Lin Evans

You're right - it indeed does work that way. That could be very confusing. Saving, closing and reopening between changing the durations and the effects seem to put things in proper order, but it seems there should be a way to program around this or it "could" get complicated. Best regards, Lin

I don't believe it's working correctly guys. If you place two slides into the slide list, set the custom time for each to 10 seconds and set the transition to "quick, no transition," the total display time "should" be 20 seconds. Instead the total display time is 18 seconds. Best regards, Lin

Hi Jim, Could you be more specific about "can't get VideoBuilder to work?" What happens - error messages, etc., and when? Best regards, Lin

Hi Jim, Yes, it's actually easy to do this. It can be a little confusing but I'll explain. First, the "start time" for music is how far into the music "selection" you want your sound to begin. For example, if you wanted to start a three minute song at two minutes into the song, then the "start" time would be two minutes. The "offset" is what you want to deal with. Go to "Project Options" - "Music" - "Customize" and place your 4 minutes 18 seconds into the "offset," leave the start time alone and you will have what you are looking for. Best regards, Lin

Hi, All these are ways you can do it. Beechbrook will be easiest because you can just zip up your executable and place it there with a description and send people you want to have look at your show the link. Facebook is an easy way but you have two disadvantages. First, the output will be much lower quality and second, if you use any music which is possibly copyright, Facebook may stop you, warn you and if you do it again, kick you off. Youtube is the same way - they like to "police" everyone. Vimeo is more tolerant, but the quality is not as good and you would have to upload without help from PTE because they really don't want "slideshows" on their site and refused to let Wnsoft or Photodex, etc., have their API codes so things could be automatically uploaded. They even insultingly tried to hold up the presentation slideshow people by "charging" them a fee for this. I strongly do not recommend Vimeo myself..... If you want your shows on your own website, you can either purchase a low cost converter to convert your mp4 file output from PTE to Flash, or you can buy a website program like Xara Web Designer (relatively inexpensive and a dynamite program) which will automatically convert and you can just upload the provided code and give folks a link to your own website to see your shows. Best regards, Lin

Hi Barry, I suspect Igor may not easily understand "exactly" what you are getting at. Let me try to paraphrase it. You would like to see PTE have the ability to clip off then save a portion of the full sound track. Did I get this right? You are saying that you greatly reduced the number of slides, but that the sound track was, of course, the original size which greatly affected the exe size even though the slide portion was greatly reduced? . Even though PTE, using the envelope, can stop sound at any place, it doesn't actually "edit" the sound track but simply mutes it as desired? So what you are suggesting or asking about is whether in a future version PTE can actually "edit" the sound track for the exe file yet "save" the full sound track in the PTE file? If I've got this wrong, please explain exactly what you would like to see. Best regards, Lin

Hi Frans, To my knowledge, the video converter has "never" automatically started, but has always been an option. If you select the video then right click the mouse, you will see the option to convert. Best regards, Lin

Try clearing you cache - could be leading you astray? If not, download it from the forum instead of the main page.... Best regards, Lin

Hi Jed, Use the PTE "Zip" feature to move your file to your main drive or you are likely to have issues with finding files, etc. If you go to "File" then choose "Create Backup in Zip" then all necessary files will be included and you can simply create a folder, extract the zip to that folder and everything will work fine. Without doing it this way, PTE will not likely be able to find all the files, especially if you make later changes to your external drive. Best regards, Lin

HI David, Are you by any chance trying to change the image from monochrome to color or vice versa? It sounds very much like perhaps you are bringing the monochrome image in as a "child" of the other file. This could account for a change in relative size. If you want both images on the same page but in different levels so you can fade one out while fading the other in, then be certain that before you load the second image you do not have the other one "selected." You can tell if it is selected by whether the image is selected in the Objects and Animations screen by the color of the file name. If it is "blue" it is selected and you need to click outside the file but in the white area just beyond to "unselect it" before importing your second image. If you already have a number of them imported as a "child" of the first image, you can simply use the right click to then choose "cut" and then unselect the parent and "paste" the cut image back as a separate item. Best regards, Lin

Hi Andrew, Beautiful presentation! I spent a wonderful week in Barcelona about eight years ago. I spent lots of time at the beach across from the Olympic Village ;-) Best regards, Lin

