pwear

Salve! People who use and like PTE should ALL support adding sound modification as an OPTION to the interface - whether they will use/like it or not. It's not just about increasing PTE's client base - more seriously, it's about maintaining the users it already has. This is truly a matter of survival. PTE is a wonderful programme with one glaring omission - no ability to do even the most basic shaping of the audio dimension. The price gap between PTE and those programmes (wings, mobjects) that allow very flexible intuitive audio adjustments is not wide enough to stop keen AV makers from jumping across. That migration can kill off the best of products. My proof? Here's the admission that disqualifies me from all comment about PTE - EXCEPT IN THIS RARE CASE. I no longer use it. I paid the extra and I'm enjoying far more pleasureable AV making with mobjects. The single biggest difference is its handling of audio tracks. I would not have switched, with all the unlearning and re-learning that demanded, had PTE offered even a basic suite of audio modifications. The other threat to PTE's survival is the myth of its superior image quality. I am a pixel pedant who demands a lot of my camera, computer, monitor etc - and I can see no difference in basic image display, fades and movements between PTE and mobjects. Please note what I am saying - not that there IS no difference, but that I, a long-time photographer cannot see any. If I can't, and my photography students can't, the market-place reality is that not enough people can for it to matter. Therefore it will never be PTE's salvation. I am not trying to start controversy, that's a waste of everyone's time. I'm just suggesting that the 'better audio' issue crops up over and over in this forum because, whether we admit it or not, PTE's very survival may depend on the speedy implementation of a competitive audio interface. Vale!

I have to agree with Umberto, but we should realise what is really being asked for. Inevitably, it would seem to me, PTE would have to be completely redesigned along the multi-track timeline model used by Adobe Premier, mobjects, and other such systems. If you are going to allow the audio to be on several tracks, it then makes sense that the images too should be on split tracks so that transitions, fades and so on are able to be very finely tuned against each other, and the soundtracks. And all the key-framed effects which PTE constructs in a separate window should be applicable directly in the multi-track timeline as they are in Premier, Wings etc. I can't imagine how this could all be done without a huge amount of work that would have to be reflected in PTE's price, spoiling one of its chief attractions. It would also mean a lot of relearning for those who have devoted much time and effort to mastering the amazing powers of PTE. Having said that, once you have tried a multi-track audio workflow, it is quite hard to resign yourself back to PTE's very minimal audio options. It's also true that the price difference between PTE and some of its multi-track competitors is now about only US$50, so it may be that market forces will start to decide how PTE changes and adapts. peter

I hope the forum will allow me a moment's tolerance to ask if there is any bi-lingual, or very patient, AV worker who would like to collaborate on some English language notes for the German programme Mobjects? I use both PTE and Mobjects, but have a project which needs a lot of video inserts, for which the latter is better specified. I'm not talking about a 'bible', much of the programme is pretty intuitive and obvious. It's the tricks, workarounds and special features that are elusive when the German manual defies the best efforts of Babblefish etc. As far as I know nothing but a very basic guide exists at the moment. I would anticipate making anything we produce freely available to the AV community. Please contact me off-forum, and thanks again for the space. Peter

Fine images set to appropriate music dominate the world of AV. That’s what most of us try to produce. But we have to be careful about becoming smug and narrow-minded ourselves. The most powerful combination of still pictures, words and sounds I have ever seen was a French AV a few years ago that was photographed in one of the dreadful colonial prisons in South-East Asia and documented the atrocities there in the last years of the French occupation. I’m sure some of you have seen it. It was AV taken to a higher level than most of us practice, because it told a story, provoked a response, stirred passions so powerfully. It was also technically complex, but not as an end in itself. Most of us probably don’t have the time or dedication or inclination to tackle such heights in AV production, but should admit that the heights exist and applaud those who set out to scale them.

