Almark

I live in Ireland and love to see what others 'see' when they visit. I thought the music started very abruptly and when I heard the 'diddle-e-dee' music I said to myself 'well it's to be expected... but at least it's not Enya". Of course what sounds like Enya appears 1/3 way through. Again I thought the finish / start of the music quite abrupt (but at least it wasn't one of Enya's well known tunes that everyone plays). The last piece of music was great, I thought it suited the images very well - although again at the end it stopped with a pop rather than a pleasant fade. I hope you don't mind me mentioning the music. I find that when images of Ireland are being shown especially on TV in documentaries, 'diddle-e-dee' is par for the course, with Enya being the stereotype. (The same goes for France with accordion 'Allo-Allo' music.) So perhaps people might be disappointed to see images of Ireland and listen to Mozart. But everyone else loved the music, so it must be Ok then ;-) Just an observation ;p I thought the photography was great. Clearly there were some typical views of the attractions but there were also some excellent shots. I particularly liked the 3 swans, their necks form a wonderful pattern. For me, although not a typical Ireland scene, this image sticks out and I would be tempted to place it as 1st or last image (probably last). An excellent production, I must check out some of your other shows.

Lument, As above, I found the pan/zooms to take much, much too long. The extreme zooms often resulted in pixelation of the image. Surely the purpose of creating a slideshow is to show off your images at their best. I found I hit the esc key before the last image. I agree that the images have much potential. If you really feel that you have to pan and zoom then perhaps limiting the zooms to 10% + or - 100% would help. Otherwise I would suggest using simple and long fades. Also I think your music starts too abruptly, creating a short fade in or inserting some silence would help. Clearly all of the above is just my humble opinion, I am no expert. So feel free to completely ignore it.

Hi Keith, I can see what you were aiming for here. I agree with what has been said above in relation to the timings of the pans and zooms But I would like, if I may, to offer you some more feedback. IMHO I see pans and zoom as a way of getting a message across to the viewer. I think you use it too often and for many of the sequences a simple long fade in/out would have been more appropriate and effective in you aim of creating a tranquil and relaxing setting. There are occasions were it works really well and gives the impression of travelling on the river. In all your zooms I think you zoom to much and this creates too much movement and undermines your intention of creating a tranquil and relaxing setting. Try zooming from 110% to 100 or out from 90% to 100% - this creates a very smooth flow and can be coupled with a really slow fade (8 secs transition, 2 sec image shown). I think your music choice is good but IMHO it starts too abruptly.

Dave, I am not sure how much feedback you want, and as I am new here I don't want to alienate anyone by perhaps saying too much? First of all, not everyone's system/firewall/anti virus etc allow them to download an exe. So a zip might allow more folk to be able to download your work. I find it only reduces the size by a small amount, but it is worth the effort if it allows more folk to be able to download it. I enjoyed your show, indeed I watched twice. Kansas looks well and I enjoyed the detail in the houses/barns and the old rusted tractor. May I make a few comments? I thought the music started too early. The 1st image is a cracker, as we say here in Northern Ireland. Therefore I think making it into a title undermines the image, I would go for s simple black background for the title and use the umage as the great first shot. Also, forgive my ignorance, is Kansas cowboy country? If so you might want to think about a cowboy type font, rather than the one you use at present. I particularly liked the images of the roads undulating into the distance. The sequence for the road with the church and then the church in detail was most impressive. I am not sure about the 3 images of the cemetery, although each are interesting images (especially the one of the white head stones across the hill) to me they don't conjour up an impression of Kansas. And lastly the image with the two shoes in the old window looks too staged, you could have gotten away with one, but two - for me - is one too many ;-) I hope this helps and please give me feedback on my feedback, so I know just how much should say. I am keen to learn and from past experience someone will only give honest, decent and sincere feedback if they have been afforded the same luxury

Hi Barry and Carol, When viewed at 1920x 1440 it is all over the place. It took me a while to realise that I had to change my resolution in order to see it as it was intended My fault of course, I thought they all expanded to full screen or to windowed mode (when a specific size is required). I think the first image would look better if the horizontal lines in the stained glass window were parallel to the horizontal of the viewing border/window, just MHO.

Hi Alan, I too am new to PTE (but not to AV's). For your first go this is most impressive, even if you do admit to getting a bit carried away! You asked for critique, so here are a few things that struck me about your AV. These are just my personal observations offered to help you learn, feel free to give me feedback on this feedback - and/or feedback on any of my shows. I was surprised to hear a midi, music is clearly an integral part of the show and it was undermined by using midi instead of mp3. I found it too long and have too many photos in it. The 4 four parts; the town, the castle/fort/, the cathedral and shopping could have been spilt into four distinct areas and accessed from a menu page. This would allow you to have four different (but by all means all Mozart) mp3's. It would also allow you to consider each section by asking yourself is this image essential? It would be much easier to do this for each part of four - rather than for the whole project. Much has already been said about the pans and zooms, so I will not repeat that. However I did want to point out that in some cases you pan and zoom into some detail and then the next photo is of the same detail. Maybe that was intentional, but the second image was always of much better detail than the zoomed one. Many of your photos had severely blown highlights, in one photo a lady is looking into a shop window that is almost completely blown out. There was a dark stage at about 3/4's way through and I was waiting for a title/caption to appear, but it didn't. There was also a dark stage just before the final titles came on. I hope that this helps and I look forward to your next production...

Dick, in that case thank you so much for taking time - over an hour - to download this pte. I take you wait and see what folk say about a show before you take the plunge? Very wise! I am glad you liked it, I am preparing a different version with narration, but I find that adding narration is much harder than i thought!

