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Would it not be easy to create an old-fashioned DOS-style batch file, and put a shortcut to the batch file on the desktop? Do it in Notepad; a simple list of the program paths and titles and write the list to a batch file, like 'shows.bat'. So, in Notepad,type in (for instance); c:\shows\show1.exe c:\shows\show2.exe c:\shows\show3.exe etc. then go to File/Save as and save it as 'shows.bat' in whatever folder you want, then make a shortcut from the filename. A batch file as above will run all programs one after the other until finished automatically. You can put a pause between shows if you like, with the 'pause' command. batch file syntax is very simple and can probably found on the net if you want. Colin

Thanks, Igor. Exception problem is fixed, and program runs well. Colin

Note for Igor; Hello Igor, A problem with beta 3 has arisen while attempting to load a sequence of 13 slides, all sized 1024*768. I marked all 13 slides with Ctrl-A, and clicked the 'add' button to pull the slides into PTE. An Exception occurred which said: "Exception EInvalidOp in module apr.exe at 00205DE7". On clicking 'Close ' on this message, another error report appeared, which said: "Unhandled Exception at 'TPteEngine' disposing (D:\D_Common\Wnlib\Wn32\wpTypes.pas, line 536)". Colin

Yep, I agree with that. The program probably has a fixed size field to accommodate the logo, and a large file would cause an overrun and destroy the subsequent program coding. Perhaps Igor is able to verify or otherwise this line of reasoning. Colin

I see you haven't had any answers to date, a most unusual situation for this group. I tried to replicate your problem with various file formats, but coud not get the error. Re-reading your post, I see now you are trying to frame the entire screen with a large frame. I suspect that PTE has an internal size limitation on copyright files, and your 1280*1024 file is too big. I did try it with a transparent frame at 1024*768 with no problems. I'm using a Dell laptop with a 1.8 GHz dual-core cpu and 3 GB ram and an 8600M-GT gpu, not too different from your setup, but in any case I don't think the error is hardware related. Colin

Thanks for that, Peter. Kind regards, Colin

Well, I'm amazed at the completely different ways to go about assembling a show. I would never have thought about starting with the music, and even now, having read that some do this, I couldn't do it that way. To my - probably strange - way of thinking, the music is there to add support and texture to the slides, rather than the opposite. My modus operandi is either to take shots on a particular subject with a show in mind, or to assemble images I already have into a show sequence, say, from holiday or travel images. I arrange the order of the images by considering the 'flow' from one image to the next, not necessarily in chronological order, and cropping so that the centre of interest of successive images doesn't jump all over the screen from one image to the next. At some stage in the process, a piece or pieces of music may suggest it/them/self/s, I guess at least partly from the effect the images are having on me as they are shown. Implicit in all this is the timing is set by the slides, and the music, when chosen, should fit within, say, 5 to 10% of the show duration, and then I fine-tune either the music or the slide timings so the music ends just as the show fades to black after the last slide. I dislike fading the music away without reaching a cadence, or natural ending. Just trailing off in the middle of a musical phrase jars with me, and to my mind is amateurish. With a number, possibly the majority of shows, the slide timings are all the same, or nearly so, and synchronizing the slides to the music in PTE will do the job easily - but note this move adjusts the slide timings to fit the music, not the opposite. In some shows, however, like the one outlined in my post which started this thread, the slide timings are based on how long it takes to read a text slide, and the timings vary wildly in that show. To distribute the slides equally as 'synchronize' does would destroy the show. I realize that one can vary the timing in the timeline, but I find that a bit awkward, as increasing one slide decreases the next, and the 'knock-on' effect rapidly gets out of control. I believe there is a way to move all slides to the right to preserve subsequent times, but that will alter the length of the show, undoing the synchronize step. Hence my original question, and why I wrote a quickie program to adjust the slide timings proportionally. It is said that people can be divided into three broad groups; the visuals, who think and learn best with pictures, the aurals, who prefer hearing rather than seeing information, and the viscerals, who work on gut instinct. Of course, most people are a mixture of all three, but usually one characteristic dominates. For me, I'm a visual. I think in pictures, plan in pictures, and use pictures to explain my ideas to others. Perhaps this influences the way I put shows together. I hope all that wasn't too boring, Colin