The original post raises some very good questions. Preferences seem to depend mainly on the kind of final product the av worker wants to produce. Those who have the skill and patience to do complex and highly creative manipulations of still images have a wonderful program in PicturesToExe. But what about those of us who work in the simplest format - a flow of pictures cut to music, with editing and effects used sparingly? I began using PTE years ago because it retained image crispness and produced such smooth crossfades. I could find no other software that combined these two crucial qualities – there was no contest. And I stuck with the program into version 5 because I welcomed ‘camera movements’, subtle pans and zooms, and again PTE gave an excellent end result. But then I started looking around for alternatives, and discovered more recent software that is faster and more flexible for the way I work. Here’s why. If you are mostly cutting pictures to music, the impact of the end result is hugely dependent on timing, on establishing the rhythm of your transitions and effects to match the mood and beat of your sound track. It follows that the most important manipulations are changing the order and duration of images, modifying their associated effects, and splitting and trimming audio tracks. This is about 90% of the work, once the pictures and music have been chosen and sequenced. The only user interface that does this well and quickly is the ‘timeline’ model, with thumbnails that can be placed or re-ordered by mouse movement, and then stretched or squeezed to change their duration. Zooms, pans and fades, associated with the thumbnails, must be just as easily configured by mouse movement, with every change able to be instantly previewed from any point in the prodution. The corresponding audio edits, splits and fades, must be quick to effect and must play back immediately. Most of this, PTE cannot do. I tossed up between Wings Platinum and mObjects Basic, choosing the latter because it was cheaper. Even though it doesn’t have an English language handbook, the design is so intuitive that I discovered most of what I needed to know in a couple of hours of fiddling around. The image quality of its output and effects is absolutely the equal of PTE. If PTE ever develops a genuine timeline interface, it will probably become the Photoshop of AV production, but until then it's like most other programs - very good at some things and less good at others. Another Peter

To name names, I think I was the person who bravely quoted you, Lin, and the forum was for users of Proshow - which I described as feature rich, but output poor. The criticisms you make about resolution are certainly true in that case, but not, I think, in all cases. I've tried mObjects and Wings Platinum and find them indistinguishable in 'raw' screen output to PTE. PTE may make a better video, I haven't compared that aspect. Thanks for your dedication to AV and this forum.

I'm another PTE user with the ATI problem. There is a workaround I am playing with that others similarly afflicted might like to try. My card is an ATI Raedon x1050. It works very well with my Benq 22 wide 16:10 monitor. Except for the colour switch when it runs a PTE project. If you use ATI's Catalyst Control Centre (I downloaded the latest one) you can get into its own colour correction window in advanced mode. This allows you to correct the cards colours for "Desktop" and "3D' mode. I chose the latter, assuming this is what the card defaults to when I run a PTE project and it throws away my lovely monitor profile. I played around with the gamma and contrast settings, while running a 10 second one-slide PTE show. I had already opened the original image in Photoshop to give me a standard to refer to. This slide was a rural late afternoon scene - but it always came out looking like midday when run in a PTE project. By warming the gamma setting, and increasing the contrast, I managed to get a replay that looked very close to my original image in Photoshop. (This obeys the monitor profile.) One thing that helps is that if you run your PTE show from the desktop there's a moment just before the desktop disappears when you can see the card switch off the monitor profile. If you keep adjusting the gamma, contrast, brightness until this transition makes very little difference to the last glimpse you get of your monitor, then you're getting close. I know this is a lot of nonsense to overcome a bad ATI blindness - but it's made my shows look much closer to the original images. Peter

Igor, I am a freelance journalist in Australia and I have prepared a magazine review of PTE v5 based on the recent betas. The article will appear in the August/September issue of Digital Photo & Design, Australia's best selling digital imaging magazine. They have a website - http://www.yaffa.com.au/digital/. It's very much an article designed to create some enthusiasm for AV in general, especially among former slide shooters ( people who like projection more than printing) many of whom have found digital a bit of a disappointment. It's very basic information with a few screenshots, but I think it is very positive - after all I've been using and enjoying PTE for a long time. I cannot post the review here, before publication, but I would be happy to send you an embargoed copy via email, if you would like to send me your email address. Please mail me - pwear@bigpond.net.au. Regards Peter

