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I don't have a problem with reading the forum once I am in, but I cannot get the automatic login to work. I tick the 'remember me' box, but it doesn't remember, and I have to click the 'Login' button two or three times before I get the login screen. My system is XP SP3 and I use Opera 10.4 - the latest version. Overall, I don't think I like this version of the forum software as I did earlier versions. Just a thought - I am in New Zealand, and my access times are generally when Europe and the Americas are asleep, so I don't see any signs of overloading that some mention.

Just to be a bit pedantic here, I have often heard and seen remarks about the dynamic range of the human eye versus digital sensors. Actually, the eye does not have a huge dynamic range at all. When one looks at a bright area, the iris closes down, and when one looks at a darker area the iris opens up. So you have 'exposure compensation' built-in which works automatically below your conscious level. If you can, look at a bright area in the scene, say the sky, and then, without moving your eye, take note of how the darker areas look. Then, look at the darker areas and note how bright the light areas look, again without moving your eye. Fact is, the dynamic range of a good sensor is about 10 or 12 stops, that's a range of 1:2^12, or 1:4000, far greater than your eye can handle without iris control. Colin

Dan wrote: "The laptop is a VAIO VGN-N31Z/W, with a Core 2 T5500 processor, 2 Go RAM. The video card is an Intel GMA 950 with 224 Mo RAM... That should be enough ?" Dan, The Intel GMA 950 video processor is not actually a video card as such, it is a video chip on the computer main board, suitable for ordinary graphics tasks, but not up to the mark for graphics-intensive applications like PTE. Business and general-purpose laptops mostly use the Intel chip, but high-end laptops, particularly those made for gaming purposes have a separate dedicated graphics card with much greater capability than the Intel 950. So, I think your problem is right there. The graphics chip is not up to the task, end of story. Commiserations, Colin

Dan, Compression of the images will affect the size of the PTE .exe file, but when loaded into memory the images expand to their actual size, taking more memory than the program size would indicate. But, I agree that the laptop graphics is probably your problem. Most laptops, specially 'business' machines, have rather elementary on-board graphics, much less powerful than a separate graphics card. Colin

Err, Barry, Modern high-end laptops with dual-core processors, advanced graphics cards and 3 or 4 GB of memory are just as capable as desktop machines, and have the advantage of being portable so you are not in the position of using someone else's computer (of unknown capability) to present your shows on - or lugging your desktop machine, keyboard and monitor along. Older laptops with smaller memory, slow hard drives, and single processors are less able to handle PTE shows, but PTE users would probably not attempt to use such machines anyway. Colin

Here's one person that agrees with you, Moritz. I have been concerned for some time that requests for this and that feature to be added to PTE come up frequently, and generally they want additions that are not, shall we say, central or 'core' to the function of PTE. Sound editing is the prime example; despite several very good sound editor programs being available - Audacity; or Audition, its big brother; Goldwave, and others, Igor is being pressured to re-invent the wheel by including sound editing capability. What will that achieve that sound editors can't? What it does achieve is ever increasing complexity, making PTE more complicated than necessary. What also distresses me is the comparison sometimes made with high-end programs like Pinnacle or Wings which have sound processing - but at about ten times or more the price of PTE. This is like buying a corporate jet aircraft and then wanting it to be an Airbus 380. I guess my popularity meter will read a bit lower after this, but it's what I believe. Regards to all, Colin

Ok then. Umm, why, with over 1,100 posts, you are an 'average' member? Did the counting start again when you emigrated?

