jkb

I agree with this behaviour. It happens no matter how many slides as long as the music is longer than the slides But the behaviour is not consistent. It seems that the first time you play - from any view - the music stops when it reaches the end of the last slide. but click in mini player or press spacebar (in Timeline views) & the music continues. If you move the cursor by clicking to a different point in timeline, or click a different slide in Slide view, then the music continues when the end of last slide is reached Being able to continue the music after the last slide is good as it allows you to hear the rest of the music before you add further slides. But perhaps the cursor should continue to move. Another point is that if when playing you switch from slide view to Timeline, then to fullscreen timeline the music & slides continue to play. Again this is good, you can switch views & continue play. But when switching from Fullscreen Timeline to normal timeline it stops playing. This is not good Jill

Igor, Enjoy your holiday, you deserve it. Good decision to keep away from computers until you are back. Hope the rest of your team also get a holiday. Best Wishes Jill

As well as saying which slide the duplicates are it would be great if PTE could allow us to choose which folder to select the duplicate slide from. I have a sequence which has many duplicates from 2 or 3 different folders. (two of us were working on the sequence at once & sending each other the backup folders. The final sequence was then put together by copying selected slides from each into a final version.) There are far too many duplicates to go through and change them manually so I have never been able to do a backup of the completed sequence. If PTE could highlight each duplicate & allow the choice of folder that would be a great help. Jill

Gary, Why not insert several blank slides of the required length for your various text items. That way it will be easy to adjust each to the timings you require. Your video clip can then be added as a Master Clip to play over the blank slides. (Add the video to slide 1 & set to Master Video Track Then you add the same video to each of the other slides & set them all to be 'Link To' If you have added the Text Items first you will need to move them up above the video clip in the object stack (CTRL +PageUp) to make sure they show on top of the video. You can even use the transitions between each of the blank slides to fade your text in & out. Hope this helps. Jill

Just to throw another spanner into the works! I have just created a menu on my Win7 64 bit laptop to play all my sequences. I have noticed that with sequences created in PTE v5.0 or earlier they play smoothly with no flashes. Sequences created after v5.0 have a white flash when the sequence starts. They all return to the Menu smoothly at the end whatever version they were created in. I have used Run Application or Open File on all the sequences. Hardware Acceleration is on. Now here is the odd part!! I have 2 users set up on my Laptop, one for normal use & the other when out giving talks. The menu was created on my 'normal' user. When run under that user the White flash is very brief & appears at the side of the screen, so is not that noticeable. But when I run the Menu under my 'Show' User The white is much more pronounced & is at the Top & Bottom of the screen. Also it appears as a band that slowly shrinks rather than a sudden flash. So it is much more noticeable. No time to recreate all my sequences under 7.07 as I am giving a talk tomorrow night & still have loads to do! So I will have to live with it. It just seems very strange that it is giving two different results on the same Laptop. As far as I can see there is nothing in the setup of the two user accounts that would cause a difference. Both are full Administrator access. Jill

Jose, This is something we have been asking for, for a long time. Currently it is not possible to copy/paste keyframes - Hopefully in the next version! Jill

What might be nice to have if at all possible, would be to be able to select a group of slides & have them fit to a selection of music. Say you have a piece of music & you want certain slides to auto fit to a 30sec part of it. You could select a group of slides eg slides 10 to 20 & then have them fit to that 30s of music. The other slides could be manually arranged to the rest of the music. I doubt I would use this as I always want my images to change in time with the music, but I am sure it would be useful to beginners. Even if it was just to be able to fit to a whole piece of music rather than a part of it. So if you had 3 pieces of music, you could auto fit groups of slides to each piece. Jill

Can we not already save our Preferences by using Templates? It is not something I have normally used, but might start now we can Customise things more. We could set up basic Templates for the different types of Workspace we want. If Templates can be used for this, then it saves Igor work in having to code a new feature. Jill

I agree with Lin, please keep the Project Level text comment Templates. I think Option B is perhaps easiest, to have the Text Comment on the Customise Slide. If possible to be able to select several slides at once & add a comment with common Font, Colour, Position etc. Then the actual Text could be changed individually on each slide as required. Jill

Sorry if putting both articles on the same PDF has caused confusion. It was quicker to do it that way as they follow on from each other in the Magazine. You should be able to download & save a copy of the PDF, but it is protected so you cannot copy the text or print it. We want people to subscribe to the Magazine! If anyone would like to write an article, on PTE or any other AV subject, we would be happy to publish it. We will send you a complimentary copy when we do. We would especially like to hear from anyone in the US as we currently don't have any subscribers from that part of the world. We would love to hear your views on AV. See the Contacts page of www.avnews.org.uk for details. Regards Jill

