Tom K

My PC has a 1.8GHz P4 with an NVIDIA GeFOrce4 Ti4200 video card. Both shows ran completely smoothly, no jerks or stutters, no error messages. I assume both are supposed to loop indefinitely, as that is how they ran until I hit Esc. The PteShow's music did not appear to be synchronized, just looping at a diferent rate than the visuals. I would have preferred to have seen a synchronized show, as I think that is what most people want to create. And like everyone else, I'm wondering about being able to vary the zoom and pan rate within the show, as all the slides looked like they were moving at the same rate. I'm also wondering about things like starting off with a stationary picture, then starting up slowly to pan/zoom across it at a constant speed, then slowing back down to stationary again. Also wondering about whether there will be improvements to transferring to DVD, where there are no video card requirements and it's a more universal platform (these days). I guess hopefully we'll be finding out next week. Thanks Igor!

April, sounds like you've been doing it the hard way. It might seem reasonable that if you assign a time to each frame that they would all add up to the same total time, but it doesn't work that way. As you've found out, there will be slight variations when you play it on different machines that accumulate to throw everything out of synch. If you're doing a simple slideshow that doesn't rely on timing it doesn't much matter, but if you have a music background that you want to synch to, you need to use the timeline function. Here are a couple of places with tutorials. Select the PTE Timeline Guide here: http://www.bishopthorpe-camera-club.com/Re...s/resources.htm Beechbrook Cottage hosts a number of slideshows. Download AlRobin's PTE 101 Tutorial (it may not necessarily be on the page I've pointed to so look around if you don't see it): http://www.beechbrook.com/pte/index.asp?categoryid=&page=7 You might also download some other shows from Beechbrook just to get ideas and see what's possible. I hope this helps but if it doesn't, don't hesitate to ask for more help. There are people a lot more knowledgeable than me on this forum. Although, sometimes knowing a lot can get in the way - it seems to me that the initial replies assumed that you had used the timeline and produced a true synchronized show, and were thinking it was a hardware problem. Unfortunately the path to creating a synchonized show is not necessarily obvious to the uninitiated. Good luck!

With the generous slide times above there shouldn't be any synch problems on CD vs hard drive. You mention that you spent hours setting up the slide show to be synched to the music. How did you do that? Did you use the timeline or did you adjust individual slide display times? Unless you're synching using the timeline, different machines will not produce the same result as your original machine.

This is a show that I put together a couple of years ago. Since I'm the digital photography buff in our engineering department, I was sent around with a company digicam (a Sony that wrote 640x480 shots to floppy) to take pictures of everyone in the department for our annual Christmas lunch. So I put together a 50-second show using the theme from the television show "ER". By the way, that's me in the last few shots. And if you look closely you can see the PC screen reflected in my eyeball as well as my glasses. The show is set up to freeze on the last frame so you'll have to hit "Esc" on your keyboard to get out when it's done.

Thank you for the comments Patrick. Your English is vastly superior to my French, which consists of, "Je suis desole'. Je ne parle pas Francais, parlez vous Anglais?" Still, my girl and I were able to get along quite nicely for a week in Paris with only that, thanks to the grace of your countrymen. (Our week in Paris is the subject of another slideshow, which I would like to upload once I get it to a managable size.) First, the music is "Classical Gas" by Mason Williams. I actually selected it several weeks before we went to Reno, and was roughly composing the slideshow in my mind even while we were there. I thought I had set the mouse cursor to hide itself after a few seconds, I don't know why that didn't work. Seems to work on my PC here. I put the navigation bar there because the show is so fast paced, people sometimes want to pause and go back to look at pictures that had just zipped by. Yes, not only the planes are sweet.... Your idea of using a series of smaller images during rapid sections intrigues me - I shall have to consider this in the future. And yes, the sound of the aircraft is incredible. I truly believe a blind person could enjoy the experience of being at the Reno Air Races. Hmmm, mixing in the sound might be possible. I did tack on the sounds of Strega and Rare Bear (two top race planes) at the end of my 2003 show but I hadn't thought about adding to the overall soundtrack. Might be possible.... Thanks again Patrick.