Perhaps you should convert one of your show's images to sRGB and see what difference there is

Color space is very relevant to slide shows, as has been attested to by posters in these forums. Shows made with aRGB (a=adobe)look flat and lifeless when projected on sRGB equipment. Show makers do need a working knowledge of various color spaces if they want to optimize the show quality. But, it's really very simple. For slide shows, use sRGB. Regards, Colin

Hello Peter, I have for come time been attempting to get my head around this color space theory, but one thing that really surprised me -though it shouldn't have - is that regardless of the color space, all use the same number of bytes to specify individual colors, e.g. a so-called '16-bit' image uses 6 bytes for every pixel (16 bits or two bytes for each primary color). Whether those bytes are used for an sRGB color space with a narrow gamut, or aRGB or ProPhoto with wider gamuts, the color space is still represented by the same number of bytes. How can this be? because, simply put, the steps between shades of colors are bigger with the wider gamuts, so to use a wide gamut, you sacrifice the smoothness of the image. In 16-bit images it probably doesn't matter, but with 8-bit images you can see the difference. You might gain more colors in the far green and red, but you are using bigger steps to get there. If the subject matter is such that there are no extreme colors involved, then there is no point in using wide gamuts. sRGB is the standard color space that monitors and projectors, and also many printers can handle. aRGB and Prophoto are specialized gamuts that in practice do not help the ordinary photographer with day-to-day images, nor do they render well on sRGB-oriented equipment. For these reasons I stick to sRGB. Best regards, Colin

Hello Brian, I fear you have made a mistake, rare for you! The examples the OP gave came from the error report, and in fact are the complete paths for the files in question, so the backslashes are in order when specifying a pathname. The actual filenames, e.g. 02xa-background.jpg are legitimate, including the dashes, and do not contain any backslashes. However, I see the problem as partly of his own making, as I, and no doubt Igor, would expect to have all relevant files uniquely named and in one folder. Expecting the zip function to gather files from various folders, with identical filenames in different folders is IMHO a bit much, and dare I say, a rather untidy (if not worse) practice. Regards, Colin

If you are making a DVD for standard TV then yes, the sharpness will be degraded. A standard (pal) TV picture is about 720 x 576 pixels, and your 1024 x 758 is scaled down when making the DVD. There is no way round this except to go HDTV. Just by the way, if you specify an image as X by Y pixels, then the dpi (ppi) is irrelevant and does not need to be quoted. Dpi is strictly a printing term, and determines the physical size the image will print at. It has no other relevance. Colin

You may have already done this but I have come across persons who do not know about Large Block Addressing, LBA for short. Basically, NTFS, the file system employed by Win 2000 and later uses 28-bit address coding, which can address an absolute maximum of 137 gigabytes. If you have a bigger drive than that, any address beyond 137 GB gets wrapped to the beginning, overwriting data previously recorded. Windows has the option of using LBA addressing which can address literally terabytes, but paradoxically is by default switched off when installing the operating system. There are utilities available on the net (google LBA) that will switch LBA on, enabling correct addressing of these 500/1000 GB drives. If your LBA is switched off you are in trouble as soon as your data exceeds 137 GB.

You guys all seem to take this unwarranted invasion of your files by aggressive anti-malware programs with some equanimity. Me, I would be spitting tacks if it happened to any irreplaceable files of mine - in fact I would threaten to sue the program makers. It is just not good enough to presume that if they think a file is infected that they simply delete it. That is way overstepping the bounds, to delete MY property because THEY think it is infected. This is why I do not run any of their anti-malware crap programs. They actualy cause more grief and anguish than getting an actual virus. A bit like the joke about a chap smacking his friend on the head and knocking him over. The friend picked himself up and said "why did you do that?", to which the first guy said "there was a mosquito on your head.", to which the friend said "well, next time, leave the mosquito, it's less of a problem than you smacking me on the head". I trhink we get smacked around the head by these anti-v programs, almost entirely for no good reason. But then, I'm a bit of a maverick in my views.

