stevemul
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Posts posted by stevemul
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Firstly, many, many thanks to everybody who is helping here.
I am sorry I'm not replying as quickly as I would like to every msg. I mentioned above I am in the process of moving house from Hobart to Sydney which is a trip of around 1500 kilometers and includes a ten hour crossing of Bass Straight so I have a heck of a lot on my plate at the moment. I'll be settled in Sydney I hope by the 3rd week of January and will try everything that has been suggested at that time. The new home is a scaling down in size so we have to deal with what to keep and what to pass on. I'm sure many of you have had similarly joyous episodes in your lives
In the meantime I will try to answer a few of your questions :-
I have used 6 images in my test slide-show, one of which is the image I used in an earlier msg to show the effect.
I hope I have been clear that the effect occurs during the transition only. Once each image is static on the screen there is no problem.
To show you the effect I paused the screen towards the end of one transition using the spacebar in PTE. It's interesting that although the image was then static it was still showing the effect from the transition. I was then able to do a screen capture which is what I attached to the earlier msg.
The six images used are of Venice taken early in the morning when a mist had rolled in from the sea so they would have been taken roughly facing east. The date they were taken was 1-Oct-2006.
However, they are far from the only images I have seen the effect. It tends to occur when there are large areas that are very identical and usually light in colour, so a light colour sky would be typical.
After all your helpful suggestions I feel 95% sure it is the Thinkpad video card and probably the answer is another laptop. It's a shame that laptops seem to have problems with slideshows as they are such useful PCs for taking slideshows to various different venues to display.
If only PTE was as good as Proshow with this problem because in every other aspect of Image Quality PTE absolutely beats the pants off ProShow.
My thanks again to you all .... now back to the moving process and sorting out some of my photo and PC accumulations (junk!?) from many years.
Best regards,
Steve.
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I tried Hardware Acceleration On and Off ... No significant Difference.
I also downloaded and installed version 4.49, again no significant difference.
A Happy New Year to you all.
Best regards,
Steve.
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Tom and Brian,
Thanks again to all who are helping here.
I'll try to answer some of your questions .....
T60, 2gb Ram, XP Pro
PTE 5.1
Hardware Acceleration is turned on. I think that's the default as I've never changed it.
It would be interesting to try my test project under PTE 4.x. I'll try that and turning off Hardware Acceleration as soon as I get a bit of spare time.
Best regards,
Steve.
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Brian,
Many thanks for your detailed reply. I stand reprimanded for my lack of proper termination.
However, the problem occurs exactly the same when I have a cable connected from the Thinkpad video output to a Data Projector. The effect is seen exactly the same on the data projector.
Under these circumstances I assume the video output is correctly terminated ?
I do have an LCD monitor here at home I can try for testing. In 2 weeks I am moving from Hobart across the ditch called Bass Straight up to Sydney so I am a little time-stressed to say the least !! However I will try to find the time to test this.
Best regards,
Steve.
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Hi Al,
Steve,Is your display colour quality set at the highest setting (e.g. 32 bit)?
Yes it is.
Best regards,
Steve.
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Steve,
Two questions for you:-
Q.A
The "Sample Picture" you Posted ~
(1) Was this an origional JPeg from a Camera ?
(2) Was the Image scanned in from a Magazine ?
(3) Was it an origional Photograph scanned in ?
Q.B
(1) Are you driving the External Monitor directly from the Laptop ?
(2) When doing this,is the Laptop Screen active also ?
(3) if both are active, are the two Images the same size ?
I have a very funny feeling that this effect is due to "Ghosting"
or R.F Pickup from the External Monitor Cable. It may be that the
Video Cable is not screened (many ar not) ~ it can also be a artifact
called "intermodulation" this sometimes happens when you set Monitors
to reproduce the same Image at different sizes from the same source.
Is the "effect" visible when you use each Monitor by itself solely ??
That test will tell its own story.
Brian.conflow.
Hi Brian,
Thanks for your msg.
The Answers :-
A. The image was shot RAW and converted to a JPEG, then resized to 1400x1050.
B. My tests are with the external video port turned on but no cable and data projector connected. Both the laptop monitor and the external port are Active at the same and the resolution is 1024x768 on both. The problem appears the same whether I'm at the camera club using their data projector or when I am testing at home with nothing connected.
The problem appears to be much worse when driving both the internal and external displays. The screen shot I posted was with both the internal display and the external port on but no cable or data display connected.
Thanks again for all your help to try to resolve this.
Best regards,
Steve.
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Brian,
Thanks again for your help.
I have looked at the site and found a few references to 'shimmer' type problems in the display on the T60. One inreference to a video game where the game software was blamed. Other references suggested > 1 Gb RAM; I have 2Gb. Another suggested the latest driver fixes these sorts of problems. I upgraded but can see no improvement.
I can not find any reference to 'Direct TV' and my PC does not have a TV type output socket.