Hi Eric, What would be your solution? Best regards, Lin

Hi David, I understand your reasoning and the value of learning how to manipulate PTE to do various 3D animations and I quite agree with you. Xara, at least the version I use for text, isn't designed for general purpose 3D animation. It's value is only for quickly creating and manipulating 3D text. So if you just want to create flashy 3D animated text, then it's definitely easier and faster to use it and export as Flash or animated Gif and use it with your show than to build the alphabet in block geometrics with PTE. On the other hand if you want pictures, photos, etc., to be part of the text as in your sample, then using PTE is the solution since Xara, at least as far as I know, doesn't have that capability. What it does do, however, that you can't do with PTE, is create the animated text using multiple fonts, three color user adjustable lighting which changes as the characters animate, and a wide choice of templated animations. To learn about what it can do, follow the link and watch a few of the demos. I think that the beauty of PTE is that the power is there for those who want and need it (and are willing to devote the time necessary to the learning curve), and the simplicity for those who don't. Also the 3D transforms add to the utility of programs like Xara because you can further manipulate the already impressive animation using PTE's own impressive tools. PTE is a bit like Photoshop in that it has something for everyone. People such as Jean Pierre (JPD) who was miles ahead of the rest of us, and was able to extract the maximum from not only PTE's internal tool kit, but by using outside software (Excel in his case) to make it jump through hoops even Igor and the development team didn't know it could do! Then there are those who just want to output a simple slideshow with nice transitions and background music and/or voice narrative. It works for both! Though I personally have always loved animation and use it often in demonstrations, I rarely use it in the same ways in my own slideshows for friends or clients. Sometimes subtle is better and sometimes "in your face" animation is desired. I think that a tool which can do both as PTE can, is the ideal choice for those who enter competitive events. I don't believe that having the "potential" for creating amazing animations is wasted with PTE in any way. Few Photographers ever learn the "depths" of Photoshop's power, but it's there if they need or want it. Graphic artists often do things with Photoshop which amaze those of us who rarely need or even see some of the more esoteric possibilities. PTE is similar. We have photographers, artists, AV competitors and a host of other specialists all enjoying these features in varying degrees. It's all good in my opinion. Best regards, Lin

Hi Dave, http://www.learntoma...dave/pixels.zip That's true - they are small, and it's fun doing them. However, Xara 3D is "so fast" for doing animated text, it's hardly worth the time it takes to construct in PTE. This one took 12 seconds to make. It took longer to zip it and upload than it did to make the 3D text. It's an inexpensive and "very" powerful little program which lets you output to Flash, animated gif, etc. They have lots of great programs - one of the best web creation software packages around..... This one is low res and slow frame rate, but you have total control over that. A large number of fonts can be used, you have control over lighting, extrusion, texturing, etc., etc. Here's a link to their site (They are a U.K. Company). http://www.xara.com/us/products/ Best regards, Lin

Hey David, You've been having fun I see!! Very nice demo of possibilities. Probably, it would be much easier though to just use Xara 3D and run it as an animated gif, but it certainly does show the flexibility of constructing 3D objects from geometric forms with PTE. Best regards, Lin

It does get a bit confusing, doesn't it? Actually, there are technical reasons why it had to be changed which have to do with video. Igor has explained it in other posts. I think part of the issue of understanding is this: Let's consider first the old way where we have the transition from say slide one to slide two. What if we had selected a four second 3d swap transition for slide one and a four second fade-in, fade-out for slide two. The 3d swap belongs to slide one, but the fade-out, fade-in, is shared between slide one and slide two. So we have the issue of actual full slide display time being settled by subtracting the 3d swap time from the display time for slide one and subtracting the the fade in time from slide two. Had we set the duration for each to 10 seconds, the entire 3d swap, display, fade-out, fade-in, display would occupy 20 seconds. So adding up all the transition times plus actual display times equal the cumulative times set for display for all slides. A benefit of this was the ability to cross-fade by pulling the keyframe from the beginning of slide two into the time frame for the ending of slide one and pushing the keframe for the ending of slide two into the beginning of slide two. This could create some very nice and interesting cross fades which were not one of the "transition" choices. For this reason, many wanted to preserve this way of doing transitions. In answer to your first question, the actual full display time for any given slide in the above scenario is six seconds. The chosen display time minus the chosen transition time. Slide one continues to be seen as a fade-out, when slide two begins to be seen as a fade-in. Slide two then has a full, uninterrupted by transition time, display time of six seconds. The time of partial visibility could be affected then by pulling and pushing the respective keyframes into the adjacent slide time frames. The reason then, that the time included the transition in and not the transition out was because the transition out was shared between the two adjacent slides. With the inclusion of video there became a technical issue with doing this and I'll leave that for Igor to explain, or possibly link to the explanation. Best regards, Lin

