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At this stage, yes. No thoughts at present of slide shows using recorded audio, but ... Cheers, Colin

Thanks Eric, yes I guess I was a bit non-specific there. My wife sings in two choirs, and they always record their concerts, but the chap who has been doing the recordings has struck bad health for both himself and his wife, so the position is more or less vacant. There are some costs that the choirs will pay, and the choristers buy CDs of the concerts, so the prospect of a little cash looms as well. Recording venues are usually local churches, and the recording quality I don't think is all that high - they used to do it onto cassettes, so I guess the Zoom H4N recorder can do the job, and I have the gear and programmes to edit and burn CDs. Things like microphone placement etc are my immediate things to know, but I guess n the end it will come down to experimentation and my ears! Regards, Colin. PS I guess this should really be in the off-topic forum!

Hello Roger, I've just played your band show, and i am rather intrigued as to how you managed to record the sound - what recording device, how far away was it from the band, etc.? I am considering doing sound recordings myself, and I am interested in how others do it . Thanks, Colin

Eric, my friend, you reduced me to tears with your story. "too late" and "if only" are the saddest words to hear from anybody, especially elderly people like us. And your choice of music, 'Duelling banjos' just adds to the pathos, that track just moves me. Whether it's the simplicity of the melody, just basic arpeggios, the interplay of the banjo versus the guitar just grips me in an emotional embrace. Does that sound foolish? It doesn't feel foolish. Thank you for a most moving show. Kind regards, Colin

Yep, no play. Frustrating ... Colin

You would be surprised at how many programs will modify the computer parameters to suit themselves, but never bother to put the altered parameters back when closing the program. Some of the worst culprits are graphic and image-handling programs, and some games are bad at it as well.

Hi Barry, It seems to me that some program that runs before PTE is altering the graphics card settings, most probably undoing the Graphics Acceleration settings, which will wreck the smoothness of PTE for sure. Perhaps you can click on the desktop background and see what the graphics option can tell you, before and after running the suspect programs. Loss of hardware acceleration is what I would suspect here. Refards, Colin

Hi Dave, Yes, that is right, but nevertheless some cheaper sets are 720p only. I have in my dining room a 29 inch Chinese TV, excellent picture, but it's 720p only, and doubtless there are others of similar size that are the same. It's a point worth considering, especially as the OP didn't mention it in his opening post. Regards, Colin

I believe that most TVs 32 inches or smaller are in fact 720p and not 1080p. That fact alone will be responsible for a poorer picture on a TV compared with a 1920x1080 monitor. Also, a TV is probably not capable of having its display color-balanced, so you are stuck with probably inaccurate color as well. Get a proper monitor.

See my reply to Politer. It's only just been mooted, for goodness' sake!

Probably not. Igor said "we'll try to add the color management in future version(s) of PicturesToExe." Not the very next version. You guys who want it now now now don't appreciate the pressure you are putting on Igor. Just back off a little please.

Excellent photography and haunting music. The music I felt didn't quite fit a few of the slides, but possibly a rearrangement to match the more dramatic images with the sound might help there. I really enjoyed the show however, Mark. Beautiful land- and sea-scapes, and as I said, gripping sound, and all clean as a whistle. Thank you. Can you tell us what the music was, please?

I have had good success using a disc-burning program called Imgburn, free from http://www.imgburn.com/ and from the website is the following: ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! It has several 'Modes', each one for performing a different task: Read - Read a disc to an image file Build - Create an image file from files on your computer or network - or you can write the files directly to a disc Write - Write an image file to a disc Verify - Check a disc is 100% readable. Optionally, you can also have ImgBurn compare it against a given image file to ensure the actual data is correct Discovery - Put your drive / media to the test! Used in combination with DVDInfoPro, you can check the quality of the burns your drive is producing It does not have any foibles like changing formats etc, it just produces exact copies of your master disc. Good luck, Colin

Hello Jeff, Thank you for your Horner tribute above, as usual a great show from you with your images of of abandoned countryside and habitations. To a New Zealander these are strange and compelling images, unlike anything in this young country, and your choice of music, in this case Horner, in other cases Zimmer etc. is hauntingly compelling. Your shows are worthy of solitary contemplation, more than just a show, though they can spellbind our club audience as well. Thank you, Colin (NZ)

I would say that's clearly a problem with Nero. Some setting within Nero that perhaps changes the format to something incompatible with your player. Can your computer play the Nero disc, and can you run a diagnostic program that will tell you what the encoding is, compared with the original PTE disc?

Yes, I know the UK lost more men than we did, But I believe the men lost per capita from our then population was the highest of any participating country, though I can't quote the figures. The perception from our antipodean point of view was that Churchill's idea of taking Turkey by the back door so to speak, and getting at Germany that way was very ill-founded, and cost much in the way of navy ships and lives as well as infantry, compounded by some British Generals who were still in the eighteenth century's tactics, throwing men at the problem ad infinitum, like the General in charge at Gallipoli who requested another 95,000 men asap - whom he didn't get. The British conception of the ANZAC forces as cannon fodder to soften up the enemy before sending the elite British forces in did not go down well over here, and as subsequent battles proved in both wars, the ANZACS were some of the best fighting men that Britain had at their command, in addition to our pilots that the RAF had at their command, right up to Sir Keith Parke, a New Zealander who ran the fighter command that defeated the Luftwaffe. Sadly, today, our citizens are regarded as aliens by the Brit government, while erstwhile enemies have free access to the UK - probably enforced by Brussels, I guess. Regards, Colin

A very big day here in New Zealand also, our soldiers were the ' NZ' in ' ANZAC' , who fought and died alongside the Aussies and other nations, including the UK. To this day, the word ANZAC unites Australian and New Zealand peoples in a unique and lasting bond, forged at Gallipoli, between the two countries. Thanks for the show Eric, (though I did hope it would show our NZ participation as well) Regards, Colin

Ogg Vorbis is by design variable bitrate with no apparent capability to use constant bitrate. Can you not load an OV audio file into a PTE test run and observe what happens? Or am I misunderstanding your query?