Well, the first run is always experimental, and as I said, the timing was done by estimating how long each slide would take to either read or view, so there was nothing sacred about the initial time of 20:16. Another 90 seconds was only a 7% or thereabouts increase. Thinking about future shows I might make, being able to make modest adjustments to the run time could be very handy. Some reaction to this approach from other readers would be welcome. Regards, Colin

Yeah, there isn't much difference, but as in my first post on this, I find the Irfanview approach is easier and faster, so that's why I use it. Vegemite - great stuff, but every American I've met that's tried it hates it, and says very uncomplimentary things about its appearance and aroma. It's an acquired taste, I guess. Regards, Colin PS: when dealing in pixels, like 1024 by 768, the ppi (not dpi) is irrelevant.

Hi Barry, Well, I didn't expect a competition; I only said what I do, as an alternative to downsizing with Photoshop. But, for the sake of putting my computer where my mouth is, so to speak, here are two versions of the same image, full of fine detail. One was downsized in Photoshop using Bicubic sharper, and the other was downsized in Irfanview using the default settings. They are both from the same tiff file. The image sizes show the source; 1.11 MB for Photoshop, and and 874KB for irfanview, both are 1024*768, saved as jpegs at level 12. (I wonder if the larger size for the PS image implies more artifacts in the image?) There's not a lot of difference, but if you push up the images a bit in Irfanview to get a good look, the Irfanview image is sharper than the PS one, at least to my eyes. Colin

Hello Xaver, Yes, you are right about IV not handling 16-bit images. However, only those with slrs or a select few compact cameras can do RAW files; all others output jpegs which are 8-bit anyway, and I suspect the majority of slrs are used in that mode. Irfanview will save in PNG mode, but it does have only 8 bits. A 16-bit image is somewhat academic, though, because data projectors and almost all video monitors are 8-bit, and most laptop screens are only 6-bit. 16-bit is useful only when modifying an image; once the image is finalized, 8-bit is adequate for printing or viewing. Lastly, although I shoot RAW in aRGB with my Canon, I convert to sRGB for most purposes, except sometimes for competition prints, depending on the scene color content. Kind regards, Colin

Thanks, Peter and Brian, for your comments above. Ok about Audacity, I use a sound editor called Goldwave (also free, and in my humble opinion better than Audacity), which can shorten or lengthen tracks, but it involves a pitch change which is quite noticeable. It will do a Fourier Transform on the track to shorten it without a pitch change, but it impairs the music quality of mp3 files, unfortunately. The other methods, just fading out the music (works for some tracks) or hanging on to the last slide if the timing is only a few seconds out, are not options in this case, as the music is classical orchestra and sounds terrible when just faded out; and as the timing is out by a minute and a half, that's too long to hang onto the last slide. As the show is now, the music ends just as the credits slide fades to black, very 'professional' But, to me, the whole problem can be solved by proportionally adjusting the slides to fit the music, rather than abusing the music to fit the slides, and my question was as to whether PTE will do this. If not, and that is not a criticism of PTE, I will refine my console program to become a useful tool. A console program is one which, while written to run under Windows, looks like a text-based DOS program, and runs in a command window; very fast. It looks at any project(n).pte files in the folder, operates on the newest file, increments the number by one and writes out a new project(n+1).pte file which, when selected in PTE immediately injects the new timings for all slides. Igor uses millisecond timing in the project.pte file, and it is easy to adjust each slide timing. Example; the opening slide in the set was timed for 7 seconds, shown as 7000 milliseconds in the .pte file. Applying the correction factor increased the timing to 7270 milliseconds, a 0.27 second increase unnoticeable when viewing the show. In this instance, since the music is classical, there is no attempt to synchronize the slides to beats in the music; rather the slides are timed so that an average (?) reader can comfortably read the slide before it changes, and the slide timings vary with slide content. Likewise, evenly spaced slides will not work. When I think about it, it surprises me that this topic doesn't seem to have been mentioned before now. Has anyone else ever raised this question? Colin

