HaroldB

Igor, My compliments on your new transitions! Unfortunately, I've tried the push and slide transitions on two machines, and I find them much too jerky for use with images, even at very slow transition speeds. OTOH, what you've done is very encouraging -- I think that a bit more work on your algorithms might result in transitions as good as the wonderful fades that we can routinely get from PTE. A more conceptual problem is that, as other people have posted, the transitions effectively do not "work" for text (or a second photo) that is superimposed on a photo. PTE today seems to contain logic to determine which parts of the two images involved in a transition are the same -- when doing a transition like page-left-to-right, no smoothing line appears during the transition on the parts of the image that are the same. We use this PTE characteristic all the time to create effects such as text being "written" on an image by specifying a page left-to-right transition for an image with the text superimposed on the original image. What I'd like to suggest is a variation of the push and slide transition that does this "difference analysis" and only slides or pushes the part of the image that is different than the prior image. For example, if an image transitioned to an identical image with text superimposed on the first image, PTE would figure this out the same way it does today, and only slide the part of the image (ie, the text) that is different. That would enable us to use this transition for all kinds of fantastic effects. Of course, assuming that my thought about "detecting differences" makes any sense whatsoever, I realize that doing this together with making the transitions acceptably smooth might be a lot of work, so maybe you would want to deal with making them acceptably smooth first. I just wanted to suggest this approach as a possible significant enhancement to the wonderful work you've already done. Harold

Patrick, That show was VERY good!! Harold

I think the Flash integration would be a Really Good Thing! I was VERY IMPRESSED by the work done by our users in integrating Flash into the current version of PTE -- and I think that this just point sout that Flash support should be integrated into PTE itself. This would be very high on my wish list. As to whether the size of the PTE play module increased, let it increase only if the user asks for that feature! I think this would be a TREMENDOUS enhancement to PTE unless you plan on building a lot of Flash's text effects and movement effects into PTE itself. Harold

My highest priorites would be: 1- Allow custom nav bar. I should be able to tell you the filename of the bar, and the X,Y coordinate where it should be placed. I should also be able to tell you in pixel dimensions, which commands to enable and where the different commands are. 2- Allow nav bar to be omitted for selected slides. (Perhaps allow all the options above to be overriden on a slide-by-slide level?) 3- Optionally allow a custom defined small icon that upon moving the mouse over it expands to the custom or default nav bar. 4- Perhaps "pause and show nav bar on mouse click" option (this is somewhat related to my suggestion in another thread). Harold

I would like to second what Mike said. The current feature is very good, and is certainly welcome, but I would love to extend this feature to allow a named slide (which must optionally be able to NOT be shown at all in the normal course of the slide show) to be shown when the mouse is clicked. I should be able, on that slide, to resume, to exit, or to go to slide "n" (many different slides, depending on which button I click). While that slide is shown, the music should pause. This would allow me to have "sections" of a slide show and branch at any point to a different section, without needing the current multiple shows. I do not see this as a "high priority" but as a "Very Good Thing". Harold

I thought the techniques you used in your show were VERY interesting! Can you write a bit about how you created the show, especially if you had a clever and easy way of extracting the photos of the people that you then placed over different backgrounds? Harold

Jim, I absolutely agree that the auto-backup should NOT be the name of the current project. The fact that in this day and age, Excel still does things that way is IMO, retarded, and an example of what happens when you have a monopoly. Harold

I just want to point out that one advantage of having the timeline in a window is that you can cancel out of it. It's not such a big deal, but this ability HAS saved me some time occasionally when I mess things up and want to start again. On a completely different topic, could we have auto-backup? Currently, if you don't save in PTE and the PC crashes, you lose all your work. Could we have PTE create a backup file somewhere once every user-specified minutes that we could recover from if the machine crashes? Harold

Thanks, Ron! Anybody else? Al? H

Al (and others), I seem to remember reading a while ago that you took advantage of the upgrade offer from Cool Edit to Adobe Audition. Are you happy with Audition? Was it "worth" the $100? Is it perfectly compatible with Cool Edit? I'd appreciate any of your thoughts or comments. Harold

This is just a report, so that you guys hear about this I have never bothered to set up a web site, so I send PTE shows to others either by sending them a CD, or by transmitting the file using AOL's instant messaging software. PTE shows are usually too large for email. The other day, I was doing the latter, and I was also using the AIM Talk feature to talk to the person while the file was transmitted. As we were talking, the other person tried to run the EXE (created with PTE 4.11) they had just received (on their Win 98 system), but all they got was a black screen. This happened when they hit ESC and tried again, too. It occurred to me to try to get out of the AIM Talk fucntion. When we did that, the PTE presentation worked flawlessly. I don't know if this is repeatable, but I figured it was good to tell you guys about it. Harold

