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HaroldB

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Posts posted by HaroldB

  1. Audio Mix When Adding Video Clip

    in Suggestions for Next Versions

    Posted

    Obviously, this thread has been placed into the wrong section of this forum :angry:

    In order to control the audio part of a video, I would recommend to extract the video's audio track (e.g.using some free tool like XMedia Recode) and insert it as a sound comment into PTE, while running the video itself with muted audio. The sound comment's loudness can be controlled using the envelope function.

    Regards,

    Xaver

    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

  2. "Speed" Instead Of Distance

    in Suggestions for Next Versions

    Posted

    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

  4. Offset In Property Tab For Video Clip

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    When you put two or more objects in the same slide frame on a timeline, they will all be visible simultaneously. That is setting the first keyframe at a starting point somewhere along the timeline other than the beginning will not cause the object associated with that keyframe to "wait" and appear at the time where you have moved the first keyframe position. . . .

    The reason I mentioned a possible misconception about how keyframing works is that there really is no straight-forward way to have the video "start" at the position of the third keyframe without the offset. As I said, you could do a "work-around" by duplicating the slide, but there are many scenarios where you can't do a work-around but need to control "when" your video begins playing.

    <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

  5. Offset In Property Tab For Video Clip

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Video is exactly the same way. "except" that the first frame of the video, as you noted, would "freeze" until the offset time rolled around and then the video would begin. To avoid seeing the first frame, simply keyframe the opacity for the video to zero using two keyframes. The first will be set to zero opacity and the second to zero to hold this zero opacity along the timeline with the third to 100% at the precise time you want the video to "appear." The timing between keyframe two and three will determine how quickly the first frame fades in.

    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

  7. Audio Mix When Adding Video Clip

    in Suggestions for Next Versions

    Posted

    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%.

  9. Video Converter Adds Freeze Frame Half Second

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    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

  18. Problem With Foreign Language Fonts

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    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

  19. Text Outlines

    in Suggestions for Next Versions

    Posted

    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

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

    H

  23. Moving Slides But Not Changing Timeline

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Harold,

    For a discussion about "Keep Full Slide Duration" see here. This was my summarisation of a lengthy debate (for which read some of the earlier posts in that same topic).

    regards,

    Peter

    <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

  24. Outline Text

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Harold,

    Click the little button between the two Zoom fields and you can change each field separately. You might also need to apply a small adjustment to the Pan values, too, to get the outline exactly where you want it.

    regards,

    Peter

    Hi, Peter!

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

    H

  25. Kerning

    in Suggestions for Next Versions

    Posted

    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

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