Why go to the trouble of creating a video & having a slightly reduced quality? Just make the show of the cell phone screen & then have a png image of the actual phone & add this to each image as an extra object. Simply add to the first & then copy & paste to each 'slide' in the sequence. This will overlay each image & as the same it will appear as though only the cell phone screen is changing. Ok if you have a lot of slides it will take a while to add to each image, but it does mean you can create an exe & keep the highest quality. Jill

Easy! Just press shift & drag the tail of the arrow to be the length you want it. Ok it means it also lengthens the head but is still a lot quicker than making a separate file for each size you need. And is easy to amend if you move the caption. You can also easily add drop shadows etc Jill

The easiest way is to add a Text object using one of the Fonts that generates symbols. Windings3 & Webdings are examples. Windings3 'a' gives a right hand arrow. Just set the font & try the different letters & numbers in both upper & lower case until you get the one you want. This means you can easily change the size & colour of the symbols as required. Much quicker & easier than creating a separate png file. Jill

Hi Redmond, As Peter says the error message is most likely because you have a sound attached to a slide. With the sound not playing in Preview mode I had a similar problem a while back at a workshop when helping a group make a sequence. Couldn't solve it at the time, but later at home checked the Windows sound mixer & found there was a slider for PicturesToExe & that was set at zero. How that happened I don't know, so the sound was playing just that its volume was zero so couldn't be heard. By increasing the volume on that slider all was well. So have a look at your windows sound mixer. Right click on the little speaker icon in the task bar & open Volume Control. I was running Vista on my laptop when it happened. Hope this helps Jill

Peter, I agree. I was simply explaining to Joy what the buttons did as she asked for an explanation. Personally, I usually just insert the extra slide in the slide view & then amend timings as required. Or on the timeline select all the slides after the point I want to insert & drag them along to right manually allowing enough time for the slide I want to insert. Both much quicker than using the buttons. Jill

The Project Option 'Auto Spread slides along Music' is not something I would normally use. However needing to make a short demonstration sequence to explain how a beginner may want to use this I ticked the box. All it seemed to do was put a message on the Timeline & grey out the timeline so you couldn't move the times manually. So I used the 'Timed Points/arrange all points' option to spread the slides evenly along the Timeline. This then spreads the slides & everything looks & works as you would expect. However a beginner is unlikely to find this option as they may not venture into the Timeline view. Having now played around a bit more with Auto Spread I see that if you publish the exe, or preview full screen, then the auto spread does in fact do just that. What is confusing, to myself an experienced user of PTE, so will certainly be to a beginner, is that in the main window the overall time shown is the length of the slides & not the length of the music. Also playing in the main window it plays to the timing of the slides & cuts the music off abruptly at the end of the last slide. Would it be possible, if 'Auto Spread' is selected to amend the overall time shown in the main window to be the length of the music rather than the slides. Along with a message to say 'Auto Spread - Time changed to music length' & for the main window to play as the full preview/exe do. It really is confusing when a sequence plays differently in the main window & Preview. Although far from creating an ideal sequence, the Auto Spread option is useful for a beginner & allows them to make something quickly when first starting. That way they can feel they have achieved something without too much effort & will hopefully go on to explore the full potential of PTE & not give up at the first hurdle. Jill

Joy, If you don't want to mess up your 'work in progress' then save it as a different project name & play around with that to see what happens. You can then always return to your original project & know it will be untouched. The 3 buttons can be useful if you need to add/removed slides. Cut transition, removes the selected transition & in effect moves all your transitions along to the right. So if you cut transition 3 then slide 3 moves along the timeline to the position of slide 4. Slide 4 moves to 5 etc. Note, this is just the placing of the transitions, it does not remove the slide What you have to watch with this is that you can end up with overlapping transitions (where the grey bars overlap)if the original transition time of say slide 4 is longer than the length of the original transition 5. Difficult to explain, but play around with a few slides of different transition lengths & you will see what happens. New Transition, does the opposite to cut & moves your transition points to the left. So if you have a large gap between slide 2 & 3, position the cursor on the timeline between 2 & 3 (but nearer to 2) click New Transition & all the remaining transitions from 3 to the end will move left. Again it is just the placing of the transition on the timeline, it does not alter the positions of the slides. Again watch for overlapping transitions. Timed Points has several options. Shift Points allows you to move selected points left or right by a specified amount. So if you know you need to insert an extra slide between 2 & 3, select all the points from 3 to the end (click on 3 & then shift/click on the last point). Select Shift Points & enter a value equal to the length of time you need for your new slide, say 5secs. This will then move all your points along the timeline by 5secs. It is sometimes better to move them by more than the time you think so there is plenty of room to insert your extra slide, you can later move them all back a bit when you have set the correct time for the new slide. To insert your new slide, click on the timeline at the insertion point & drag your slide from the file list. Or right click & insert blank slide if you are just adding a title. To keep your music in sync with your images you would have to add an offset as has been suggested elsewhere. So if your music starts with slide 3 & you insert an extra slide between 2 & 3 of 5secs, you would then need to add an offset of 5secs to your music. This will obviously leave you with a gap in your soundtrack if you originally had music covering slides 1 & 2. So you would need to add some extra music of the required length. Hope this helps. Jill