Lately, I been helping a very talented lady friend build a website to display her art, etc. In the process, I discovered a bug in my web building software which made the pages look odd with Chrome as a browser, but worked perfectly with Internet Explorer and with Mozilla Firefox. Because the developer has yet to find a correction, I needed a work-around. The problem was that objects such as titles (which are rasterized to insure same image as original font regardless of whether or not the font is resident on the visitor's system) would be out of position on chrome and look very "ragged." Because the pages I needed had no reason to be frequently changed, I elected to instead use JPG's of text and create my own backgrounds with translucency, combined images, fades, decorative text, images with decorative frames, etc. Doing all this in Photoshop is "possible," but extremely awkward, even for a seasoned and skilled Photoshop technician. But PTE is an absolute jewel for some of these operations. For example, it's possible to bring multiple images into PTE on separate layers including a colored background, etc., and in "seconds" visually create what takes perhaps an hour to accomplish with layers in Photoshop. By quickly manipulating opacity, using masks, etc., it's possible to get amazing creations in seconds. Just be sure your screen resolution is high enough to support the quality you want, then simply turn off navigation and mouse, set the display time for about 30 seconds, hit preview and use your favorite screen capture to capture and save the multi-layer creation as a jpg, etc. Want to add a png frame to a picture? What if the frame doesn't quite "fit?" Of course in Photoshop you can use the "transform" feature and with enough time and patience, you can surround your picture and manipulate the frame to "fit." However, this is not a simple task and even if you are "very good" with Photoshop, it will take you some time to accomplish. In PTE, it's as simple as holding down the shift key and "dragging" the sides of your png frame to fit. It literally takes seconds to do. Do you want multiple images masked and appearing at different places in your composition? In Photoshop, this takes a very long time and sometimes it's simply not worth the effort! In PTE, it takes a few seconds to get incredibly good results. Bottom line? PTE is versatile in many, many ways and can be used for tasks one doesn't normally thing about with a presentation slideshow software product. Lin

Hi Bob, The only control other than "mute" which you have over volume on a video right now is via the Navigation Bar. On there you have a speaker icon which allows you full volume control, but you don't have audio controls with the envelope as on regular audio backgrounds, comments, etc. Hopefully, in a future version Igor will have full dynamic and keyframe sound control in video just like in still image audio. Best regards, Lin

Hi Coolrock, You'll have to check the dates on these posts. Sadly, both Jean-Pierre and Ron have passed away since these were made a number of years ago.... Best regards, Lin

Hi Barry, Good suggestion. By the way, you don't need to use a png file to make a "hotspot." you can just use a "frame" and set the size and position by drag and the opacity is automatically zero. Best regards, Lin

Hey Ken, This little jewel of a program makes it "simple" truly!! Best regards, Lin

Hi Folks, Lately, I've had the pleasure of reviewing a wonderful program which creates web albums. It's called S10 WebAlbum and can be downloaded at: Link to S10 WebAlbum This is a really nice package which does much more than "just' create a web album. It includes tools to rotate, tilt, adjust brightness, remove red eye and even lets you link to your favorite program such as Photoshop to further manipulate your image if you deem it necessary. The program has multiple "themes" and is very versatile in ways to present your images. There are places to write descriptions, comments, etc., and you can change fonts, colors, and present your photos in user selected sizes. I've used a large number of "web album generating" tools folks, but this one is special in my opinion. It's VERY easy to use, very intuitive and the developer is quite helpful if there are issues specific to your use. This program was formerly sold, but is now offered as freeware though I suggest that anyone who uses it and finds it useful donate a small amount to help keep development current. The developer also has some really nice and low priced other utilities which you can see when you visit his page. As some of you may know, I'm helping a local lady with setting up her website to display her art. I'm building a website for her and am using the S10 WebAlbum to display some of her art. Here's a link to see one of many "themes" possible with this fine package. It gets my highest recommendation!! Link to my Sample! Lin

You did a fine job of explaining!! Not a problem. Your example is a beautiful way to show how the copyright logo can be used as a border! Best regards, Lin

Hi Ron, The suggestion to use the copyright logo works fine as long as each image is the same size. You simply create the PNG file the size you wish as a border with the transparent center, then display it at 100% (look in Customize Logo) and it will lie on top of your photos as a very nice border. However, if you have some vertical and some horizontal photos in the same show, or if you have various sizes, the only way you will be able to do this is to add the PNG border file on a layer in Objects and Animations and adjust it for each photo. You only need one size border to do it individually for each photo. You simply click-drag the border until it's centered on the photo (or set the position manually to zero and zero) then click on one end and hold down the shift key while dragging that side into position. Do this on each side as necessary. The shift key allows you to "distort" the horizontal or vertical XY axis visually. There is no other way to automatically use a png file as a border that I'm aware of other than the two ways described above. Best regards, Lin

Hi, You will need to convert your iTunes to mp3 - here's a free converter: It wants to install a tool bar, but I think you can disable that..... http://translateye.c...leconverter.php Read about it here: http://itunesm4ptomp3.wordpress.com/ There are numerous converters which are low cost but not "free." You could also do a web search for other freeware to do this. Lin