I have looked at the ATI Control Center Software. There are many parameters that can be changed. I've experimented without seeing any real improvement ... also, I have to admit, without any real knowledge myself of what the parameters mean and their effect.
FWIW, I made a screen grab shot of the effect. It is roughly 50% of the full screen.
The effect is clearly at its worst when driving both the PC display and the external video port at 1024x768.
Thanks.
Steve.
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Barry and Brian,
Many thanks for your suggestions which I will look into.
One thing I probably didn't make clear in my first msg was that the problem I see with PTE is not there at all in ProShow. I think it must be something in the way PTE renders/displays the transitions between images that causes the problem.
This morning (Tasmanian Time) I have tested things a bit further. I tested both PTE and ProShow versions on a desktop PC. No problems with either PTE or Proshow. So my conclusion is that the problem only occurs on the Thinkpad Laptop and then only with PTE, not ProShow. Further testing shows the Thinkpad with PTE is at its worst when driving the external video port at 1024x768 which very unfortunately is the exact configuration I use to display these slide-shows using a data projector at my photo club. Too bad.
BTW, the desktop PC has dual Eizo monitors, one 1280x1024, the other 1600x1200. I tried both Proshow and PTE slide-shows on both monitors. If ever anyone wanted proof of the superior image display quality of PTE this proved it without a shadow of doubt. Fantastic PTE ! In contrast Proshow looks so soft to be almost out of focus.
I suspect the answer to this problem is probably to use a different laptop for PTE presentations but that's an expensive solution when in virtually every other respect the Thinkpad is an excellent machine.
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I began producing Slide Shows with Proshow but became very frustrated with Jerky Presentation particularly with panning and zooming images and scrolling text.
Then I discovered PTE 5 and was delighted with much smoother panning and zooming plus better image quality.
However my PTE shows are let-down by one major flaw, a shimmering effect when transitioning between slides. I assume this is what I see described in these forums as the Moire Effect. It doesn't occur on all images, mostly on those with large areas of similar colour, a gray sky is a typical problem area.
I have one slide-show that includes several images taken on a misty morning. These images have large light gray areas of mist and sky. There is no pan or zoom just a standard 3 second fade in/out. The shimmering of the light areas in the images during the fade transition is horrible.
I have read these forums and followed the advice to size the image to the screen, in this case 1400 x 1050 pixels on an IBM Thinkpad T60. It is still awful. I have also turned off Anti-Virus, the Internet, Wireless, etc., but I can not get rid of this horrible shimmer.
Any ideas or suggestions would be most appreciated.
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This takes a little explanation, so bear with me .......
Thanks for your suggestions, Lin. After reading your post I went back to Beta 10 and found the solution. It has made a huge difference so I will explain it here just in case others make the same mistake as me.
When you set smooth, accelerate, etc., the initial setting is for all keypoints for the selected object and intermediate keypoints become ineffective. To use more than three or more keypoints click on the button(s) under Pan/Zoom/Rotate as applicable. Then, and here's the bit I have just discovered, don't select smooth, accelerate, etc., but click on "Setting Up". You will then see an item for each of your keypoints. Alongside each keypoint item click on the blue words "Separate here". Then you can individually set the linear/smooth/accelerate/etc., for each pair of keypoints. Brilliant, just brilliant.
The improvement in this part of my sideshow over Beta 9 is fantastic!
Different, but slightly related .... I made a test show of scrolling text from bottom to top, like cinema credits. I made test projects in PTE, Proshow Gold 3.0 and Proshow Producer 3.0. Both the Proshow products are very jerky on my PC ..... PTE is as smooth as silk !
Thanks again, Lin, and thanks also to PTE's developers.
Best regards,
Steve.
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I have a slide show made in Beta 9 where a slide has 4 key points; it starts zoomed in to part of the bottom of the image, zooms out to the whole of bottom of the image, pans up to the whole of the top of the image and finally zooms in to just part of the top of the image. This worked well in Beta 9 except for the sudden, jerky transitions at each keypoint so I was looking forward to Beta 10 and smooth, accelerate, etc..
I installed Beta 10 and set the first keypoint to Smooth. The 3 other keypoints set automatically to smooth BUT ..... although the slide show now smoothly goes from the 1st keypoint to the last it totally ignores the zoom and position settings of the intermediate keypoints.
I want to decelerate and then accelerate at all keypoints so that all transitions look smooth. Could someone explain how I can do this please.
Many thanks,
Best regards,
Steve.
PicturesToExe Deluxe 5.5 Release Candidate 5
in General Discussion
Posted
Missing Image Files in Project.
I opened a project which has 5 missing image files out of maybe 80 files. However I can't read the full file description in the Error dialog box. The dialog box isn't big enough.
Could you make the dialog box sizable please or provide some alternative solution so I can see what the files are especially when they are in a fairly deep folder structure.
Many thanks.
Steve.