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Sorry Eric, but your thesaurus has misled you a bit there. Your screenshot shows that the thesaurus could not find the word 'sibilance' and offered a range of near matches, including 'siblings' - but that is not to say that the meaning of 'sibilance' is 'siblings'. They are in fact two completely different words. Also, the proper word when referring to high-frequency sounds of speech is usually 'sibilants' and not 'sibilance' so the poster that used the word did not get it quite right there. Sorry about the pedantry there.

Perhaps if forum members just said what screen sizes they use you would get an idea of what is most common - if indeed there is a more or less common size. I have two screens, one on my laptop is 1680 x 1050 (16:10) and the other on my desktop is 1920 x 1080 (16:9). A complication for me is the club projector is an older 1024 x 768 (4:3), but it seems to resize down quite well so it's not a problem to show higher spec shows. Regards, Colin

Boy, it's great to see you back again, Jeff. I have kept every one of your shows, and used several at the camera club to motivate the troops into doing their own shows, always plugging PTE of course. This latest show is right up to the standard of the rest, except perhaps I found the transitions a little quick, My taste would be to slow the show down a little, but that's just me. I'm pleased your health appears a bit better Jeff, enough for you to buy a new camera which is great, maybe a Canon 7D perhaps?? though your 300D used on your earlier shows was no slug either. All the best, my friend, from my wife as well, who always watches your shows, Best regards, Colin (New Zealand)

Eric, Have you tried removing the computer monitor, or if a laptop disabling the monitor - Fn-F8 on my Dell? I run a 1920x1080 monitor on my lappy whose screen is 1680x1050 but the laptop will not deliver 1920x1080 until I disable the on-board monitor, and then it automatically switches to 1920x1080 for the external monitor. If I re-enable the laptop screen it immediately drops back to 1680x1050. Good luck, Colin

A late reply owing to time difference between Europe and New Zealand. NZ charges GST (goods and services tax) similar to VAT, but it is always levied as an addition to the nett price of the goods. Goods from NZ sold overseas are not subject to GST, and imported goods up to the value of $400 (I think) are exempt as well. If physical goods are imported over that value, then Customs advise the recipient of the tax amount, and on payment will deliver the goods. Software directly downloaded does not attract tax at all, probably because of potential difficulty in collecting it. This is why people here will buy and download software direct from the overseas source. Although the same item may be available here at retail, with the seller's markup plus GST added to the price the final cost can be twice or more than buying direct with a credit card. I buy all my software this way. The bottom line in all this is that PTE should be sold ex VAT from Wnsoft, with VAT added where required.

Early on I made three blank slides in Photoshop at 1024 x 768, the size of our club projector. One slide is white, one is 18% grey, and one is black. When I start a folder for a new slideshow I copy these three slides into the folder, and use them as required, inserting them where necessary. The black slide us used the most, I don't think from memory I have used the grey slide so far, nor the white, but they're there 'in case'.

Ha. But you only find out when he falls over. When he's scheduled to be the nth speaker, fronts up with his computer - which he hasn't mentioned till now - and wants the setup changed to accommodate his machine, and then can't make it go, the show organisers wear the blame.

Good point. However, PC's with DVI outputs are fairly uncommon - Alienware comes to mind - but I have yet to have a guest speaker turn up with a DVI-equipped PC, whereas it's common with macs. But my main point, albeit I might not have said it too well, is mac people seem to be generally uninformed about what PC's can do, and seem to have this opinion that macs are somehow superior - which they aren't, they're just different.

Amen to that. Our club frequently has guest speakers on artistic or photographic subjects, and quite frequently they bring their own laptop, frequently a mac, as artistic types are wont to use. They expect to use our projector for their show, but often they do not bring a DVI to VGA adapter, so the club now has one of those to accommodate the Mac types. We ran a regional convention a couple of years ago, and one of the top-flight speakers showed up with his powerbook - and couldn't get it going. He fluffed around for what seemed like ages, before I finally asked him what he was planning to show, and he said a powerpoint presentation. I said, Have you got it on a memory stick and yes, he did, so I stuck in my Dell and away it went. He was amazed that my PC could read his powerpoint! What stuck in my throat was a review of our convention that criticised the 'amateur' handling of the projection gear!! None of the several PC's faulted in any way, but this chap's mac spoiled the show for us. Ironically, after the debaclé another chap came up to the table, looked at this guy's mac, pressed a couple of keys, and away it went. So not only was he a mac snob, he couldn't drive it anyway. And, he was forced to admit that the Dell gave every bit as good a picture as his mac could do. Sweet!

