HaroldB

Jim, IMO, the problem is primarily when the show designer runs tolerances close, and the show runs perfectly on machine A, which is a fast machine where slides can be loaded quickly, and blinks and stutters on machine B, which is slower and takes longer to load slides. It can be quite embarrassing if machine B is the machine you use to present to a thousand people . Keep in mind that what I want is for PTE to handle the situation gracefully by automatically decreasing the transition time, as opposed to blinking and stuttering unpredictably, which is what it does now. What's the upside in having it behave unpredictably? For me, this is actually quite an important change. And considering the number of messages that are posted on this forum regarding this problem, I think it would be really beneficial for PTE. Harold

Al, Until Igor gets around to fixing that annoyance with PTE execution going weird when the transition times are "too long" relative to the slide duration, it makes a lot of sense to develop PTE shows on the slowest machine you have! Harold

Igor, I realize that I'm being revolutionary , but actually, I'd go one step further than Al, and suggest getting rid of the whole idea of a "project name" completely, and just use the file name. When we edit a Word file, we don't have a "project" within the file... we just have the file name. The only time it makes sense to me to have a "project" is when the project encompasses a number of files, the way it does in Visual Basic, for example. As best as I can tell, the only use that PTE makes of the "project name" field is that it uses it as a default for the "caption name" on the Screen tab for non-full screen presentations. That could just be a regular field, and doesn't need to be associated with "project name". Please don't get me wrong... I'd much rather have the ability to change transition times from the synch window than have you fiddle with this "project name" stuff. I can easily live with "project name" forever. I'm just reinforcing what Al said... but what I really want is the ability to change transition effects and times from the timeline window . BTW, a while ago, I pointed out that the "caption name" field is used even for full-screen presentations. If you switch away from a full-screen presentation by using Alt+Tab, you'll see that whatever is in that field appears at the bottom of the screen (near the Start button). Admittedly, now that we have preview from the middle, there is not much reason to switch away from a full-screen presentation, but I think that the "Window caption" field should be available for all presentations, full-screen or not. Just my two cents. Harold

Jim, Are you doing a slide show that is synchronized to music? If so, the navigation bar is not available, since the presumption is that you want the show to play to the music in the way that you synchronized it. Harold

Frank, That's exactly the way I work it for my original pictures, too. I then have a separate directory for each PTE slideshow, and put the PaintShopPro-modified slides there. If you are running Windows/ME or XP, the built-in File Manager has the ability to display thumbnails. Harold

Doesn't PTE already display the duration of the music in the timeline window? It's at the bottom of the window. Harold

The new beta seems to work fine, but be aware that it doesn't even fix the small nit kind of bugs, such as a cut transition showing as taking time on the timeline. FWIW, I got both my image-in-small-box-on-main-window-doesn't-change and my whole-system-sometimes-hangs-when-starting-preview-from-the-middle problems with the new beta. But I can NOT reproduce either of the problems on demand, unfortunately. Harold

From what I've seen of this forum software, there is a reason to minimize the number of sub-forums. Now that there is only one sub-forum, I can simply look at it and then click at the blue-down arrow in each thread title to get new messages since the last time I have logged on. If we break the forum into many sub-forums, one will need to click to get into each sub-forum to check for new messages. There IS the "View New Posts" function, but that seems to give you all the individual new posts (although there DOES seems to be a way to get back into the thread context). Personally, I prefer the current format, because I think it is easier and faster for me to read new messages this way, but I do seem to be a minority of one . If y'all think the other way is better, so be it. Harold

How about a section for "PTE feature requests"? Harold

KenD, Try rebooting your machine. Harold

Igor, I just completed my first full presentation using the 4.0 betas, and I want to tell you how much faster it goes with being able to preview from the middle of a show! I find that that feature was really a big improvement. You really did GREAT! Now if we could just change the transition effects and duration from the timeline window .... Harold

RJM, With the current version of PTE, this will happen if the transition time specified for the slide is longer (or even close to) the total slide time. Try taking out the transition completely for the selected slide and see if that makes the problem change. Harold

Igor, I think these are two old problems, but I wonder if they can possibly be fixed in this release. 1) Currently, in a synched show, if the slide transition time plus the time PTE needs to physically load the slide exceeds the time specified for the slide to stay on the screen, PTE acts weird during execution. Most of the time, it appears to stutter, blinks, shows the same slide a few times, and then skips some slides and usually catches up to the music. The problem here is that the "time PTE needs to physically load the slide" varies from machine to machine. This means that the show may run perfectly on a developor's machine, but then fail (embarrassingly, of course) on somebody else's slower machine. This problem comes up often on this forum, and it would be good if you could fix it once and for all. I don't know exactly how PTE functions inside, but if possible, I'd advocate shortening the transition time to the remaining slide duration time. Let's say that a slide load starts at time 200 and the next slide is supposed to come on at time 1000 and the transition for the slide is specified to take 760 time units. If PTE can "see" that the physical load of the slide took more than 40 time units, it should realize that it will not have enough time to do the whole transition. It should, I think, automatically speed up the transition, so that, for example, if it took it 60 time units to load the slide, the transition will automatically shorten from 760 time units to 740 time units. Justification: This problem comes up very frequently and upsets developers, especially new ones, who don't yet know to be careful about this. The shortening in transition times will be small enough to not be noticed in most cases, and it's much better to do that than to stutter and lose slides completely. 2) On the PTE main window, clicking either on a slide in the file list or a slide in slide show is supposed to show a small preview of the slide in the little picture sub-window. Occasionally, when I click on a slide in the slide show, the picture does not update. The only reliable way I have found to get the picture updating again is to close and re-open the slide show. Can this small annoyance be fixed? Thanks a lot for considering these! Harold