Hello Brian, I generally run the projector at my camera club nights, and we have trouble from time to time with Mac laptops. Unlike most PC lappys, Macs can show two different images simultaneously, one on the projector and the other on the lappy screen. Very handy for notes on the laptop and images on the 'jector. But we have difficulty in getting the right images onto the projector, and often the mac owner doesn't know how to switch the screens around. More then once we have had to abandon a show on a mac for this reason. My advice would be to set up and run the Mac shows first, in case of trouble there, as the PC shows are much easier to set up, especially if one is not familiar with macs. In the case of PC's, have your projector on and connected to the lappy first, then powering up the laptop is correct, as the laptop will sense the projector and will set up the pixel dimensions of the 'jector automatically. Showing the PC shows first is inviting trouble if when you switch to the mac you have problems there. One further problem we have is that the club projector is hardware calibrated with a Colorvision Spyder, but the ICC profile is stored in the lappy's video card, so with any other laptop the projector is uncalibrated and the color rendition is anybody's guess. Ideally you should get both projectors calibrated for sRGB images, so if an author complains about the color - as some will readily do - then you are covered. Good luck, Colin

It's known that PTE is best used with sRGB color-spaced images. Adobe RGB and other color spaces can give flat poor color results with PTE, which sounds like your problem. Check that your camera is definitely set to sRGB and not aRGB (Adobe) color space. Viewing the exif data of your images will reveal what color space the image is in. You can convert the color space to sRGB in most image editor programs if you find the images are not sRGB.

Well, unfortunately I think you may have jumped the wrong way with that decision. While a Mac may be a good computer, there is no PTE version available at this time, and Mac users have to use Bootcamp or other cross-connecting programs to utilise Windows programs on a Mac. I am not up on Mac details as I am a PC man also, but there are almost endless posts on this forum complaining to some degree about PTE on Macs. I think a better idea, since you don't get along with Win 8 (lots don't!) would have been to install a copy of Windows 7 on your PC. It acts very much like XP and is an easy step up, which is what I have done. If you still have your PC that is what I would do, and save almost endless hassles with the Mac. It's not only running PTE on a Mac, it's also compatibility with mac-sourced programs being able to run on PC's and vice versa, if you intend doing that.

It pains me to say this, being a Windows man, but apparently some Macbooks can display two separate images at once, one on the projector screen and another on the laptop, both full screen. You have your show on screen and your notes or whatever on the laptop screen. I don't think that can be done in Windows without dual gpu's.

Hello Gary, Commiserations, I've been there and done that, except I already had my lappy. I put together a short demo show of 10 images, put them together in PTE on-screen, included a music piece pre-tailored to the right length, assembled the show and published the exe file, all there on-screen, then showed the finished show. Lots of oohs and aahs, but no follow-up at all, not one person gave it a go. Then I tried to get interest in 20-20 pecha cucha ( the Japanese format for a show, 20 slides for 20 seconds each with live spoken commentary) basically a very simple show, no takers there either. I even tried a lecture on how, when going out with a camera, to shoot with a sequence for a show in mind instead of thinking single shots as a whole new way of taking photographs. Got a lukewarm reception and no results at all. This is a camera club with about 60 members, but all they seem to do is shoot for the club competitions. One member who did an Antarctica trip made a slide show - ironically in Photomagico, the Apple program - which was so full of fancy effects that the images were hardly appreciated. Even then, still no interest. I wonder if the members don't have enough background or theory in photography to tackle a slide show. We have members who do not know how to resize an image, don't use an image editor of any sort let alone Photoshop or Lightroom, They just get their images printed at 12 x 8 at the local processor. They just like taking photographs but "don't bother me with all that theory stuff" seems to be the prevalent view. 'Real photographers' are pretty thin on the ground, the advent of digital photography has seen the rise of photo-shooters who have no knowledge of the craft like the film user photogs in previous years. I am old enough to straddle both disciplines, having been involved in photography for 65 years, I really appreciate the cleanliness and versatility of digital imaging after 20 years of a wet colour darkroom, but these newcomer digishooters don't know anything about that. They shoot everything on auto or maybe Av, have never used a meter or thought about exposure, and apparently don't want to know. Oops, a bit off-topic now, better go, Regards, Colin

Gidday Eric, Well, you've cracked it there, a very good image, tonally speaking at least. I'm not sure about sharpness but that can be optimised with a tripod or copy stand. I have an old Leitz 35mm enlarger, totally obsolete now, but I removed the enlarger body from the column bracket and modified that to hold a camera, which works very well. The idea of using a tablet as a light-box is clever, as the light is already balanced for viewing, and the only problem might be the brightness - but with a copy stand a slow exposure wouldn't be a problem. Also, from a definition point of view, the image from a camera is probably greater than 2000 ppi, which is at least equal to most high-end scanners without interpolation, and a good lens on the camera should be able to compete with a scanner. The only remaining problem might be distortion - barrel or pincushion - from the lens, but that can be corrected in post-processing. A real bonus over scanning is the speed of copying, as scanners are notoriously slow to scan transparencies, So, all in all, you're away laughing, as they say. Congrats! Regards, Colin