Hi all, I've just uploaded a slideshow of the 2004 Reno Air Races to the Beechbrook Cottage website. I've been using PTE for several years but this is the first slideshow that I've released for public viewing. I didn't build it with a general audience in mind - there are shots of my friends and me in it - but it should give an idea of what the Reno Air Races are like. There are airshows all around the country but Reno is unique. There is no other place where you will see every year (mid-September) a pack of heavily modified warbirds pushing the limits, the engines just that close to coming apart, rounding the pylons at speeds approaching 500mph. It's a sight (and sound!) that raises the hair on the back of my neck. They also race jets, biplanes, sport planes and WWII T-6 trainers. In addition to the races there is always an assortment of aerobatic acts and military demonstrations (often including the Thunderbirds or Blue Angels) but it's the racing that makes it a unique experience. It's the world's fastest motorsport - no auto racing comes anywhere near 500mph! Since this is my first upload I'd like for people to post feedback here. And for what it's worth I have also done shows for 2002 and 2003. Thanks, Tom

Google is your friend. Use it. http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclop.../ken_burns.html

Audacity is the recommended free software for music editing here, mentioned time and time again. However I thought I'd bring up another free program, Wavepad. I did a forum search and did not find any discussion of it before. As implied by the name it's a very basic editor, but it is free. Check it out: http://www.nch.com.au/wavepad/

1. "Ken Burns" effects - smooth scrolling and zooming. I've done reasonable scrolling of panoramas with the "push" effect by breaking them up into individual slides, but there's still a hitch between frames. If I don't allow at least 1/10 of a second between the end of the push and the start of the next slide it may redo the previous slide, too. Interestingly, it looks smoother when transferred to a DVD than it does on the PC. 2. The ability to lock or fix a slide (or block of slides) to a certain point in the synchronized timeline, and be able to space adjacent slides from it. For instance, start with a slideshow with 30 slides and a two-minute music file. When initially put into the timeline each slide is onscreen for 4 seconds. But let's say that I want the first slide to be onscreen for 10 seconds, so I drag it over to the 10-second mark. I want all the slides after it to respace themselves. Then I want to drag slide #10, 11 and 12 to the one-minute mark and lock them in place, and then respace all the slides between them and slide #1, then all the slides after #12. And so on. Like grabbing a spring somewhere in the middle and pulling towards one end, the coils stretch apart on one side and squeeze together on the other in a proportional manner. 3. Ability to apply a display scaling factor to individual slides, preferrably by choice of numerical value or grabbing and dragging an edge or corner, and placement on the screen the same way. So for instance I'd like to be able to start with a small picture that only takes up a corner of the screen, then transition to a larger one that is offset from the corner, then a larger one that is centered, then a smaller one offset, and then finally a small one in the opposite corner. Of course this type of thing can be done by preprocessing the pictures in Photoshop or similar programs, but I'd like to do it on the fly in PTE. 4. Similarly, the ability to have more than one slide onscreen at the same time. Slide 1 comes in and takes a portion of the left side of the screen, slide 2 comes in on the right, slide 3 comes in and replaces 1 as it fades out, 4 replaces 2, slide 5 overlaps the previous ones, etc. Again, these effects can be done by processing the images beforehand but I'd like the flexibility to do it in PTE. 5. Igor and company have done such a great job I can't think of a fifth thing to list (and I was really reaching with 3 and 4 above.) The Ken Burns effects and being able to lock slides and respace in the timeline are really the only ones I care about. Thanks!

Igor, thanks for attending to the Pause problem. Most of my shows are fast-paced (usually just a second or two per slide) and sometimes people want to take a closer look at something that zipped by. Backing up to a particular slide is a pain when the show begins running again after clicking the Back arrow.