Thank you all for your kind and welcoming comments. Al, thank you I will try that program and see if it helps. John, thank you for your feedback, I was concerned about the noise, but as these were taken in the dark, handheld, I agree with you the noise is understandable and acceptable. Neil, watched it twice eh! Well thank you for taking the time, I spent some time arranging the images so that they sometimes blend to create a 3rd image. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. I attended a local AV workshop today and received more useful feedback. So there will be a new version coming soon and one with audio commentary as well.

Thanks lin, I will do that now.

Lin, thanks for your kind comments. I used the music from the Lord of the Rings as I thought people might mentally link the music to the beautiful scenery and fjords of New Zealand. Re the horizon, I will definitely check but many of the images were taken from the ship and sometimes because of the way the land lies it may look wonky. Thanks for taking the time to look. Dave, again thanks for downloading and having another look. I have set it like that as in our camera club we normally answer a few questions after showing the presentation, so I wanted to leave it up - rather than someone's desktop being shown. Funny thing is, I can't run this on my laptop, works fine on a much older desktop, but not on my whizz bang laptop ;-)

I am having problems. I have created my exe but when I try and run it on my laptop in full screen mode it produces black areas with white lines in 'X' shapes all over the place. As a result I made it 1024x in windowed mode. A forum member took the time (thank you) to have a look at my exe and suggested that it would have been better in fullscreen mode. But when I try to view it - it simply doesn't play. I have since discovered that it will play on a different PC at 1280x but on my laptop at 1920x it won't. I assume that my laptop must be lacking the graphic power: Vista Premium, 2GB RAM, 2GB Ready Boost, Duo Core 2.16, NVidia Geforce Go 7900 GS. Or am I missing something obvious? All feedback welcome.

I started off with PTE then somehow got sidetracked on to ProShow, I am not sure how this happened. And I got used to ProShow, I liked the insert blank slide, offsetting the audio, the captions. But what has brought me back to PTE? I think the images produced on PTE are better saturated and sharper - that's it.

Good points Dave, thanks for taking the time to download it. I bought my first DSLR just over a year ago to see if photography would be a suitable hobby for retirement. As a web designer the computer side of digital photography has always been easy to learn. Capture NX is what I use for raw adjustment. I have been making AV's since I bought the DSLR, and while I started on PTE I somehow got sidetracked to ProShow. I am now back with PTE as I think it produces a truer saturation and I am convinced it is sharper as well. The images in this show were taken with a Nikon D300, (an early Christmas present to myself) the one of the husky dogs pulling the sleigh was taken in the light of the guys head-torch, hand-held at ISO 6400. The blue harbour scenes were taken in darkness at ISO 3200. Re your points. I have made the show border-less, but sadly it must be in a window because when I set it to full screen it doesn't run right, at least not on my laptop. I will have to play with it again and see what I can do. I have updated the show and re upped it to the Net, some details - I removed some black bars top and bottom, and moved the sun in the reflection of one ship window so that it is in exactly the same position (in another ship window) on the next image. I agree with you about the page curl and the beginning and end. I too have always favoured the simple fade in out. But a friend from my camera club showed me this and suggested I copy the the trolls from the beginning to the end. First curl goes bottom right to top left and the last one the opposite - a sort of opening and closing so to speak. BTW, did you get the link between the music and Norway? Maybe a bit cryptic, but have a go. Update, the full screen version refuses to work on my 1920x1440 laptop but does work on a 1280x? desktop PC. Will upload it (again) shortly. Update: the zip file has been updated, now works full screen. http://www.markallenphotography.co.uk/mark...ies/norway3.zip

Last night in our camera club we ran two shows, both made with the same images and sound. One was made in PTE (5.1) and the other in a different well known brand. The other brand had its output set to 'HIGH' in all areas and created a file of 33MB. PTE created a file of 18MB. They were run one after another. Most folk thought there was little or no difference. Some thought PTE produced brighter and more saturated images on screen. Some thought PTE produced sharper images on screen. So there you go, completely un-scientific -but I thought you might be interested.

Yes, that solved it. Thank you for your prompt reply.

Vista Premium, 2GB RAM, 2GB Ready Boost, Duo Core 2.13. PTEV5.1 was working but now it's not. I can open my pte files, I can move the slides about and change everything but as soon as i click on the Button for 'Object and Animation' it crashes. I get a message in the top right of the program saying not responding, if I click on anything else the screen greys out and if i click again i get a message dialogue asking me if I want to wait or close the program. I selected wait the first time and had to Ctrl-Alt_del to terminate it after 15mins. Now I have to select 'close the program', sometimes it closes down straight away and sometimes I have to go down the ctrl-Alt_del route again. I'v tried rebooting and re installing, I am at a loss as what to try next. Any suggestions?

In December 2007 my wife and I went on the 'Coastal Voyage' from Bergen, Norway, to the North Cape and back again. We were on board the MS Trollfjord, part of the Hurtigruten fleet. Once you go above the arctic circle ii is dark all day, although if there are no clouds in the sky you can get an errie blueness that is difficult to describe (but can be seen in the AV). The Northern Lights were on display but I found it really hard to take decent photos - the ship is moving, rocking and the wind sharp - not to mention the cold. So I only have two decent images of the 'Lights'. We were caught in a warm storm near the North Cape and had to anchor in a fjord and wait it out. Sadly the warm rain washed away most of the snow and ice and instead of the expected -15C it was 5C. http://www.markallenphotography.co.uk/mark...ies/norway3.zip

Lin, I came to this forum with the same questions in mind. May I say I find your detailed reply most impressive - well done. It has answered all my concerns. BTW for large res projectors doa search for 'HD Ready projectors'.