Jim, That was a superb show! And your wife should think of going commercial... she was very good, too! Harold

PowerPoint has been doing this, too, for quite a while, and on pretty low-powered machines, too! I would like to see this kind of stuff in PTE, too, eventually. Harold

Igor, I just want to make sure that you notice this when you get back. There is a thread that describes problems people are having with skipping music when running PTE shows produced by 4.11 off a CD. I'm curious if anybody during the beta actually CREATED a CD with 4.1 and tried it out, and if so, what kind of machine it was executed on. I'm worried, because I could see that the new music player could do something like this. Harold

I tested this without touching my mouse, and it still ended after the "Presents" slide. I am mystified. Even more mysteriously, if I hit the arrow key to advance the show while it is showing that "Presents" slide, it does run. System= Windows 2000 Pro. Harold

Michel, I just wanted to add that there WAS a similar problem with MP3's on the 4.10 betas, and it turned out not to be a problem with 4.10 but with earlier versions of PTE. Maybe the fix Igor included affected your presentation in some way. Let Igor see it when he gets back! Harold

Ray, I think you misunderstood me. While I wouldn't mind PTE producing DVD's, I think the ability to pan across a photo is simply a transition like any of the transitions that PTE does today. The software Jim pointed out actually generates BMP files for the intermediate images, but that is something that PTE does internally today for all of its transition effects. The one difference between the pan and zoom transitions and the transitions that are in PTE today is that the pan and zoom transitions require from and to selections on the original photo. But that is something that Igor can surely add without getting into the problems with video! I hope . Harold

Tom, It's possible that I was inadvertently jiggling the mouse, too, when I looked at that show. I have it on my work machine, so I'll try it there when I get back to work on Monday. Is it possible that you had the box marked "Exit on mouse move" checked accidentally? BTW, in synched shows, you have complete control over the length of each slide, and PTE pretty much guarantees that the show plays the same way on different machines. Harold

Tom, You might want to know that running at 1024x768, the first time you scroll down those pictures in the middle of the screen, the background picture seems to shift and have something "under it" at the bottom and right of the picture. Additionally, you might want to double-check the spelling for "Vatican" and "Coliseum". Harold

When I try to run this presentation, downloaded from Beechbrook, it ends abrupts after the fade-in of the word "Presents". Anybody else have this problem? Harold

Jim, I downloaded the software and played with it for a bit. For the sample picture I tried, it seemed like I needed a lot of pictures to stop the pan or zoom from being jerky. This seems like something wonderful for Igor to include in base PTE. Igor, if you can go see this software when you get back from vacation, you might see that it is not too hard to include it into PTE! Harold

I'd love for PTE itself to be able to do this without burdening the user with a gigantic EXE file. Igor? Harold

Al, Precisely! This was driving me crazy earlier today. I had a soft piece of music that I was doing fade transitions for, and I was sure that I was going nuts. Transition points that I was sure were good turned out not be good when I simply replayed them (by repositioning the blue arrow on the timeline)! I finally STOPPED everything that I was doing, restarted all the programs, and carefully matched CoolEdit against the PTE timeline. And that's when I discovered this apparent problem! OTOH, that's what beta testing is all about . Thanks a lot for confirming this problem. When I realized that it didn't always happen, I figured that nobody would believe me . Harold

Igor, I'm not sure why I didn't see this before, but I think there is a bug in beta 11 of PTE that if you click on the timeline while music is playing, it doesn't always reposition the music correctly. I simply can not figure out exactly when it doesn't work. I can not recreate it at the beginning of my show... it seems to happen only at about six minutes into it. The symptom is that when you click on the timeline, the blue arrow starts moving and the music continues playing where it was before. About a half a second later, the music seems to reposition, but by then it is obviously out of synch already. It works perfectly if you hit Pause and then Play. I hope that you can figure it out from my description, but if you need, I can send you the music and PTE files. The music file is an MP3, and is 8603KB in size. Harold

That does seem to be an inconsistency. When you do File New in Beta 11, it asks you for a project name, but then you never see that "project name" again afterwards. It looks like it is using that "project name" temporarily until you save the file the first time. In the Microsoft world, that is known as "Untitled" or something like that, I think. Harold