This is the first chance I've had to work with the new version 4.30 (Beta #3) and I just did a quickie show to check something. I believe you added the capability a version or two back to allow use of the Navigation Bar during synchronized shows. There's a checkbox for this titled "Permit the control of show" on the "Main" Project Option tab. This seems poorly placed to me - I would think it should be on the "Advanced" tab next to the "Show Navigation Bar" checkbox. At first I thought that it was redundant to have those two options - why would you show the Navigation Bar but not control the show? Conversely, why would you permit the control of show but not show the Navigation Bar? Then I remembered that you can also control the show by setting actions for mouse button clicks, and you would not necessarily need a visible toobar. But there is what I think is a flaw with the Navigation Bar when used during synchronized shows. When control of the show is permitted and the Navigation Bar is used, the Pause buton works fine. But when the Back or Forward arrows are used, the show resumes play instead of staying paused. To me this defeats the whole purpose of using a Pause button - you want to be able to pause the show and then back up or go forward, slide by slide, without play resuming until you click the Pause button again to resume play. I had mentioned this when 4.20 came out and there was general agreement with my view, as I recall. Could you look into this please? Also there's something that bothers me about the Customize Synchonization window. I seem to remember (perhaps wrongly) that when it first came out you could use the Play button to play the show in the small window (and with the timeline visible), starting from any slide. But when I try to do that now it always starts at the beginning of the show - the only way I can start from a slide in the middle of the show is to use the Preview button and then it plays like a normal show, without the timeline being visible. Am I remembering wrong or just doing something wrong? Whether I set the blue pointer or select the slide where I want to start, when I click the Play button it always goes back to the first slide. By the way, it'd also be nice if I could grab the edge of the Custom Synchronization window and drag it to whatever size I wanted. As it is now it only goes across about half my screen and it'd be nice to enlarge it. And thanks for the slide thumbnails! The T, V and F buttons aren't very prominent and I almost didn't see them, but I like what they do, especially the F (Fullscreen?) button. Much easier for slide arrangement and something I've wanted from Day 1. And I love the slider bar for controlling thumbnail size. Igor, you're a genius.

1. Constraints when using the timeline. In the CAD world, we create 3D models that can be modified afterwards by altering dimensions and then "updating" the solid. Often parts are contextually linked to one another so that if one changes, the other does too. I'd like to see a similar concept used on the timeline. For instance, I want to "fix" or "anchor" slide #32 at 1:18 on the timeline and slide #80 at 4:12. Then I want to drag slide #48 to 2:02, with all the slides in between 32 and 48 spacing themselves equally, and the slides after 48 spacing themselves as well. Like grabbing a spring in the middle and pulling to one end or the other, the coils space themselves evenly. I want to be able to do this multiple locations on the timeline, fixing and unfixing slides as needed. It can get even more complicated in the CAD world where one feature is represented by a formula based on another feature, but the above sample would be most useful, I think. 2. Preferrably this would be under a sound timeline that shows a waveform, so that I can see just where the beat is that I want to anchor a slide at. 3. Smoother "push" transitions, and add "zoom" (in or out) and pan as well - preferrably able to combine them. 4. I like the option for the mouse pointer to disappear after three seconds (or time of your choice) and reappear when the mouse is moved. Can you make the Nav bar do the same thing? I second all the requests for a slide table sorting scheme and manipulation of blocks of slides. I think here is a "bug" that needs to be fixed, and not a new feature as such - when the Nav bar is used with a synchronized slideshow, the pause button becomes "unpaused" when you use the FWD/BACK buttons and the show restarts playing. It should stay paused until you toggle it back to play again.

I have a question about that. I added "control of show" to one of my synchonised slideshows and while the pause works fine, if the back or forward functions are used the show starts playing again. That is to say, if I pause the show and back up one slide, I have to immediately hit pause again or it starts to play on from there. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong? Can it be fixed so that the show remains paused until it is toggled back to "play? By the way, this was done using Beta 4 - I have not tried any of the later versions.

Actually when using the Nav Bar I prefer to use the option to hide the pointer after three seconds or so, then reappear when the mouse is moved. That way it's there if you need it but not in the way if you don't. Best of both worlds.

