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Hi Ian Good to see you are still involved in PTE. I think the forum members pictures link working is more good luck than good management :-) but pleased to be able to provide some nostalgia! Cheers Andrew

Thanks Dave I'm really surprised this functionality hasn't been within PTE from the early days, it really does open up Igors potential market Cheers Andrew

Hello there Been a LONG time since I posted in the PTE forums. When I first started using PTE many many years ago I was lead to its superb image quality after being disheartened with the very bad image quality of PowerPoint.Now I find myself doing more and more PTE presentations but for business purposes. Ironically I now find myself yearning for a couple of the features which Powerpoint employs. If you are presenting to a group of people invariably you are going to want to show a bullet pointed list of points to discuss at some stage during the presentation, its also really effective to have each bulleted point appear when you click the (next slide button) My suggestion for a future version of PTE is as follows:- • In the Objects and Animation have a new type of object call it an Auto Bullet List Object • When this is selected PTE will automatically create a bullet pointed list, a new bullet being added every time the ENTER key is pressed, pretty much like you can in a basic word document • Then the real useful thing is for that slide you can tick an options box along the lines of "Advance each bullet point on mouse click" so when you come to that slide in your show if doing a manual show PTE will know to display each bullet point on each mouse click until they have all been displayed then carrying on with the next slide. I know there are other ways of doing this in PTE but they are time consuming and this feels like such an integral function of any manual presentation, it also makes PTE, through what I imagine is a fairly minor change, a presentation software that can easily and intuitively meet the core needs of the corporate and creative user and what's more allow both styles within a single presentation. What do you think? Many thanks Andrew Busst

Thanks Peter that's awesome! :-)

Hello all Has been a long time since I posted here but urgently need your help... My wife is doing a presentation for a major trade show using PTE and has completed the whole presentation her boss now tells her she needs to launch a video from within the presentation. Is there any way to do this? We don't need it to run inside of PTE just launch ity and come back Any ideas and hello to all! Many thanks Andrew Busst

Haven't been here for a loooooooong time but do drop by now and then to check up on PTE. I regularly use Video Builder to make DVD's with simple animated menus and it does a great job. What I was wondering was is are there any plans to update Video Builder? Things that would be useful are:- 1. Be able to set a default font type and size for the whole menu or be able to select multiple title entries and change font and size at the same time for the multiple items. Currently if you don't like the default font (I think Times Roman) you have to select every Title and change separately. 2. Be able to add additional text to the menu. 3. Be able to align items automatically. 4. Be able to create more templates with total control over number of clips etc Apart from that PTE continues to be great and the new Mac functionality is an amazing feature of the program. Kind regards Andrew Busst

I'm with Barry on this, I have on two ocassions now on long shows used slides twice unintentionally simply because I didn't pick up it had already been used. A great idea and simply adds to the intuitiveness and flow of making shows. By the way, we live in the bottom of the South Island of New Zealand about 2500 Km's across the Tasman Ocean from the Bushfires, in the weekend our skies were laden with smoke (we could smell it) and the sun practically reduced to a deep red glow, it felt like about 7pm at 2pm in the afternoon. Can't imagine what it was like in Oz itself.

Peter I disagree, you aren't making an image or asking PTE to be an image editor you are really asking PTE to quickly and effortlessly provide a point or many points in your presentation where there is nothing! but maybe a colour. This could be achieved in two clicks - right click context menu, brings up a palette to choose a colour - done. A fade to or from black or white or whatever colour you choose is potentially a common use in PTE I personally use it many times in a presentation it just seems to make sense to have this hard coded into the software as a quick user friendly function. If you want extra flexibility in what's on you blank slide you really aren't talking about a blank slide and should be making it in a separate image editor, but the majority of cases as I see it only need either Black or White. I would really like a new users viewpoint as us experienced old PTE users know the program far to well to give an objective view on this. As I have mentioned earlier I have seen new users first hand searching for this command, kinda makes sense if you are developing a software and your users intuitively are looking for something that isn't there maybe you need to consider putting it in, a bit like buying a word processor and being unable to find the Spell Checker as its tucked away in the Tables Menu Finally don't you just love it when something works like a well oiled machine? The whole zoom off to O&A or load up a blank image from an image editor just breaks up the flow for me when I am really concentrating on putting a show together. Cheers