Patrick, This is such good work. It makes the point compellingly that the fundamental skill in AV making is that of cutting pictures to music. Until that is learned - no matter how good the images, music or effects - nothing. And Steve, note the order - pictures to music, not the other way around. Patrick's workflow is how it's done. I've spent hundreds of hours in film editing, and image assemblies like this one are almost always built on a bed of music which is laid down first. Can I just add a big thank-you to Patrick, Igor, and all our French, Russian and other colleagues who so patiently translate back and forth between their own language and English. In a better world, we would each write in our native tongue. Peter

I agree with thedom. I would be happier, in terms of PTE's long term survival and development, to pay more for my licence, right now, than to see the program compromised by shortage of capital and earnings. It's not just good value for money, it's far TOO GOOD value for money. That may seem a short term plus, but in any business venture it's a long term minus. Double the price, Igor, reinvest the additional income in R&D, and I doubt you'll lose a single customer. Maybe keep a budget version running, PTE-lite, for first-time customers to try? Good luck to you. Peter

I am trying, without much success, to make my pans and zooms in PTE 5 look ‘natural’, as professional camera operators do. The perspective correction option is certainly a step in the right direction,and I wondered if some discussion on the subject might help in the further development of this wonderful program. From my own TV experience I know that if I ask a good cameraman/woman to pull back from, say, an upstairs window to a wide shot that reveals an entire streetscape, there will be nothing linear about the resulting shot. It will start in close on the window, the zoom will begin very gradually, almost imperceptibly, and then it will speed up, and the tilt down will accelerate too, until the frame starts to fill with information – shops, cars, pedestrians – at which point the camera movements will slow to allow the viewer to take in the extra data. The hallmark of a good camera operator is that you never notice any of these transitions in tilt/zoom speed, especially the moment when the zoom stops – it seems to just drift to a halt. Think of a pan across landscape, an horizon maybe, and the same applies. It’s usually hard to notice when the movement started and finished, or whether the pan speed remained constant - almost always, it didn’t, it responded to the content as it passed by, dwelling here, hurrying there. When I try to mimic this in PTE, putting waypoints between the beginning and end of a movement, every change of zoom/pan speed is obvious. Perspective correction doesn’t help. It looks robotic. I have drowned in maths and swarms of keypoints trying to smooth it out, but to little effect. The eye is amazingly sensitive to changes from one linear speed to another. The end of any movement looks the worst, like the thump of a zoom lever running out of travel – a situation which causes camera operators to swear, and do it all over again. I notice that PTE presentations often dissolve into and out of animated images while they are still moving, and I wonder of this is the popular workaround. For those of us with limited skills, some kind of template or magic button that smoothes speed transitions, much as a fade smoothes a cut, would be super useful. It would probably have a dialogue just like that of any other effect. I’m sure it is only because PTE already does so much so well that we try to push its qualities to the limit. I also look forward to the day when I can provide some answers to this forum, rather than my current succession of durn’ fool questions. Peter

Many thanks to those who replied with their ideas. I'll think about them all. I guess that scanning to maximum resolution gives advantages when manipulating images in PTE. I started off doing most of my anticipated resizing in Photoshop, down to my screen res, but so much creativity available at the PTE stage is lost if you "run out of resolution" on a tight zoom or somesuch. It's always possible to rescan, but that begins to defeat the point of trying to timesave from the word go. This is a nice community, my thanks again. Peter

I'm sure this has been discussed elsewhere, so I probably only need a redirection. I want to build some fairly simple PTE shows from my slide collection. This means I have a mountain of slides to scan, about twenty years worth, and my scanner speed is very dependant on the resolution I choose. Any opinions as to a reasonable balance between the flexibility of 2900 dpi (my maximum) and the speed/ease of something closer to a screen res of 1024 X 768 (which I use as my computer default)? Trying to look to the future, I'm guessing the shows I make will need to satisfy likely increases in computer screen res, and high definition TV. I'm sure other folks have pondered this question and your thoughts, as always on this great forum, would be most appreciated. Peter