I agree with Gary, that this would be a useful feature. I hadn't realised that I could type in an amount larger than 100%. I always build up my images in layers in Photoshop & align them that way before resizing to 1024 x 768 & saving each layer with a new name. But for quickness when building a sequence I simply insert the original jpgs to get a feel for the flow. (I always shoot in Raw plus a small jpg) As the camera takes in 3:2 format & the final show is 4:3 format, there is a black bar top & bottom. So I have been manually going through each O&A & changing the zoom to 112%. To be able to do it quickly for all images in Project Options will save a lot of time. Once I have an idea of the order of the images I then resize & align each one in Photoshop & then simply replace the image in PTE. The final show could then be set back to 100% An addition to this feature would be the ability to select a block of images & set the size for them in one go. That way you could build up the images in blocks & quickly resize to fit. Jill

Hi Peter, Thanks for the Link. However the problem is not concerned with residual noise. It is directly linked to the power supply. Even if no sound is playing you can still hear a hum through the speakers. Note this only applies to some powered speakers. When using an amplifier & normal speakers the sound is clear & there is no hum. Unplugging the power supply & running the laptop on batteries also removes the hum. Jill

Hi Brian, All this will do is stop the laptop going to sleep. It does not explain the black bar showing on the projected image? I ususally run on a separate user when giving shows & I thought I had that setup to not sleep, maybe not, will have to check. Jill

Another problem I sometimes get on my laptop, which is the same as John's - Acer 5920G with nvidia 8600M GS graphics card - is that if the laptop goes to sleep, during tea break etc. Then the first time I play a sequence after waking it up again, a black band moves down the projected image. The image on the laptop screen is unaffected. It is as though the projector is on a different refresh rate to the laptop. Laptop is 60hertz refresh. If I escape out of the sequence & restart it everything is fine. Again this only happens on certain projectors, one of which is less than 2 years old. Don't know the make offhand. This problem occurs both on mains or battery power. Jill

Bob, Why not just have the slide show for 7secs, then move to the next slide which is the same bird but with it's name. This slide can then either remain on screen for 3secs or you can set it 'to wait for key press' before moving to the next image. This way you can quickly duplicate each bird image & just put the comment on the second one without having to build in any delay. Sounds like a great way to teach your grandaughter about birds. Maybe you could also add the birds call if you have the sounds available. Regards Jill

AVG is now getting very annoying! It is throwing up most of my AV's as infected. A new AV which I finished & published on Friday is now being shown as infected. The exe was fine on Friday, but then my XP desktop pc did a full scheduled scan on Saturday & threw up the exe's created with version 7 as being infected. The previous week, ver 7 exe's were fine but it was saying older exe's (created with ver 6.5 or earlier)were infected. I then tried to publish the exe on my Vista laptop (the PTE file had already been copied across but I hadn't got round to creating the EXE). AVG said the file was infected & I couldn't even publish, it then caused PTE to stop responding & I had to CTRL+ALT+DEL & stop the process. So I downloaded & installed PTE v 7.0.3 as I was previously using 7.0.2. AVG also updated to a new database 2108/4691 (19th Dec 19:34) Ver is 2012.0.1890 I was still getting exe's being shown as infected, but having re-published the AV's with v7.0.3 they are now accepted as clean. This really needs to be sorted out with AVG once & for all as it seems that each time they update the database it is showing different EXE's as being infected. Jill

Igor, This is a very strange error & it took me a while to work out what was happening. I couldn't understand why a Sound comment played on one slide but not on another. But I eventually traced the problem to the Name of the Object. If you have an Object & on the common tab (in O&A) you set the Name to 'Music' then it stops the sound comment from playing. If the Name is 'music' with a lower case 'm' then the sound plays. Also if the object is a child (with upper case 'M') then the sound will play. I have tried this with Text & Image Objects but not had the chance to try any others yet. Using Version 7.0.2 not tried in earlier versions. Perhaps you can look into this. Thanks Jill

I have just tried this and find that if you click on the little page symbol at the end of the comment box, it opens up a 'Text for Current Slide' box. CTRL+V does work in this box but not in the single line comment on the main screen. As Lin & Vicbrasil have found you have to use Shift+Insert to paste into this. Jill