Davidh12

Discovered something myself recently. When PTE crashed doing animations on my laptop outputing to projector. The cause I discovered was I had set the power options to medium to get a bit more life from the battery. When I changed this back to best quality (forget the exact wording, not near laptop) everything was fine again. David

Andy Your correct I meant bigger display on desktop (20 inch) and increased pixel count. I was playing some shows I had created 1024 x 768 and it does stretch but the pixilisation, if that's the right term, was noticable. As you say of course it is not noticable on the projector which is 1024 x 768 no matter how big the image is displayed. Next show I do I shall try 2048 x 1356 and see how it turns out, thanks. Barry It would be nice to leave the photos at full resolution but computer resources and all that mean I have to cut down the size. it should play well on my machine but if I send them to friends with less powerful ones then it's a problem. I have one of your DVD's on picture borders I must revisit it (I can't remember if it was a png or not) that' an idea thanks. David

Thanks Jeff That's what I was after .Post or send send me a copy when you get one for this year and I'll try and make it. Thanks Ken I'm much more informed about Snods Edge. David Sorry to hijack the interesting post on aspect ratio. I haven't really solved the problem myself. My work so far has been 1024 x768 but having recently aquired a bigger screen set up for 1680 x1050 it's becoming an issue. Should have really gone for full HD I suppose but not really set up for that yet.

Jeff What is Snod's edge? Feel I'm missing out on something. David

Freebird There is another program you could try. 'Roxio Easy Media Creator 10' in this suite of programs there is one called Videowave. This will allow you to combine video and pictures. The program is not that difficult and will take a wide variety of video file formats AVI, Mpeg2 and Mpeg4 the last of these a lot of the latest camcorders make. The program costs about £40. It is also possible to capture from video but that gets a lot more complicated. David

To right! I downloaded a trail copy of Proshow Gold because I wanted to add a bit of video. put the stills were vastly inferior compared to the quality of PTE. That is bye the bye, what is important is that you have a great time away Igor you deserve the rest. You and your team have surpassed yourselves with another great upgrade in 5.5. Thanks. David

Looking through the previous threads of Ray and Lin regarding flash players I have been playing around a bit with a video converter I saw on the same site, Aplus video converter. Downloaded this on trial and playing around with it into different formats. (There is novelty value in converting your pte show to3PG to play on your phone). I also downloaded on trial Avs Converter that looks a bit better and will input MP4 from camera but the output qulity does not seem to be as good as Aplus. There is quite a few of these programs about. Anyone recommend one before I fork out for probably the Aplus? Thanks David

I suppose it depends how people define AV. For some it is Just bunching a group of related slides together and adding a bit of music and I have done that myself. OK I have tried to be a bit more thoughtful of matching slides, and timing transitions to the music but all that I wanted to do was show some photos I had taken at an event. For some that wouldn't really be AV in the truest sense I have heard as much said at competitions. For those people and maybe the author of Barry's comment AV's should be researched and compiled documentary's or well thought out and worked stories. I have had a go at one of those and there is a lot of hard work involved it's enjoyable and I could understand (if not agree with) the snobish, nose up at the former simple shows. I have seen a couple of Barry's shows in which I would say fall into another category that of Art. Wonderful images merged into one another with great use of the 'third image'. All different but the same? You've brought up and interesting topic Barry David

I have had Vista Service Pack1 installed on my Laptop for, must be a month at least, with no problems. In fact it could be my imagination but I am sure downloading from the net and copying files and a few other things are working much faster. What I would be interested in hearing is if anyone has installed the new XP Service Pack. Since the warning on this forum I have turned my updates off in my desktop which has XP. Any updates from those in the know? David

I have a Canon Powershot A620 that delivers really good sharp results in good lighting condition but disappointed when it comes to flash photos. I have been thinking about buying a new camera and have been looking at the new Canon 450D but have been put off by reviews saying the Jpegs are a bit soft. Shooting raw would be nice but I like to take lots of pics if I'm taking for an av's and don't think that would be practical. My other thought was the new entry level Nikon or new Pentax. So may take the above suggestion and try them out in the shop and see which one feels right. Thank you for starting this timely (for me) thread Dom and the option of a bridge camera. David

Dear Confused of Ely Don't worry yourself my love. If it works for you just do it. Don't worry what the other boys say. I use Vista as well with no problems on my lap top its just I know someone, we'll call him Mr desktop who feels terribly inadequate he can't run Vista and is rather worried what they plan to do to his XP. Claire