This won't help you, but I presume you know there are programs out there that will grab the screen whether or not the printscreen key is disabled? One such program is "Bulent's Screen Recorder" which will grab a screen image and write it to a folder with a single key press, fast enough to grab several frames a second. Basically you cannot guarantee that your images will not be copied, and only the most inexperienced computer users will give up if printscreen is disabled. If it is important enough not to want your images copied, the only safe way is not to use them. This is a truly universal problem. Colin

A couple of not-so-obvious points about file and image sizes. First, Proshow Gold does automatically resize images, as Barry says, and the reason is that PSG is oriented to making DVDs for showing on a TV, so resizes the image for that medium. This can result in the images showing on your computer/projector at less than optimal resolution. It will make executable files, but the definition is as per the TV quality. PTE is optimised for best results for computer/projector display, much better definition than a TV can give - though 1080p is getting closer - so it does not resize. Additionally, if you want to zoom into images you will need a bigger image, e.g. on a 1024 x 768 projector, you can size your images to those dimensions, but if you want to use a 2x zoom, then the image needs to be 2048 x 1536 pixels, so that at 2x zoom the displayed image is 1024 x 768, so no loss of quality. The same applies, of course to other aspect ratios and image sizes. A point to watch is that over-large image sizes makes the computer work harder to render at screen size, so can stress the hardware if it only marginally handles the workload. PTE shows have a frame rate of 60 frames/second, twice the DVD frame rate, so that has a bearing on computer performance as well. Colin

There are at least two independent programs that will rip music from a CD. The two I have are Express Rip and Exact Audio Copy, both free, both work well. You can find them on Google. Colin

There's something wrong with the executable being put into that apparently randomly named folder under the Temp folder. Your actual executable is buried six levels deep in the directory tree and that may possibly be enough to trip PTE up - but it shouldn't be there anyway. When I start a slideshow I make a new folder under My Documents, named for the show I am going to make, and copy all the relevant images and sound files into the new folder. Then I open PTE and navigate to the new folder, pick up the images and sound files and build the show. The Project1.pte file and the executable show file are both written to the new folder as well, so everything is in the one place, and by being under My Documents, when I backup My Docs all sub-folders get backed up as well. If I want to transfer a show from my desktop to my laptop I just have to copy the relevant folder across. HTH, Colin

With due respect to mac aficionados, it is unrealistic to expect a finished mac version in only six months. The current 'state of the art' PTE for Windows has been a number of years in the making and is still being developed. As for mac users 'representing a huge market', I can only say that alongside the Windows market the mac market is miniscule, and whereas the Windows market is open to all, Apple restricts software developers, making it harder to write for mac. Igor has said it will happen in due course, but it seems clear that Windows development is the current priority. My personal comments only. Colin

Perhaps I should mention that 8-bit images are entirely adequate for viewing, as 256 steps per colour are more that the eye can distinguish. The problems come when adjusting images in photoshop or similar, when trying to lighten shadows or darker areas of the image. The distribution of tonal representation in an image is not linear, as gamma comes into play, resulting in more steps available in the lighter areas than dark. So fewer steps in the shadows means a greater change of depth per step, and when one tries to lighten the shadows, the steps become visible as banding or posterizing. Working in 16-bit greatly increases the number of steps available in shadow areas, so lightening dark areas is far less prone to banding. The rule is, all tonal adjustments should be done in 16-bit before converting to 8-bit for printing. Likewise, all your original images should be stored either as the original RAW images, or at least in 16-bit PSD or Tiff files. Converting to 8-bit and Jpeg is always the last step. If you shoot in jpeg, depending of course on the purpose of the shoot, you are severely limited on what manipulation you can apply to the image in the way of tonal adjustment. I am reminded about the story of the old farmer, and his young farmhand who had just finished building a fence across the field. The old farmer said "Is it straight?", and the youngster said "Yep, she's near enough." The old cocky said "near enough is not good enough. I want it STRAIGHT." So the young farmhand set to work and squared and aligned every post until the fence was absolutely straight. The old farmer surveyed the fence and said "Is it straight now?" and the farmhand said "Yep, she's absolutely ruler straight." The old man looked at the fence a while, then said "Well, I guess that's near enough." I sometimes remember that story when I am working on an image. Regards, Colin.