Hi Ken Yes it does work but the point is that you end up with a work around to make a blank slide. Inserting blank slides is something most users have to do so why not make it real simple to do. Also you endup with you blank slide named whatever the orignal file was called which could be confusing. If I could insert a blank slide with one click I would feel PTE was offering a smoother more intuitive approach as opposed to diving into O&A which at the end of the day has nothing to do with making blank slides ftrom a new users point of view. What do others think? Cheers

I think PTE would be a better program if it had a built in blank slide generator activated by either a right click or from the slide menu, it would also be useful to be able to select the colour as part of the process, chances are a high proportion would be either black or white. Its good that PTE can already "make" a blank slide by going into o&a and playing around with opacity etc but this isn't very intuitive to new users. It just doesn't feel "right" (or professional) grabbing any old image and changing its properties to be a blank slide, a blank slide should be, a blank slide! :-) It seems to me that in almost every presentation you make there is a high chance you will want to insert a blank slide so why not have a dedicated menu option for this function? I have recently introduced PTE to several people and "Where is insert blank slide command?" is a very common question. I can't imagine this being a too onerous programming task?

I can confirm the above happens on my PC too

It seems that in the O&A window it would be very helpful if you could PAUSE the animation rather than only being able to select STOP or PLAY. When you stop (after pressing play) the cursor returns to the start of the animation it would be very helpful to be able to PAUSE the cursor at any point in the animation so you could then add you keypoint at that point, this may even remove the need to see a wave form?

I think this is another one of those cases of technology slowly but surely is edging its way into the main stream, I remember when camera clubs sort of scorned upon images taken with a digital camera and in fact set up a whole new category just for Digital Images in competitions, I think most now have dropped that and its free for all. I wonder how this issue would be viewed today if for the last 20 years every PC/Mac owner had the ability to effortlessly encorporate Video and Stills into an AV presentation? I suspect there would be no issue at all and people would accept its not the technology that categorises the Photographers work but the final on screen result and the impact of that work to the viewer. Just look at Youtube, anything goes and millions of viewers are entertained with all types of media presentations with little concern (I imagine) for whether the presentation is a mix of stills and video or not, its the final impact that matters. In todays world this fluidness of media seems to be more and more accepted (and expected) and in future we can only wonder (and embrace!) what clever software developers can engineer to allow us to produce versatile, entertaining media presentations with increasing ease and flexibility. Cheers Andrew

Hi Igor No need to apologize, Trend Micro should have picked up this problem way sooner than it did and from your perspective I think it relates only to a certain type of Trend Micro Product and within that only those edditions downloaded in Australia/NZ (at least that is what I am guessing). For your information though the virus checker seemed to be over zealous in the area of unpacking the ZIP file into the EXE file and TXT files for some reason this was the behaviour that incorrectly triggered a warning from info I gathered from the Trend Micro site glossary of detections. Cheers

It is has almost been a month since I reported that Trend Micro Internet Security was detecting PTE as a virus. I am pleased to say, as I knew all along, Trend Micro was false detecting a virus. Its great to get this sorted from my perspective but I could not believe the run arounds I received from Trend Micro. I must have had email correspondence with 15 seperate staff. It seems each time I emailed back advising their solution didn't work someone else would pick up the problem usually on a whole different tangent until I went full circle. It was only during the last few days and after some increasingly frustrated emails that the problem appears to have been fixed by Trend Micro but I can't be sure as my last reply to Trend Micro (which contained evidence that there was no way PTE could contain a virus) never received a reply and I have never received a response advising they have fixed the problem either. I just felt like I was a very small fish in a very big corporate tank and even though their emails were filled with words like "thank you, patience, sorry, inconvenience, sincerely" they just didn't get the issue from day one and never followed a constructive, progressive process to identify the fault and fix it. This event was so frustrating it almost made me change my Virus checker but I have to be fair and say apart from this issue I find Trend Micro as a product - Fantastic, usually effective, very low overhead and has saved my computer from infection on many occassions. This whole process has taught me don't give up. I know Igor was also talking to Trend Micro and maybe his efforts were more productive than mine but I will never know as Trendmicro have advised nothing.