It appears to do that to me as well, but I think it is an optical illusion. I put a marker on my screen and watched the disc stop, noting where it was in relation to the marker, and looking just at the marker, the disc did not move. I've seen other illusions showing the same effect, one was a series of serrated circles, and when one stared at the central one, the others appeared to rotate slowly. I was intrigued enough to print the image, but strangely, I couldn't see the effect in the print at all, so I concluded that it seems to be a function of the screen scanning, or similar. I did note that in O&A your image didn't have any keypoints, but the rotation happened without them anyway. Queer! Colin

I have just finished assembling a slide show of about 96 images for a family reunion, tracing the ancestor's lives before emigration to New Zealand 100 years ago. After individually adjusting the screen times for each slide - some are images, others are mini-family-trees which take a bit longer to read - the show duration is 20m 16 sec. However, the chosen music is a couple of tracks by Telemann, which runs for 21m 46 sec., so I needed to proportionally lengthen each slide duration to stretch the show by 1m 30 sec. to fit the music. Synchronizing the slides and music would, I think, re-space the slides equally to fit, which I don't want to do, so my question is, is there a facility in PTE to do proportional adjustment of slide times? I got around the problem this time by writing a console program to read the project.pte file and adjust each slide time by a factor derived from the difference in the timing. This worked well, but it was a kludge. If such a facility is not in PTE, then how do others adjust complex slide timings to match the music without destroying the timings? Colin

At the risk of adding more fuel to the fire, I would like to clarify some misconceptions about ppi and dpi, two terms which are wrongly used about 90% of the time - including by such programs as Photoshop. PS's image resizing is always in ppi, but PS calls it dpi - flat out wrong! When talking about images, the term is ppi - pixels per inch. There is no such thing as dots per inch in a digital image; it is simply wrong to use dpi when referring to images. ppi is a measure of how big the image will print; halve the ppi and the image will print twice the linear size, but at reduced digital resolution, of course. Dots per inch is what a printer does, with ink. Modern printers print at something like 4,800 dots of ink per inch horizontally, and 2,400 dpi vertically. If you are printing a 300ppi image on such a printer, the printer will lay down 16 dots of ink horizontally by 8 dots of ink vertically, that's 128 dots of ink for each and every pixel of your image. This allows the printer to mix inks to produce a close approximation to the color of the particular pixel it is printing. The printer always lays down its designed dpi regardless of the image ppi it is printing. Remember, ppi is image-speak; dpi is printer-speak. Colin

Well, they say variety is the spice of life, and there's more than one way to resize an image. I run Photoshop CS2, and, like the Photoshop versions before it, it uses bicubic resampling, whether you do it in image size, or with the crop tool. Problem is, there are better resampling algorithms than bicubic available these days, and one of the best is the Lanczos algorithm, which is used in Irfanview. So, I crop my images to a 4:3 ratio for 1024*768 projectors, using the marquee tool in its constrained mode and making the constrained ratio 4:3, then use Image/Crop to crop out the image I want. I might sharpen at that point, i.e. the last action in PS before I save the images. I can generate quite a lot of different sized images doing this, but then I batch resize them in Irfanview. Irfanview can automatically resize to whatever you specify when setting up the resizng parameters, using Lanczos resizing, and applying a sharpen step after the resize. I find that not only is it quicker than doing it in PS, the resultant images are better as well. The resizing operation processes about one image per two seconds or so, on a 3.00 GHz P4 processor, so for a 96-slide show I did recently, the resize/sharpen operation took all of about 3 minutes. Of course, my slr is way over the top for slide images; but even my old 2.1 MP point&shoot gives excellent results with the above method. Colin

There doesn't seem to be any problem with the wnsoft website. As of 0905 hours UTC on Wednesday 26th March I was able to log in to the secure pages of www.wnsoft.com with no problem and quite fast, about 3 seconds to show the page. Perhaps your ISP has a problem with some sites, or perhaps your spyware/virus program is preventing you from accessing the site. Colin

If you were running the laptop via a mains power supply, you might have been the victim of a power spike. Do you remember anything being turned on or off at the same time? A fridge maybe, or pump? I usually use a mains filter unit in line with my laptop when in unknown environments. Colin