Igor & Ron, The frustrating thing is that *I* can not get this to reoccur on demand either. It only happens OCCASIONALLY, and naturally always at the worst time . I'm thinking that it might be a "resources" problem, that it happens only when I am low on resources, and that perhaps PTE is making a request for some resource and not completely checking that it got the resource -- or something like that. It only seems to happen when I have lots of programs open and lots of images open within the programs I have open. The presentation I am working on has one MP3 file, size 4560KB. It has about fifty pictures, all JPEG 1024x756, and the typical file size is about 140K. The presentation is synched. I'll let you know if I get more of a Clue. Harold

Igor, I've had this happen to me three times now, although it doesn't happen every time. If I'm running a preview, and I hit the ESC key to stop it, and then I very quickly (almost immediately) start the preview again, my PC effectively hangs. The mouse moves very very slowly, I can't switch to any other task, and PTE itself fails to respond. I am running Windows/ME. If I hit Ctrl+alt+del, I get a very slow response, and it shows a task named P2E_PREV in the task list. Also, at the bottom of my screen, there is a task button for the show, but the show itself doesn't start. The only solution I have found is to reboot my system. I am using the partial preview from the main PTE screen by clicking on the little icon, but for all I know, this bug may be the same when using the other available preview buttons. Harold

Igor, Just another minor note so that you are aware of it. In the Customize Slide box, Effects tab, the number in parentheses to the right of the effect duration input box is always missing. Just the parentheses appear. Harold

I agree completely about "being able to change the transition timing and type from the synch window" coming before having the waveforms. Harold

Unfortunately, as best as I can tell, CoolEdit doesn't save the cues at all. (I hope I am wrong on this, and that someone more familiar with CoolEdit can correct me. But I've looked for a way to save them in CoolEdit and I don't see any way.) But CoolEdit neatly displays the cue times in their own window, and I copy them to the PTE timeline window by hand. Tedious, but not a fraction as tedious as picking the transition points by trial and error in PTE itself. Life isn't perfect -- yet Harold

Sure. CoolEdit displays a scrollable, zoomable waveform over a timeline. For many types of music, it turns out that desirable transition points occur at waveform peaks. So it's simply a matter of finding the right waveform peak and setting what CoolEdit calls a Cue to that place on the timeline (you press the F8 key to do that). CoolEdit maintains a list of Cues, and it is then easy to copy them to PTE. This technique allows you to precisely choose PTE transition points. It works well for most (but not all) kinds of music, and is particularly good with "cut" transitions. If you are using transitions that perform an action, you sometimes have to "move" the "chosen" transition point in order to account for the action. When Igor added the timeline feature to PTE, I was immediately frustrated because I couldn't find the "exact right place" for the transition points. But somebody pointed me to CoolEdit for merging multiple MP3 files together, and when I looked at CoolEdit, I realized that it was the perfect solution to my problem. Of course, the REALLY perfect solution would be for PTE to display a waveform over the timeline, too. Maybe one of these days! Harold

Just a quick note that beta #4 still has the problem that a cut (no transition) shows as a few seconds on the timeline in gray. Harold

Igor, I would definitely vote for moving the Customize Synchronization button to the main window. You can have a checkbox in the Project Options window that says whether this button should be grayed out or enabled. It is MUCH easier to work with beta #3, particularly because one can now preview from the middle of a show. The number one PTE improvement on my list is now to let me change the transition type and transition duration from the synch window via drop-down boxes... that change will make PTE even greater than it now is! Harold

FWIW, PowerPoint had the capability of flying text or a slide into the main picture ages ago. And it didn't require any kind of fancy hardware, either. OTOH, it didn't look as good as PTE's shows do, either . Harold

Igor, I'm not sure how easy it is for you to do this, but on the chance that it might be real easy: Could you allow the mouse wheel, if present, to be used to zoom in and out in the synch window? It wouldn't replace the buttons or keyboard keys, but for those users who have a mouse wheel, it would make zooming in and out much quicker. This will become especially relevant if you eventually display the sound waveform over the timeline. If it's a lot of work to add the mouse wheel zoom, I wouldn't bother now. I'd MUCH rather have the ability to change the transitions and transition times in the synch window. Harold

Igor, I was actually amazed that I missed it, too. But I hadn't used beta3 to actually create a slideshow until today, and then I immediately realized that it was a problem. Thanks! Harold

I use CoolEdit and like it a lot. I use it primarily for finding transition points, and if Igor displays the waveform above the timeline, I'll be able to do all of that in PTE. But it also works great for editing sound files. BTW, my version of CoolEdit (CoolEdit 2000) writes MP3 files. Harold