No, not asleep, Peter, just a terminological differentiation raising its head. Colour depth is usually expressed as 8-bit, or 16-bit, referring to the number of steps from black to saturated colour for each of the three primary colours. 8-bit has 2^8 or 256 steps from 0 (black) to peak colour, and 16-bit has 2^16 or 65,536 steps from black to peak colour. Photoshop refers to colour depth as 8-bit or 16-bit, and that is understood to be per colour. So, an 8-bit image (all jpegs are 8-bit by design) has three primary colours each of which has 256 steps, so the combined colour result is 256 x 256 x 256, = 16-odd million possible colour combinations. Don't try to calculate the possible colours in a 16-bit image - 2^48 is BBIIGG! - 28 followed by 13 zeroes! (Of course, most cameras shooting RAW do it in 12-bit, a few later models use 14-bit, but image editing programs pad the pixels with 2 or 4 bits to make 16-bit, or 2-byte pixels to facilitate handling the image in bytes rather than bits.) It all boils down to whether you take the photoshop approach, or the advertising hype approach, 8-bit per colour or 24-bit for three colours, its all the same. But, my original point about being aware of 6-bit - aka 18-bit - screens which sacrifice colour quality for speed of rendering was the main reason for posting in the first place. Will that do, or do I need a lawyer? Regards, Colin

Goddi, Just check to be sure the 2ms screens are 8-bit, and capable of 16-odd million colours. Most 8-bit screens are about 5ms, and the 2ms screens, aimed primarily at gaming and movie use, are usually 6-bit screens which use a form of dithering to reproduce some colours. Almost all laptop screens are 6-bit, the colour is acceptable but not good enough for accurate image manipulation. You can tell the difference by checking the figure given for the number of colours displayed, 16,777,216 for an 8-bit, and 262,144 for 6-bit. For high-quality still images, get an 8-bit and forget the milliseconds. If you can't ascertain the colour count, don't buy the screen. Colin

I have just had a play around with this tool (which I normally do not use), and it appears to me to enhance or improve the image quality of a zoomed image, so I assume that Igor's current description means to 'Improve low quality of resizing'. If that is correct, my suggestion is 'Optimize resized image' or 'Enhance resized image' or 'Improve resized image' or similar. Colin

Hello Peter, Just to add my tuppence worth, you don't say (or I haven't found where you do say) what color space you are using. Despite the claims for wider gamuts with Adobe RGB and Prophoto RGB, the choice for projection should still be sRGB, with a smaller gamut than either aRGB or pRGB. Part of the reason is that jpegs are only an 8-bit image, and the wider the gamut you are using the more widely spaced out the 256 available steps are, and this can lead to visible banding. The usual caveat with wide gamuts is to use 16-bit files, which have 4,096 steps between black and peak color, whereas 8-bit has only 256 steps to cover the same range of tone. Colin

Hello Barry, Hmm, I wonder if you are looking at the jpg size file, which is about 1/10th the size of the unpacked image. A 1920*1080- pixel image is indeed over 2 MB in memory, and PTE has to shove that amount of data on the screen for you to see the picture. Not to sound in the least condescending, all compressed images, jpg, compressed tiff, etc, all expand back to their full size when loaded into memory, and PTE has to fetch from the executable and unpack each image before handing it to the GPU for display, whether using PZR or not. I have been the president of our camera club for three years, and next month will see the AGM when I will retire from that position, and maybe I will have a bit more time to do some show-making Regards, Colin

My trusty calculator tells me that 1920*1080 images are 2,074KB, and 1024*768 images are 786KB, so the 1920*1080 images are 2.64 times larger. The GPU therefore has to work that much harder to display 1920*1080 images, which might be just a tad much for borderline GPU's to handle. Has anybody found this to be a limiting factor with their GPU? Having recently acquired a 1920*1080 monitor, I will doubtless find out for myself in due course, as my AGP card is an Nvidia 6600GT, not the fastest card these days, but quite adequate for 1024*768 - but will it handle PZR at 1920*1080? I shall post an answer when I have done some experimenting. Colin

Hello barry, That's true, 16:9 is a bit skinny for 3:2 but it only means a bit wider bars at the ends; however, shaving 3.75mm off the 24mm dimension of a full-frame 35mm format gives a 16:9 ratio, i.e. the height becomes 20.25mm instead of 24mm. On my modest 300D that means a vertical dimension of just over 1700 pixels, and of course better than that with newer cameras, so enough room for a 1.7x zoom without resorting to pixel-stretching. To be honest, the AOC 22" 1920*1080 was bargain price at $NZ 280, quite a lot cheaper than 16:10 screens, so that was the decider. Colin

Likewise, I voted in the poll for my 1920*1080 22" desktop monitor, but I also use a 1620*1050 laptop monitor which is n't allowed for in the poll. I see from the poll results to date that 1920*1080 is the most common format at 29% of votes so far.

Does nobody here run Opera? I use Opera almost exclusively, the only exceptions being when a site does not open properly, which is pretty rare these days. Opera did have troubles that were not of its own making earlier, when its programmers insisted on sticking to the correct implementation of the various languages etc, at a time when Microsoft's own web page software - Frontpage etc - was just plain slack in its language implementation, and IE was equally slack in running the faulty code. I persevered with Opera through this phase because I believed they were right, and these days it's rare to find a site that is not properly coded - but they still do exist. Opera is now up to version 10.54, and well worth a trial IMO. Colin