Well, I might be a maverick here, but I do not run any antivirus software like Norton or McAfeee, or AVG. Overall, they are getting just too clever with fancy programming to be reliable. If they are so wrong as to take out perfectly legit files, what chance is there that they miss baddies? Nobody seems to answer that question, except laboratory tests with viruses that reveal there is no one antivirus tool that is 100% effective - and a lot of them are worryingly poor, only about 60% - 90% effective. I do run Zonealarm Extreme Security, also do regular scans with Advanced System Care and SpyBot S&D,and my computer is behind a WPA2-protected modem-router sporting a hardware firewall. In 25 years of programming and using computers I have not had a serious infection from any malware. Anti-malware software is advertised by the makers in lurid terms of what might happen to your computer and your data thereon, reminiscent of Chicken Little who ran around crying that the sky is falling. This is the ragged edge of sales advertising, scaring people into believing unrealistic scenarios of disaster and mayhem if you do not run their program. ZoneAlarm has two major advantages. One, it will not allow any program that has not had permission from the computer operator to access the internet, so even if you do get hit by a phone-home trojan, it is caught before it can transmit anything, and ZA tells you the name of the program trying it on. Two, it 'stealths' your computer so any fishing attempts, or probes, will not be answered by your computer, keeping your presence on the net secret. In conjunction with a properly set up modem/router with a hardware firewall, about the only way you can catch a virus is if it is piggy-backed in on a legitimate download, and if you are careful what you do download, the chances of that are very small. Just another point of view.

Hello all, This is the first show I have put up on the forum. I had a number of images taken in January 2006 in Hong Kong, and decided to put a show of sorts together for my camera club, since Chinese New Year is topical at this time. Apologies for the mix of horizontal and vertical slides, a slide show was not in my mind at the when I shot these images. If all goes well we should be in Hong Kong again for Chinese New Year 2011, and if it comes to pass, I'll have a better show in mind then. Meanwhile, if you'd like a look, you can download from http://www.mediafire.com/file/ym1zzngmjti/Chinese Christmas_New Year.exe It's about an 85 MB file. Colin

With respect, you are doing it the hard way. You can open a pdf document directly into Photoshop, then immediately save it as a jpg or dng image, which you can then use in PTE directly as a slide. No need to track external documents from within PTE. When you open a pdf in PS you will get a dialog box which inter alia asks for dpi (ppi), defaulting to 72. Since most pdf's are from a 300 ppi original, I set the PS dpi to 300, which results in an image about 2000*3000 pixels more or less, which you can then resize to your show requirements. Colin

Hello Xaver, I looked at that topic, and I remember reading it when it was 'live'. But, apart from Peter extolling the capability of Wings Platinum to handle complex audio tasks, the thread opinions vary from those wanting audio capability to others claiming that Audacity or Audition was the better route, citing inter alia how cluttered the PTE screen would be if filled with many audio channels as well as picture information. I remain convinced that a separate audio editor, like a separate image editor, is the way to go. Nobody has yet said that Wings can operate in .wav format, then save the file as a lossless .wav file before converting to MP3 or other desired format for incorporating into the slide show. Audacity/Audition and Goldwave can do that, just as Photoshop can work in and save images as 16-bit tiffs, converting to jpg or dng files for PTE. Also, assembling multi-track sound in PTE does not save the composite audio file, and if something crashes one would have to reassemble the sound from scratch, whereas a track made in Audacity and saved will be available for immediate use if the PTE version crashes. The same argument also applies to images. Lastly, putting advanced editing facilities into PTE will inevitably increase the price, the program complexity, and the learning curve for new users, a potentially counterproductive step. Regards, Colin

There have been a lot of posts in these forums about sound editing in PTE, and I confess to being puzzled as to why it is thought necessary or desirable to edit sound within PTE. With software available like Audacity (free) and Goldwave (about $US49) - specialized sound editors which are far ahead of what PTE could be expected to offer, what is the point in wanting PTE to 're-invent the wheel', so to speak? Personally, I am perfectly happy for PTE to have no sound editing capability at all, just as it does not offer advanced image editing capability, for which there are many programs from Gimp to Photoshop available. PTE is an outstanding slide-show program for assembling images and sound into breathtaking shows. Preparation of those images and sound tracks is not, and should not be, part of PTE. The particular problem described in the first post in this thread, reducing the music level while a voice-over is active, is trivial to handle in Goldwave (the sound editor I use). Goldwave, and I presume Audacity, has timelines calibrated down to milliseconds. With both music and voice-over tracks in parallel on screen it is very easy to reduce the music level exactly where you want it, and then combine the tracks into one composite track. Further, you can do all your editing and mixing in the lossless .wav format, and then convert to lossy mp3 as a final step. By saving the .wav file, you can revisit the track at any time for revision without loss. I cannot see that we could expect PTE to do anything like this, any more than I would expect PTE to be able to emulate Photoshop for editing images. Well, that's my two cents (and worth every penny, as some would say ) Colin

