simply "hide" the extra pixels. On large images this can lead to the jaggy edges that degrade quality, so it is generally better to save the image in a size that the projector can display easily. Ian

Hi Ron If your mini disc recorder already has a USB port, you should be able to connect it to your PC and use the Sony Sonic Stage software to transfer the files. This also allows you to convert the files to standard audoi formats like .wav and .mp3. See Sony website for details and current downloads http://www.sonydigital-link.com/DNA/SonicS...cStage/SS31.asp Ian

This seemingly random issue has been reported before - see see here I've had it happen a couple of times with images that have been saved in identical format to others that remain visible! Then returning to the project a few days later all is back to normal. Ian

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Igor's suggestion of not allowing the named list of command files above seems emminently sensible and a good solution to the potential problem. The fact that no "malicious" user has created such an action button in the past doesn't mean that no-one will try in the future, so thanks to Tom95521 for thinking ahead! Ian

Hi Ron If you call up the on-screen menu, there is an option in the "View" setup to change from the default "normal" setting to either vertical flip, horizontal flip or both. Its on page 21 of the manual item B-29 Ian

I agree with Andrew - I prefer the previous method of how the timeline behaved when deleting transition points. The most useful new feature is the ability to draw around any number of points and move them in a block - this makes it far easier to insert new slides into the sequence. Keeping this new feature but with the old method of deleting points would be the best solution for the final version I think. Ian

Hi Cindy The aurorun file is a small text file that Windows looks for when it loads the CD Rom or DVD. If it finds one present, it performs the task that the file instructs it to do. It is quite simple to write the file using a text editor like Windows Notepad. Start a new file, then type in: [autorun] open=menu.exe icon=your-icon.ico where "menu.exe" is the name of the file that you want Windoes to automatically open, and "your-icon.ico" ia an icon file that you want the disk to show up as in My Computer (this is optional though, as you don't need to specify an icon). Then save the file as "autorun.inf" and copy it to your Cd or DVD. Ian

Hi Tom The best way is to use Movie Factory's menu facility. That way at the end of any sequence the display returns to the menu page to allow the user to choose a different sequence. Ian

Just noticed one chsnge in the Object editor that might be a bug. When using buttons etc to launch other exe files, the beta version doesn't recognise file names with spaces in them. Once you remove the spaces by re-naming the exe file it works okay. In much earlier versions of PTE you had to put "quotation" marks around the file name, so maybe this bit of code has reverted to an earlier version. Ian

Igor, the page turn effect is excellent! I'm just about to start a project based on a children's story book and this effect will be perfect!! Ian

From the look of the show it could be a Xatshow file with a Java applet handling the transitions? Ian

It sounds as if "Reflet" might be a Java applet that creates the illusion of a moving reflection by flipping the image and distorting it. If so, its not actually an animated gif so there wouldn't be any individual images to capture. The "speed" of the reflections are governed by the processor of the PC viewing the effect. If you look Java reflections there are some images I made several years ago on a much slower machine than I have now! They looked okay then, but now on a faster machine look more like a hurricane blowing up..... If Reflet IS a java applet, it might be that you'd need to make several 'distorted' images in Photoshop to use in a PTE animation. Ian

It is possible to put an exe file for PC's and a DVD folder on to the same disc. You'll also need to include an autorun file to point to the exe so that the computer launches this and ignores the DVD folder. When you burn your DVD, tick the option box that allows the DVD to be left open, so that more files can be added later. Then after it has been burned, just copy over the exe file and autorun file. When the disc is run on a domestic DVD player, it will ignore the autorun and exe files and launch the DVD movie instead. I have also found that the DVD versions do not look sharp when played on a PC, but are acceptable on a TV set. Because of this I never attempt to show DVD files full-screen and just play them in a player window. The reason that the DVD files might need to be played back on a PC could be do demo a fancy menu structure to the client. Its far more convenient to use a laptop to present to clients than to carry a DVD player around (unless you buy a portable player instead...) Ian

This is tricky to imagine! Some of my sequences I have set to 16:9 ratio anyway, so they have a black border top and bottom of a standard monitor but fill a widescreen TV. I'm not sure I understand exactly how the 4:3 limit would work - would it be possible to include this option in a future Beta release so that lots of users can have a go with it? Ian

I agree with your suggestion. Most shows seem to be made with 1024x768 images, and as tend to be projected at this size will fill the screen anyway, so some authors may 'forget' to tick the "fill screen" box and only realise when the show is seen on a higher resolution monitor. The best way to do it would be to keep the tickbox on the options page, and make the default setting "ticked". that way it would be simple to untick it if the author genuinely wanted a fixed size image irrespective of monitor resolution. Ian