I just tried using beta #4 to create a DVD with the two slideshows that I've been using (a wedding with all fades, and the Reno Air Races with all quick cuts.) Clicking the box "For ULead DVD Movie Factory" produces a .ptev file (Pictures toEXE video for Ulead) which ULead does not recognize. Windows Media Player won't play a preview either. I went ahead and tried making a DVD with just the ULead box unchecked and "Interlace for TV" checked, which gave the same interlacing problems I had before on quick cuts. I'm not sure how the .ptev files are supposed to work - am I doing something wrong? Is there something in ULead that I need to change to recognize the file? Frankly I'm not all that happy with trying to use ULead anyway, since it took an hour to render and burn seven minutes worth of slideshows (is this typical?) But if it will eventually give the best results I might be able to live with it.

I've just tried writing a VCD, an SVCD and a DVD this evening using TMPGEnc Plus, TMPGEnc Author and ULead DVD Factory 2. I used two pre-existing slideshows that I had on hand. One is of a friend's wedding with all 200ms fades and about 1.5s per slide, the other is of the 2003 Reno Air Races with all quick cuts (no transitions) and about 750ms per slide. MY PC is a 1.8GHz P4 with 512M of RAM. My DVD player is a Samsung DVD-V1000 DVD/VCR combo unit. I have previously made a successful DVD using ULead which worked well, except for a "combtooth" effect (interlacing artifacts?) on some of the quick cuts in the Reno slideshow. The wedding slideshow with its fades played perfectly. Tonight I made another successful DVD using TMPGEnc Plus and TMPGEnc Author and it did not seem to have the comb effect on the quick cuts. I'm not familiar enough with TMPGEnc Author so the disc chapter menu was botched up but that is not the program's fault. I thought it seemed like a lot of work to make the .avi with PTE, convert it to a .m2v file with TMPGEnc Plus and then burn it to disc with TMPGEnc Author - the Plus and Author programs really should be combined or work together - or maybe I just don't know what I'm doing to make it work efficiently. Even at that, it took a lot less time than making a DVD with ULead - maybe 40 minutes versus an hour and a half. Then I used TMPGEnc Plus to convert the PTE .avi to a .mpg file and made a VCD with ULead. Pretty crappy result. Picture quality-wise it looked about like a videotape I made of the original DVD (using my combo DVD/VCR machine) except the fades in the wedding slideshow were very bad - compression artifacts all over the place. Picture detail was low. Then in the Reno slideshow the pictures started transitioning badly toward the end so that some of the pictures even showed up out of order. Not worth doing. Then I used the same files and ULead to make an SVCD. Much better quality! The picture detail seemed to pretty much equal the DVD and I almost wish I had the capability to compare the SVCD and the DVD output side by side. I say almost, because even though the picture was good and it started out playing well with the wedding slideshow, the transitions gradually became worse and worse until they were very jerky at the end. Then during the Reno slideshow I started getting jerkiness towards the end, similar to (but not as bad as) the VCD results. By the way, on both the VCD and SVCD there was no menu available - they just played from the start to the end. It was possible to skip back and forth between the two shows but if I had multiple shows on a single disc (which I am likely to do) it wouldn't be possible to select one individually to play. It's too bad that the SVCD didn't work out since CDs are so cheap. The picture quality was very good but it just wouldn't hold up during the transitions, at least on my DVD player. However, blank DVDs have really come down in price and can be had on sale for about a dollar each (here in the States.) DVD writers have also really come down and I've seen a number on sale in DVD+/-R/RW format for under a hundred dollars. So I don't feel economy is a reason to expend any effort on VCD/SVCD. Plus I believe they are less likely to play in DVD players than DVDs. My results: VCD - craptastic SVCD - better but not good enough DVD - the way to go

