fh1805

The northern hemisphere summer is drawing to a close and that means the resumption of meetings of all the local photographic societies and camera clubs. I just know that at my own society I am going to get asked about PTEv5 and all its new features. If I am asked by the members: When should I use animation? How should I use animation? Why should I use animation? what am I going to tell them? I've posted this to get some points of view other than my own. However, here are mine for what they're worth: It all depends...!!! To my mind that sums it up. There is no black and white, right and wrong when answering these questions. But I do believe that there are some general points of guidance that will hold good in many situations. 1. Just because you now can do it doesn't mean you have to do it. Use the tools sparingly to add emphasis to a particular point. 2. If you are going to do it, do it at the right speed. Zooms can be done fairly quickly but slow zooms are also effective. Pans must be done slowly. Panning and zooming at the same time can be a particularly effective means of emphasising a particular aspect of an image. 3. Don't let the "packaging" get in the way of the "message". Unless you really want to show off how skilled you are with the PTEv5 features, don't go overboard and use everything there is in a single sequence. Be selective. 4. Remember, you are not making a movie. You are using apparent motion to add to the strength of your message. When watching a movie (at the cinema or at home on TV or DVD) take note of how the director uses panning and zooming. And whilst doing this, take care not to confuse tracking the subject with panning and zooming. No doubt other forum members will have their own thoughts on this subject. I'd welcome your comments.

Hi Andrew, You had the good grace to comment on my Holy Island sequence; it's only right that I should return you the favour. I enjoyed the sequence but was left with a feeling that something just wasn't quite right. Eventually I realised that, for me, the use of panning and/or zooming on every image created in my mind a sense of restlessness that was totally at odds with the serene tranquility of the lakeside scenery. Did you consider letting some of the pans and/or zooms settle, if only for a second or so, before starting the next transition/animation? I don't know whether or not it would have worked. It might simply have resulted in a sequence that felt "jerky". The pan/zooms that really worked for me were the head on shot and, to a lesser extent, the triple of the vessel leaving the dockside. Although here the sequence would definitely have benefitted from a lot more images - more of a quickish timelapse effect rather than just the three images presented. Thanks for sharing this with us. Is this one of your local locations that you go back to time after time? If so, you're very lucky to live amongst such marvellous scenery; I envy you!

Hi Andrew, Thanks for the interest. I agree with you, the opening images are the strongest. But, as I stated in the initial post, the weather refused to cooperate that week. As I'm sure you've encountered often enough, sometimes we have to take what we're given. I was given dull, overcast so had to switch to flower photography and church interiors. What I really wanted were some striking sunsets and some moonlight shots. The "spikes" were erected in the 1800s and are leading marks for shipping entering the harbour channel. The calcining of lime in kilns down by the castle was a big local industry in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Because of the tidal races created between the island and the mainland, the harbour channel was always tricky to negotiate, so the markers were erected to assist ships to get onto the correct bearing for a safe entry to harbour.

Hi Colin, They are the licences I need to keep me legal as far as UK Copyright law is concerned. They relate to my use of commercially recorded music as my background music. MCPS = Mechanical Copyright Protection Society BPI = British Phonographic Industry PPL = Phonographic Performance Ltd As a New Zealander I dont think they will be directly relevant to you. But I fully expect that there will be some equivalent form of copyright law applicable in New Zealand. The following website gives a good summary of the situation as it applies to UK-based AV workers: http://www.theiac.org.uk/central/copyright.htm

Hi "ltdedorc", The camera was a Nikon D70 body and the lenses that I took with me on that trip were Nikkor AF 20mm, AF-D 35-70mm and AF 70-210mm. The "closeups" were all taken using the 35-70mm. I do have the Nikkor AF Macro 105mm which is a real beauty for all the way to lifesize images but it is also a heavy little beast and I was "travelling light" on this trip using a camera bag that can hold the body and three lenses. All images were supported by a monopod. Post-production in Photoshop Elements was pretty much restricted to Auto Contrast and Sharpen Unsharp Mask at 80%. Glad you liked the end result. Thanks for the comments and queries.