I second that. Goldwave is not that expensive, about $US48 and like PTE it is a lifetime license. I have tried to use Audacity, but I find Goldwave is preferable, at least for me. Colin

Hello Dan, Go into Start/Settings/Control Panel, double-click Add/Remove Programs, and remove PTE 6.0 from your system, then reinstall. This should guarantee an uncorrupted program, then try your slide show again. Colin

From Igor himself: "PicturesToExe license terms provide two variants if you bought one registration key: - For one PC only (for any number of users). - Or only for one user who has two or three PCs (home PC, laptop and PC at his office, for example). In other cases you have to buy second registration key." This is as plain as it can be. A single machine can be used by more than one person - but only one at a time. ONE user with two or three machines - with a single user, only one machine can be usefully running the program at any given time. The central point is that one license can only be used by one person at any one time. If you are on your desktop and your wife is on the laptop, both using PTE at the same time, that violates the license conditions. HTH, Colin

You're right about that, Andrew. Life is a continuous learning curve, and sometimes goes in directions one would never have thought of. Ed's experiences, along with mine and yours, makes me think that those who organize AV shows should lay down some guidelines about what subject matter is suitable - not so tight as a 'set subject' as in still photography, but designed to eliminate disconcerting or upsetting subject matter etc. I am a radio amateur (ham) and there is, or was when I was active, an unwritten law that one could talk about anything except politics and religion, a wise move. Maybe a similar no-go in AV show competitions and displays such as religion, politics, and war could be made part of the entry rules. This is not to say that such shows have their place, but that place is not in general AV screenings. Maybe shows could be graded as in commercial movies, e.g. General, Parental Guidance, R18 etc (or variations of for AVs). This might give an audience some warning of what is to come, rather than just dumping the show on them. Regards, Colin

Andrew, Well, commiserations on your show not making the grade. FWIW, the reason IMHO is not to do with the presentation, or the lack of 'bells and whistles' effects. You hit the nail when you said "and displayed the horrors of the place in full colour." The fact is, a serious show about a tragic situation will lose because of the message, and not because of the presentation, especially when shown together with non-serious shows containing no poignancy or introspective qualities. I took the liberty of showing Auchwitz to my camera club here (New Zealand) when we were offering help on fine-tuning it and the dead silence, broken only by one member getting up and leaving the room, was disconcerting to say the least. The member who left is an Austrian immigrant to NZ, and he later apologised for leaving, saying the show opened bad memories for him. He was quite upset. I hope this post doesn't offend you, Andrew, just my take on your loss there. Regards, Colin

Gary et al, I just had a play with your sequence, under XP Pro SP3, and the twitch is clearly visible in the PTE programming screen as as well as in Preview. Moving the slider under the image pane back and forth at about the 7.860 second mark will reveal the jumping. This time-mark corresponds with the change from slide 2 to slide 3, and leads me to think that the text children, although seemingly in the same place on both slides is in fact out by a pixel or two. Perhaps the granularity of the positioning coordinates is not fine enough to differentiate down to pixel level. Two sugggestions come to mind; inserting a 1-second fade between slides 2 and 3 to mask the jump, or - my favoured solution - is to do all titling and text overlays in Photoshop first, unless you want differential zooming, in which case you will have to use your current method. Colin PS: I added a fade of 500ms to slide 3 and shifted the zoom start to about 8.550, which seemed to fix your problem.