I also posted the following under the topic "PTE video to disks for TV" but it looks like this thread is where most of the action is: I just learned of rev 4.20 this afternoon. After several false starts and "coasters" I have successfully created a DVD slideshow (with two shows on it.) I wound up downloading ULead DVD Moviefactory2 to do it but I hope there's something better - it's sloooow. At least it seems that way to me, it took an hour and a half to write a DVD that runs about seven minutes total. The file sizes of the two .avi files was about 46M and 27M and the total of the files written onto the DVD itself was about 280M - a mere drop in the DVD bucket. I first tried creating a SVCD with Nero Vision Express but it would not play on my Sanyo DVD/VCR machine. Then I tried a VCD, similar result. It seemed to want to try to and they might work on some other machine, but I'd prefer not to have to buy another DVD player just for this. When trying to use Sonic MyDVD I could navigate to the folder that contained the .avi file and click on it, but the program would lock up and I'd have to Ctrl+Alt+Dlt out of it. As far as the DVD result finally achieved with ULead goes, it looks very good although there were some problems of a surprising nature. The first slideshow (of a friend's wedding) used all fairly rapid fades of 200ms for the transitions and the slides were onscreen for 1-2 seconds - 161 slides in 4:26 (I do not like slow-moving slideshows!) The fades all looked great, just like on the PC and the audio sync was also perfect. The second slideshow (of this year's Reno Air Races) used all quick cuts - no transition - and the slides were onscreen for something less than a second - 206 slides in 2:36 or about 3/4 of a second per slide. Surpisingly, the quick cuts is where I saw problems. Maybe every tenth slide or so there would be horizontal bars seen as if one slide were caught halfway transitioning to the next, kind of a comb tooth effect. I don't know if it had anything to do with the rapid pace of the slides or if it is an artifact of the quick transition. I'm kind of thinking the latter as at one point I had about 7 slides in two seconds and didn't see any problems there. Requires more investigation I guess. That's my $.02 so far. And thanks a ton Igor and crew!!

I just learned of rev 4.20 this afternoon. After several false starts and "coasters" I have successfully created a DVD slideshow (with two shows on it.) I wound up downloading ULead DVD Moviefactory2 to do it but I hope there's something better - it's sloooow. At least it seems that way to me, it took an hour and a half to write a DVD that runs about seven minutes total. The file sizes of the two .avi files was about 46M and 27M and the total of the files written onto the DVD itself was about 280M - a mere drop in the DVD bucket. I first tried creating a SVCD with Nero Vision Express but it would not play on my Sanyo DVD/VCR machine. Then I tried a VCD, similar result. It seemed to want to try to and they might work on some other machine, but I'd prefer not to have to buy another DVD player just for this. When trying to use Sonic MyDVD I could navigate to the folder that contained the .avi file and click on it, but the program would lock up and I'd have to Ctrl+Alt+Dlt out of it. As far as the DVD result finally achieved with ULead goes, it looks very good although there were some problems of a surprising nature. The first slideshow (of a friend's wedding) used all fairly rapid fades of 200ms for the transitions and the slides were onscreen for 1-2 seconds - 161 slides in 4:26 (I do not like slow-moving slideshows!) The fades all looked great, just like on the PC and the audio sync was also perfect. The second slideshow (of this year's Reno Air Races) used all quick cuts - no transition - and the slides were onscreen for something less than a second - 206 slides in 2:36 or about 3/4 of a second per slide. Surpisingly, the quick cuts is where I saw problems. Maybe every tenth slide or so there would be horizontal bars seen as if one slide were caught halfway transitioning to the next, kind of a comb tooth effect. I don't know if it had anything to do with the rapid pace of the slides or if it is an artifact of the quick transition. I'm kind of thinking the latter as at one point I had about 7 slides in two seconds and didn't see any problems there. Requires more investigation I guess. That's my $.02 so far. And thanks a ton Igor and crew!!