John, Thanks for the positive feedback. It's always nice to hear that you're still doing some things right!

Ken, Thanks for the steer towards Ron's site. Ron, Thanks for making all that help resource available online - and free!. I've been using PTEv4 for about two years and PTEv5 for about 2 weeks. I already have a master menu built under PTEv4 which works fine. I was wanting something a little different (see my reply to Barry in post #4 above). Your excellent tutorial covered familiar ground for me but didn't include anything drawn from your experiences with PTEv5 (or have I downloaded the wrong file?). The problem manifests itself only with a menu built using PTEv5 and occurs on both the Windows Vista desktop PC and the Windows XP laptop (although on the latter, all that appears between the end of the inner show and the return to the menu screen is the Windows Taskbar - and this vanishes of its own accord) Al's reply (see post #2) indicates that this flicker/flash in PTEv5 is an already known problem that Igor and his team of magicians will seek to rectify in a future release. If you have a method of eliminating the flicker/flash in a PTEv5-built menu I would very much like to know what the secret is - pleeeeease!.

Neil, Thanks for your comments. My sequences are built primarily for my own pleasure but I do show them to various local organisations. I always try and get the audience's attention with the opening and then send them home happy with the ending. As I said in my original post, the weather conspired against me for most of the week so I had to build the show with the material that I had. I'm not entirely happy with it but I'll need to go back for another week to try for some more material. Maybe next year.

Al, After the Menu exe and the Show exe have both been closed down there are no copies of either of them in the Windows Task Manager. The only time I see any extra copies is just after I have launched the Menu exe - and at that point I always see two instances of it in the Windows Task Manager under the Applications tab. And this situation applies only to the PTEv5-built form of the Menu exe file. The PTEv4-built Menu exe appears as just the single instance that I was expecting. Barry, I have PTEv4 and PTEv5 co-existing on both the desktop and the laptop computers. Also, like you, I make extensive use of PTEv4-built menus. I'm a regular visitor to this particular local organisation and, although they are not a photo group, several of the members are keen photographers and they always ask about the tools and techniques of building the sequences. I just wanted to show them something with a bit of the "gee whizz!" factor included. I had in mind to have "New!" flashing alongside the buttons for the sequences that they haven't seen before. But Lin's caution about animation and hardware acceleration on menus sort of put the kybosh on that idea. I'll probably use PTEv4 to build a modified version of my existing master menu but colour code the buttons of the new sequences. Both, Thanks for the help. Your friendly and freely-given advice is, as always, most gratefully received.

I would welcome advice in respect of a problem that I am struggling to eliminate or circumvent. Later this year I will be providing an afternoon's entertainment for a local organisation by showing them a selection of my sequences. I would like to build a menu sequence that I can use to "front end" all the other sequences. I've researched this subject among the previous posts on the forums and have read the dialogue between Jeff Evans and Al Robinson on the subject of chaining menus and submenus. I also noted the thread initiated by Lin Evans on the subject of executable menus and hardware acceleration. I have tried to take on board the various recommendations made in those threads. But I still have a problem. First let me set the scene... All the existing sequences that I want to use were built using PTE v4. They all start and end with a black slide and are set to "Close show after last slide" In order to check everything out before building the final menu I built a little test menu system using PTEv5. In this there are three "target" sequences and the test menu sequence. The three "target" sequences have the same build: a black slide, a coloured slide and a final black slide. All three sequences are set to "Close show after last slide". I have left all other PTE settings at default values in these three except for: setting Fade In/Out as the only transition, setting mouse left click to Next slide and mouse right click to Previous slide and hiding the mouse cursor during the show. The menu sequence consists of a single image with three buttons on it. The Project Options for this sequence are defaults except for: When show ends keep last slide on screen, mouse buttons set as for the other shows, always show mouse cursor, hardware acceleration is unticked and transitions are disabled. The only image is customised to have an onscreen duration of 600 seconds. The executable file names are: Menu_Mk_II.exe Show1.exe Show2.exe Show3.exe I have placed a shortcut to Menu_Mk_II.exe on the desktop. When I launch from this shortcut the menu appears as expected. Clicking any of the three buttons starts the relevant show. The problem occurs at the end of the started show. There is a lot of flickering/flashing before the menu image is displayed. During that flickering/flashing it is possible to make out that the original desktop display is in amongst it all. I started Windows Task Manager to try and see if I could see anything unusual and noticed that when I launch the Menu_Mk_II.exe two copies of it are shown as running in the Applications tab of Windows Task Manager. Why two copies? Is the presence of the second copy contributing to this problem? The PC system is a Compaq Presario desktop with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz processor, 2GB RAM running under Windows Vista. The graphics card is an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS. If I can get past this problem the exe files will eventually be copied over to the lap top that I use to drive my digital projector. Please, can anyone offer any advice on how to get a smooth transition from the end of a "target" sequence back to the menu sequence image?