Lin & Xaver Thanks for the reply and the advice. Looks like I will be sticking with XP as it is then. I have that on the desk top with Vista on the lap-top which although a higher spec machine I don't use that much, only to feed a projector. Thanks too to Brian and those members who keep us up to date with what's going on. Great forum this. David

Brian Maybe what Jeff was meaning and it had crossed my mind too, was if you don't install SP3 then you wont have access to any new patches like security etc. Do you know if it will still be possible to install future security patches if you don't install SP3? David

Tom I'm not sure about XP Pro but it is my understanding that only if you go to the new 64bit Vista will you be able to read 4Gb of Ram. 32 bit Vista only reads up to 3 Gb. You can have more but it won't use it. I stand to be corrected of course. David

John Surely a way of doing it would be to take a note of the length of your music and divide by the number of slide you have this will give you the number of seconds between each slide which you can set in project options. you might have to subtract the time you use for animations to be more accurate. But even though it is just for family a show timed to the music will be much better than one that just might hit an obvious change point ever so often even for the ordinary layman as Fh1805 suggested. David

Annette I don't know how bad you felt your pictures were. It might just be worth mentioning that normal DVD quality will in no way be near the quality you see on the computer screen. I use 5.1 and have been very happy with the results I get in video builder but I do have a good spec machine. David

Lin Thanks for the link and tutorial. Like you I had the same problem with Firefox but after your post downloaded it fine in Internet Explorer. David

To those who asked I don't know if this will help. Attached is a saved zip file of a menu show I use. It has an introduction sequence then the menu slide with buttons calling the various exe shows (not included). Created in objects & animation. Have a look. Hope it's helpful to those who asked. You will notice in this show Hardware acceleration is turn off. As Xaver states above this is important in menu programs, can't remember the reason now, but there are problems if you don't. Which really means you should avoid animation in this menu show. David start_menu.zip

I have to disagree I don't think the word 'shift transition' is a good way of putting it. (I know that is what is happening) But the confusion would come in the thinking that you wanted to shift a set of points from 'A' to 'B'. I don't have a problem with cutting them and ignoring them in the short time it takes to program in the transition points on the fly. (they are far right and you don't catch up with them.) I wonder if it would be possible for Igor to have the cut points which go to far right to be greyed out or a different colour to highlight they are only temporary? David

I have not worked with 5.5 a lot but from what I can see the new timeline will need a bit of time to get used too and can be a bit confusing. I operate like has been discribed in the post above. Moving the slides into the slide list. Going into timeline clicking on the first time point going to the last time point, holding down the shift key and clicking to highlight all the time point then clicking on 'cut transition' and all the timed points go. Except they don't, they move to further down the right of the timeline. However what you can do is ignore them. Proceeding at the start (taking as read you have added the music) press play on the mini player and when you want to add a slide click 'new transition' and your slide is added when all the slides are done the ones that were to the right have disappeared. I hope I have described that well enough. Try it and you will see what I mean. From what I can gather from conversations the program must have a timepoint for a slide. Although FH1805 stated that the transition points in the timeline can be processed independently of the images in the Slide List is true, what's confusing is that they are linked more than previous versions so if there is a slide it must have a time point. Even if when you cut transition it gets temporarily placed on the timeline on the far right. Perhaps others can describe it better, or tell me I am on another tree somewhere it is late here, but that's how I figure it and it seems to work for me. Just don't let the cut points being still there confuse you. David

Well done to Igor and the wnsoft team Like others before I put in transition points on the fly so really pleased you have sorted this out in Beta 4. 5.5 is looking really great. Now like the new look! David

Idofut I have found a good plan if you want to move files is in the main PTE program click 'Files', 'Create backup in zip'. This will create a zip file with everything you need for the show slides music .PTE file You can copy to the other drive and unzip. Perhaps you could temporarilly copy the files back to where they were, do the process, then delete them again. David

Colin The other way I have found to get round the problem of different formats is to duplicate the picture on screen (say landscape) but tint/reduce saturation/blur and use it as a background with a picture (portrait) framed or unframed in the forground. Much like in this country they do on the television for showing football scores or information and I image similar in NZ TV. It doesn't jar the same way as it blends into the previous picture without noticing to much. Hope I have explained it well enough. I used it for a show of old pictures of our family in fact it's quite nice two portrait format side by side in this way. David

Some other AV's just been looking at on You Tube. If you type in avpeter and search you will see some from Peter Coles some very good montages among them. David

I can second Maureen's suggestion to take a look at Ian Bateman's 'The Gatthering' I have seen it live and it is superb and all done on Pictures to Exe, who needs video! David