HaroldB

From your experience, do you think this would work well enough when the audio track is for people speaking, where the audio synch is important? H

Igor, Sometimes, I like to use pan and zoom to give the presentation a kinetic feel. When doing that, it is often important to keep the "speed" (for lack of a better word) of the zoom pretty much constant from slide to slide for a series of slides. Today, the only way I know how to do that is by trial and error, or by using numeric computations based on the zoom numbers, which can be pretty tedious. So it occurred to me that PTE is running on a computer, and why couldn't I ask PTE to do it for me? This is my dream, and I am going to use words to express it that might not make much sense to you, since you know much more about video than I do. But I am going to try <s>. Suppose I want to do a sequence with the "camera" slowly moving "forward" at a constant pace ("speed"). As it does that, I want to fade or cut from one picture to the next. So what I want to do, when looking at two keypoints, is set the size and place of the picture for one of them, and then tell PTE how "fast" I want to zoom in ("move forward"). Then I want PTE to calculate the size and place of the picture on the next keypoint that will generate that "speed". I also want it to keep the speed number around so I can change it a bit (make it faster or slower) and recalculate the specs for the next keypoint. When I move a keypoint, I am certainly willing to press a button to recalculate, although if you have hot-linked the two keypoints together, and it happens automatically, that would be great. Zoom seems like it might be somewhat straightforward, since I can zoom in and out. But I think this might also be a good idea for pans, and it seems to me that for pans, I would have to give a direction in addition to speed. To generalize this, and allow both zooms and pans to happen at the same time at a constant "speed", it seems like I want to give PTE a "direction" in some kind of "3D way" that tells it how I want to move, and then also specify how fast, and let it figure out where I will end up on the next keypoint. I've not given this much detail implementation thought, since I have no idea whether something like this might be at all possible. But I'd love to have the ability to do this kind of presentation with less tedium than it would take to do it now. H

Hi, Ken! <laughs> But it doesn't have to do with video OUTPUT per se! Starting with PTE 7, PTE also takes video as INPUT! <laughs> It's OK wherever it is, Ken, as long as Igor sees it. H

<nods> I didn't think I could do this with keyframes. But I would have thought that I could do exactly this by using the Time Range parameter on the Common tab! I tried it, and you are most certainly right. Even if I use Time Range to get the video object to appear somewhere in the middle of the "slide time", it is as if the video has been running since the beginning of the "slide time" unless you specify offset. This does not seem intuitive to me, but I guess I get to live with it. BTW, Igor, there seems to be a bug in PTE. When I do this setup (having a second video come in later in the "slide time" and be reduced in size, it jerks when coming in instead of just appearing. It's as if it "came in" in the wrong place on the screen and then was put into the "right place". H

Hi, Lin! Wouldn't I get the same effect by simply having the video object appear where I would put the third keyframe in your example above? It seems to me that the only thing the offset field is buying me is the ability to see the first frame in freeze-frame for a user-specified time. Am I still missing something? H

What is "offset" in the property tab of a video clip used for? What it seems to do is hold the first frame of the video in a freeze frame for the specified interval. Is that its purpose, or am I missing some clever PTE feature? H

From what I can see in the forum, I think there are plans to address this general problem, but I wanted to add my thoughts. I think that the current all-or-nothing for the video clip's audio is a severe limitation when dealing with people's voices in video clips. While I can work around it by using an external sound editor, that would require re-working any time the video clip's location changed. I think a good start (and hopefully easy to implement) would be to offer the following options in the O&A for a video clip: - "percentage loudness" for the PTE audio track and the video's audio track. 100% would mean that they are each mixed at full volume and the PTE audio track volume is unchanged from the previous slide. Values more than 100% should be allowed, particularly for the video's audio track. - "fade in time" for each of the PTE audio track and the video's audio track. If this is non-zero, it would be the time at the beginning of the object's presentation where the respective volume is changed from 100% to the number specified above. - "fade out time" for each of the PTE audio track and video's audio track. If this is non-zero, it would be the time at the end of the object's presentation where the respective volume is changed from that specified above to 100%.