Hello Peter and Dave, Peter, The background texture and the frames thereon were done in Photoshop as a template, used some 14 times in the show. Each time, there is new data typed into the boxes with the text editor on O&A. With three boxes per screen - two parents and a child - I type the father's details in the left box, then with a fresh text application, type the mother's details in the right box, and then same again with the child's name in the lower box. That's three starts of the text editor, and three times I have to reset the font and color. I finally resorted to doing the whole job in Photoshop, and inserting the completed images into PTE. I found that making boxes in PTE was harder than in Photoshop, expecting to do the typing in PTE, until I ran into the font/color problem. Dave, editing the .pte file would work, except that in some places on proper images I did want white writing, so a blanket replace would upset those texts, I guess. Anyway, by using PS instead of PTE I got around the problem, but I think at some stage if Igor could make the selection 'stick' it would be very helpful Regards, Colin

That looks like a good workaround, Ralph, thank you. I am doing a family tree box chart, and as each box is completed, I have to restart Text to do the next box. Resetting the font to Geneva and color to black repeatedly is painful. Maybe just a single character in the right font and color saved with Ctrl-C will do the trick. This is a great forum! Colin

Hi Ken, Thanks for that, but that is the screen I mentioned to do with the 'comments' facility, and does not have any effect on the Text functions in O&A, sorry. Colin

Not that I can find, Ken. I have perused the menus etc but found nothing along those lines. Colin

I am doing a slide show that requires extensive text to be added some slide images, which I am doing in the O&A screen. I can choose the font and the color that I want to use, but the choices do not 'stick'. As soon as I exit the text function, they revert to the default Times Roman and white color, and then when I select text entry again, I have to re-choose the font and color. Also, there seems to be some sort of shadow around the text which does not clear by undoing the drop shadow tick box. In this instance I would like the text to have no shadow. I haven't been able to find whether it is possible to customize these settings. Oddly, the defaults for 'comments' can be changed and they 'stick', but this does not seem to work for the text settings in O&A. Meanwhile I have reverted to doing the text work in Photoshop, but I would prefer doing it in PTE. Does anybody have any clues about this? Regards, Colin

Hello Ray, Lin, and Brian, Well, I might be a Kiwi, but these overseas fellas have beaten me to it. 'Course, they were posting while we were sleeping. Anyway, that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it Yes, BJC (Barry Colquhoun) used a travelling arrow to show his journey, and Lin's produces a thin colored line to indicate travel, but where roads are close together as in NZ, there could be problems with inadvertently covering more than one road at once. I envy you your trip with your granddaughter. I have three g'daughters, two are 5 and 7, but the oldest is 18, and she is very quiet, almost taciturn, and I can't see myself ever being able to do anything like that with her. Pity. Colin PS: Out of four daughters, four sons-in law, and 10 grandkids, only one shows any interest in photography. My youngest daughter, and she owns a 40D, lives in Hong Kong, and makes stunning pictures. I gotta get her onto PTE.

If you convert a raw image to 16-bit, you will actually have a 12-bit image, as the analog/digital converter in the camera is 12-bit (except for the latest cameras like the Canon 40D and high-end Nikons, which have 14-bit A/D converters). The extra 4 or 2 bits in a so-called 16-bit image are not used; they are simply padding so the computer can handle whole bytes. The number of bits has nothing to do with definition; it defines the number of steps between black and peak white in the image. A 12-bit image has 2^12 shades or levels of brightness between black and white (4,096 steps), while an 8-bit image has 2^8, or 256 shades or steps. This, by the way, is considerably more than the eye can discern. If you have an image which requires considerable tone lightening in the shadows, say from underexposure, an 8-bit image will show posterizing, that is, areas or bands of tones with obvious demarcations between, because you're stretching the tone steps to cover a greater tonal range. A 12 or 14-bit image starts with many more steps, or levels, so can stand a lot more tone stretching without obvious posterizing. Also, realize that the monitor you are viewing the image on is almost certainly an 8-bit device, unless you use a laptop or relatively inexpensive LCD monitor, in which case most laptop and LCD screens are 6-bit. I have found that scanning B/W negatives can cause problems with 8-bit images, mainly because most scanners do not handle B/W negatives well if the Dmax (maximum density) approaches or exceeds the scanner limits. You should not take this situation to apply to color scans or digital images. In short, PS Elements is absolutely fine for your images. And, if you shoot jpegs, they are all 8-bit anyway. Colin