Whilst reworking the Holy Island sequence today (see post in other forum) I came across an "unexpected" situation working in the O&A Main Menu. I was making frequent use of the left and right arrow buttons up in the top right corner of this window to move from one image to another. When I clicked on the Right arrow button I was correctly taken to the next image in the sequence and the button remained visible. When I clicked on the Left arrow button I was correctly taken to the previous image but the Right arrow button vanished!!! If I then hovered the mouse over the place where the Right arrow button should have been and then clicked, the next image was presented correctly and the Right arrow button re-appeared!!! Is this unique to my PC or was I hallucinating?

Ken, Glad you appreciated it that. It was real difficult to get the emphasis points in the soundtrack "just right" :-)

Here's a sequence that I built earlier this year with PTE4 and have just spent 3 hours this lunch-time (don't worry, folks, I'm semi-retired!) re-building in PTEv5. http://www.mediafire.com/?9rdy2vy9moy (File size is c.15MB) I decided to rebuild it because I originally used a font that I subsequently discovered wasn't on every PC. So the show didn't always have the look and feel that I had built into it on my own PC. The only use of new function in PTEv5 is the use of rasterized text stored as PNG files. Now, the show really is WYSIWIS - what you see is what I saw!!! The images were taken during a five day visit at the start of May this year. The weather was glorious on the Monday and then went rapidly downhill. By Tuesday evening it was dull, overcast and occasional rain showers and stayed that way. It brightened up again 2 hours after I left on the Friday. For the benefit of the overseas viewers, the Holy Island of Lindisfarne is located off the north-eastern coast of England just a few miles south of the border with Scotland. It is accessible across a causeway for 3 hours either side of low tide. At all other times it is truly an island. It is famed as the cradle of Christianity in England and has association with St.Aidan, St.Cuthbert and others from the Celtic Christian tradition around 650-750AD. It was through my faith that I was directed to go there and take photographs to set to this particular piece of music - but that's another story! Enjoy!

Barry, Thanks for that tip (and the illustration of the effect on the page on your web site). It doesn't always work well with every image though, does it? I copied all the images into my Playpen folder and then ran Process Multiple Files in Photoshop Elements 5, doing only the automatic levels. In many instances I think it actually softened the image whilst in others it introduced some unwanted colour shifts in parts of the image. I suppose it is something that is worth giving a try out on each image and, if I like the effect go with it and if I don't, there's always Ctrl+Z!!!