If I add a video file and use the video converter as part of the add process, and I crop the file in the video converter process, the slide time in PTE is still set to the original full file time. It seems like it should not work this way. H

I am brand-new to video with PTE, and I have a number of questions, which I intend to post separately. I've tried to read the forum, and apologies in advance if I am asking things that have already been covered but I could not find. My "video camera" is a Canon Powershot SX210 IS, which produces .MOV files. So my first question: when I include the video clip directly into PTE, it starts at exactly the right time. However, when I use the video converter and include its .AVI file, there seems to be about .6 of a second of the first frame frozen at the beginning of the clip. If I use the O&A screen to bypass this, it works fine. Harold

Now that you're back, I'm bumping this up so that you can take a quick look at it. H

I updated to AVG 12 with database 4546... and all works fine now on my system. Presumably these database updates will shortly be migrated to AVG 11, too. I'm not thinking of me, but the people to whom I distribute PTE shows. H

I am running AVG version 10.0.1410 with database 1522/3943. It says AVG 11 when I start it. It's the most current database (10/07/11) and it causes my PTE programs to fail. H

I just updated AVG (AVG 11; Windows 7) and it does NOT work. H

I also tried a one-slide show. It said it failed to send it to AVG. I hope AVG resolves this soon... it's positively embarrassing. H

Just for the record, I am having this AVG problem, too. And it says that sending them my "sample file" (ie, my EXE) failed. H

Hi, Igor! Can you try the simple steps I described in my first post in this thread? You'll notice that it displays correctly in the text entry field on the right side of the screen, but incorrectly on the slide. H

I did do that. And got question marks. H

Windows 7 supplies a number of fonts that contain foreign characters, which can occasionally be useful. Recently, I tried to use one of these fonts in PTE, and found that PTE, in the Objects and Animations window, displayed "?" for the foreign characters. Try it with the AngsanaNew font. Open the Windows Character Map application, select that font, scroll down in the font, highlight one of the Thai characters, and click on Select and then Copy. Switch to a PTE O&E window, create a text object, and hit Ctrl+V to paste the character. Note that PTE displays it correctly in the text entry area, but incorrectly displays a "?" on the slide. Does anybody know any way around this, outside of creating the text as PNG files in Photoshop or something similar? H

Based on further experimenting, I'll reinstate this request. Lin's technique produces variable results depending on the font in use. H

I'll cancel this request, or at least make it a low priority. Lin figured out how to do this using drop shadows. See "Outline Text" in the main PTE sub-forum. H

Thanks, Lin! That works like a charm! H

One can, of course, create a PNG file with the desired text, but it really would be nice to have it native in PTE, especially because outlines are sometimes almost necessary to make text stand out when it is placed over a photo. H

<laughs> I am impressed by the complexity. I ran some quick tests, and unticked both Show Full Slide Duration and Keep Full Slide Duration. Since I work almost exclusively on the timeline, I also checked Hold Time Points. Thanks for your help! H

Hi, Peter! The little button is related to height and width, not left and right. I can't get it to do outlines. H

Igor, Since the text feature in PTE lends itself to creating titles and headlines, I think it's important to have the ability to kern (move the letters closer together and further apart). This would also be very useful for artistic fonts, such as script. First, it would be good if PTE honored the kerning pairs specified in the TrueType font. It may do so now, but if not, it would be good if it did. (Since you don't want to "break" existing shows, if it doesn't honor it now, perhaps it should be an option for the project.) Then: I think that a text field can have a global kerning field, which would be a positive or negative number (positive adding more space between characters and negative decreasing the space. I think these numbers have to be related (ie, proportional) to font size (which can change for each keypoint). (I think the convention is to use some fraction of the width of the letter "m" at the specified font size, but I am not at all sure of that.) I don't think that this field needs to be keypoint-dependent. Additionally, the space between each two characters in the text should have a number assigned to it. I'd get the list by pressing a button on the O&A dialog box, and I could type a value (positive or negative) to change the relative positioning of the two characters. Setting the global kerning field for the text field would set that value for all the pairs. If the user types a value into the global field, and there are values in the pair table that are not equal to the old value of the global field, I'd prompt the user with "There are xxx letter pairs that have a kerning value different than the old global kerning value". Allow him to use the new kerning value for all fields, or only for fields that have the old global kerning value. I think there should also be a way of visually moving the letters. Perhaps selecting the text character and holding Shift down while dragging would move the character in the direction of the drag? Since dragging may not be precise enough, perhaps Shift+Arrow as an alternative? The problem with this is that you most often want to move all the rest of the characters on the line, too, so this might need some more thought. H