You can come back from a day out with some great images for a slide show even when that elusive masterpiece escapes you. This is quite correct. I went to a friend's wedding a few months ago and even though a number of my pictures were marginal by themselves, when integrated into a musical slideshow they worked quite well. At one point during the reception, my girlfriend borrowed my camera (an Olympus C-2100) and shot 4-5 frames of the bride and groom dancing. She (my girlfriend) was wobbly drunk and the light was low, so even with image stabilization the pictures were all smeary and blurred. When I first saw them I trashed them as unusable garbage. Then I started putting together the slideshow and relized I could still use them and pulled them back out of the PC trash. When shown in fairly rapid succession with the appropriate music, they give an impression of giddy happiness and fun. Now it's one of my favorite bits of the show!

There's a similar program called "Stillmotion" by Imagematics, $99.95. http://www.imagematics.com/ProductPage.htm In the Personal Edition it produces a .swf (Shockwave Flash) file that takes up very little space. I fiddled with the trial version a little bit about a year ago and was not impressed with the result - it was low res and kinda jerky, I thought. But they make higher end versions that will produce .avi files which might have a better appearance. Don't know how well they'd integrate into a P2E show, though.

My top three requests are: DVD/VCD output. As a workaround in the meantime, are there any programs out there that allow screen capture video - that is, a program that will create an avi or mpeg or whatever of the activity on the screen? Seems like it'd be something very useful to have in general. Of course it needs to also capture the sound at the same time. Thumbnails of the slide list. I find it annoyingly difficult to reorder my slides by file name - can't tell what's what. Presently I use ACDSee 5.0 to reorder all my pictures and rename them so that they show up in the approximate order desired, but fine-tuning always needs to be done. Panning/zooming of individual slides. I like to create panoramas but a long thin picture across the middle of the screen loses a bit of impact, so it'd be nice to be able to scroll from one end to the other. I'd settle for having a "push" transition, so that as a picture moves off the screen from left to right (or vice-versa), another one moves onscreen at the same time. This would require using a photo editor to split the panorama into several pieces that butt against each other, but I could handle that. Zooming in or out would also be way cool. I fiddled with a program called Stillmotion (I think) but the results weren't smooth and were low res. Plus the results weren't something you could put into the middle of a PTE show - I think it produced an avi.

Hi Mikey, I've fooled around with that a little myself and found that I had to make the NTSC output my main monitor. That way I was able to send the signal to a VCR and record my slideshow on tape for the benefit of my mom, who does not have a PC (and barely uses the VCR.) It's been a while since I did it but I seem to recall that I had to fool around with resolution settings as well. I'm using a GeForce4 Ti4200 with dual outputs, don't recall the brand. The TV picture quality was not great. Sorry to give a negative answer - maybe someone else is more clever than I (undoubtedly.) Tom

Sorry for your loss.... This is a perennial question and the short answer is "no". The slightly longer answer is "yes, kinda" in that you can take screen shots using the "Print Screen" button on your keyboard (or with any number of downloadable programs that do a more sophisticated job.) This will put a copy of whatever's on your screen which you can paste into a photo editing program and crop as needed. Likely it won't be as high of resolution as your original image but it's better than nothing.

Okay, 4.0 has been released for two whole weeks now - time for more wish lists for the next version. Number one on my list: thumbnails. I'd like to see an option for listing the picture files as thumbnails that could be dragged in order, just like the filenames are now. My slideshows typicaly have several hundred pictures and sorting them into the order I want using just filenames is tiresome. I typically have ACDSee running in a window so I flip back and forth between the two, trying to remember which filenames I want to move to where. It'd be much easier if I could just see them in P2E. Number two would be for objects added via the Object Editor to have an option of scaling up or down, as the picture does. I typically have a "front page" slideshow with clickable objects in it that go to other sub-slideshows, and I usually want the picture to fill the sceen. So when users with different resolutions run it, the objects move around from where I originally placed them as the picture is scaled up or down to fill the screen. They may even start to overlap. I'm sure there's other stuff that I want but that's it for the moment. Oh wait! I also want scrollable panoramas! BTW, although I haven't posted for 6+ months, I've been using P2E for a couple of years and am very happy with what Igor's done to improve it.