Ken, That one word is "praise indeed" from one of the masters of this trade. thanks

Ken, Oh, all right then, I'm easily persuaded! Everyone, This reply includes the reworked Zip file with all the text files rasterized so that, whether you've got these fonts on your system or not, you can still see what they look like. Fonts_for_Text_Aug23_2007_9_00_45.zip

Hi everyone, Given that there is already a facility out there on the web to view and compare fonts, as Ken has kindly pointed out in his reply above, I'll not be taking this any further. Even though I have now rasterized the text files and cut another zip I will not be posting the new zip file.

Thanks Ken, It just goes to show the accuracy of your signature tag line. But I had fun inventing a different kind of wheel!

Hi everyone, Dont download the zip. I forgot to rasterize all the font bits to PnG files. I'm working on that now and will upload a fresh copy in about 30 minutes or so.

I'm not sure in which forum section this post should go. If the moderator feels its in the wrong place then please feel free to relocate it. No matter what software I use for whatever task I might be doing, I always have difficulty choosing from the multitude of fonts offered to me. So, with PTEv5 I have done something to ease my pain. I offer it to the forum members in the hope that it might prove useful to others. The attachment is a PTEv5-built zip file of the components of that sequence. The sequence will change automatically every 4 seconds or you can manually control it via left-click to go forwards and right-click to go backwards. The choice of fonts to include is very personal. As I worked steadily through all the fonts available on my system (Windows Vista), I selected those that I could see an immediate use for in current Work-in-Progress sequences and in old PTEv4 sequences that I am considering rebuilding under PTEv5. Please feel free to plagiarise this work and customise it to suit your needs. Fonts_for_Text_Aug23_2007_8_16_38.zip

Judy, Thanks for your comments. When I visited the Everglades in 1999 I was a keen birdwatcher and natural history photographer, so I had done all my homework and knew what birds I was looking at and photographing. I had to buy a Field Guide for the flowers. They were identified using the 35mm slide and the book after I got home. Glad you liked it.

I have just encountered a problem when renaming images in PTEv5. The problem arose when I decided to rename the images that I am using in a sequence that is still work in progress. The sequence has its own folder "Skelton War Memorial" and within that the images have their own sub-folder "Images". The first four slides were: BlackSlide.jpg Remembrance02.jpg Remembrance02.jpg BlackSlide.jpg Remembrance02.jpg was an image that I had copied into the "Skelton War Memorial/Images" folder from another sequence's folder. I wanted to rename this image to something that better reflected its use in the new sequence. I selected the first instance of Remembrance02.jpg in the Slide List, pressed F2 and keyed its new name SWMTitle and pressed Return. The name of both instances of the image file in the Slide List changed. Everything seemed Ok. But when I tried to Preview the show PTE reported a missing image file. After some head scratching I saved the .pte file under a new name and opened that into PTE Adjustor (Thanks for this tool, Al). I discovered that, whilst the rename on the first instance of Remembrance02 had been fully propagated into the .pte file, the rename for the second instance had not been fully propagated. The second instance was the Main Image of an animated image that had one piece of Text animated to fade up over it. It would appear that when renaming slides, if there is any animation involved then the rename isn't propagated into the O&A information within the .pte file. I am wondering whether this is a bug or a limitation of the current version.

Provided the feedback on my Florida sequence is not too harsh, I'll be posting another sequence called "Wonders of Wyoming" - about Grand Teton and Yellowstone Parks. Images taken late September/early October about 10 years ago. keep your fingers crossed Peter

Ken, Is that the one I think it is, 4 minutes 33 seconds of pure silence? cheers, Peter

Hi everyone, This is my first post in this part of the forum. I'm offering the sequence below for comment. Wild Side of Florida.exe - http://www.mediafire.com/?6s9cjtmbixd I'm a long-time member of my local Photographic Society so I'm used to being on the receiving end of the judge's scathing comments. So, go ahead, shoot! I've been using PTE V4 for about two years now. The early sequences were simply conversions of existing "analogue" sequences to the digital format. This is the first sequence that was built from scratch using scanned slides, ripped music, Audacity and PTE V4. Hope somebody out there enjoys it. cheers, Peter