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Well, i also am not a professional :)/>/> but the question was really intriguing. You're right Dave, you can drag the time point on the time line to place it where you need to. It's also true that when you need to perform a lot of settings on different objects it can be really annoying to correctly align all objects single time points to ensure you can switch between them without continually select them on the time line. Moreover, doing so when you have more than one time points will screw the animation and it would be handy being able to select a time point and "see in future" how it will behave even with only numeric inputs. Regards... Umberto

Hello Igor, Short answer: YES. Long (not so) answer: YES, the best for me would be being able to select a time point and move the time cursor independently, maybe in this case only the numeric input in properties panel will be enabled, i suppose there will be some trouble interacting with the mouse if the time cursor doesn't match in case of multiple time points) Greetings! Umberto

You may not believe it, but i never tried to click the folder dropdown because i tought it was file related! Thank you for your clarification! Under this condition, better to make the field read only in case of builtin mask. Thank you! Umberto

Yes Dave, i agree that the slider controls are all correctly clipped. But i'm not referring to the mask creation dialog. I'm referring to the "after-creation" management. You know, you can access the mask parameters also by the properties panel. It's a really handy shortcut to manage the mask parameters without building new masks until you reach the desired result. Too bad from the properties panel it's possible to screw the editor. One first solution is to set the field as read only, but i think it's really useful being able to change the parameters directly from here. Please have a look at the attached screenshot. Greetings! Umberto

You are right, i'm using american standards. But my work is designed for use with a digital projector directly attached to the PC or iPad and those FPS play well with this configuration, letting me squeeze a bit more smoothness (you can notice the difference from 25 and 30 FPS). Anyway, i also understand your point. Your workflow is aimed to the maximum image quality and you don't want any PTE intervention on interpolation, that may slightly blur your sharpening. This requires you to deal with screen resolution and image resolution and to work well to match them. I simply never approached this way just because i use a lot of slight pans and zooms, and when you involve zooms the sharpening is blurred. So... i tend to avoid thinking about this issue. But, i repeat, i understand what you mean. Greetings! Umberto

Sometimes i play with the builtin mask parameters 500:500:0:50:50 and directly edit them to fine tune the mask effect. If i mistake and type something that goes out of range an exception raises. Sometimes it's possible to recover it by undoing the mistake, closing and reopening the O&A editor but sometimes PTE enters into an exception loop that requires a task manager kill. I think it can be useful to clip entered parameters to the maximum available range to avoid this annoying error. Greetings! Umberto

Jan, Both your posts work remarkably well! Did you use a PNG image for the front snow layer in first example? I really loved also the balloon one, great cinematographic effect. and really loved also the music! Is it original? Regards, Umberto

Daniel, perhaps we have different requirements. In my opinion it's not important to know the exact size in pixel of a picture, and i appreciate the way PTE works. But sometimes i need to put on screen a set of pictures that must keep their relative size. I mean, if i need to work with, say, a 500x500px and a 100x100px image, sometimes i wish that they appear on screen the first 5 times bigger than the second. I don't really need how many physical screen pixels they will take, just because PTE is resolution agnostic and it does a good job rescaling all pictures at the current work resolution. Obviously, i must be aware that a picture needs as many pixels as the surface it will cover on the slide, just because if not i fall into interpolation losing picture sharpness. But really the physical size is not important IMO. By working resolution agnostic, you can get your project and apply at different resolutions. In my last project, i rendered it three times, one at 1440x1080 at 60FPS, one at 1024x768 at 60FPS and one at 1024x768 at 30FPS with just few clicks. If i had my project pixel-resolution tied, i'd have a lot of annoyances during this conversion. Greetings! Umberto

Igor, I really love this panning effect. I'd use it in my projects but there is a little issue with this approach. By rotating the two images on the X axis you get an exagerated perspective effect. It would be nice being able to apply some kind of "counter perspective correction" to the texture so that the 3D image will appear as the flat image. A kind of "front projection" that you may find in many 3D modelers. Just to say... Greetings! Umberto

I'm with you on the resolution independent definition. PTE does a good job on this side and it's a big help to avoid the user dealing with pixel resolution sizes. But, on the other hand, sometimes there is this need to keep a set of pictures proportionally sized. I'm not saying that we must start to deal with pixel sizes, i'm just saying that it can be helpful a feature capable to consider the (hidden) pixel size to correctly correlate a set of pictures appearance through zoom level. Read it as a kind of "macro" that does the dirty work for you. But there will be no more parameters in the interface. Maybe only a right click option on a set of selected pictures. I think it will take only few code lines and make happy many users :)/> Greetings! Umberto

It's not really complicated, it's more difficult describe it by words. Answering your first question: Yes i have a real life example: in my last slideshow i have many "fake 3d" scenes built with several layers stacked in 3D space. Each layer has different location on Z axis to achieve a good 3D rotation effect. Moreover, each layer has different size because of the structure of the image (some layers are small details of the entire scene). My need is to import all layers so that every layer keeps the right proportional size respect of each other. My situation is a bit more complicated because i obtained all layers from a single picture so placing them at different Z locations requires an additional zoom level adjustment to match them when seen from the front. But this is a different issue. Suppose we don't need this. Then you see that importing a group of pictures mantaining their respective size is an useful option. Answering your second question: If the images are all with the same height and width then they overlap perfectly, hence the bounding box of all images matches with all of them and the images are managed as if they were a single picture. So, Fill frame will fill frame with all images, like if you did it one image at a time. Greetings! Umberto P.S. I don't know if initial Daniel requirement is exactly what i'm talking about, please Daniel let me know.

No, you are missing the point. I explain. Suppose that you want to work with a 100x100 picture and a 500x500 picture, but you want the first picture to get a zoom factor 1/5 of the second picture, so you can keep the proportions (pixel size speaking). It's easy to do manually in this case, but think about dealing with 20 pictures, each one with strange sizes (1920x1080, 3260x1560 for example). To get the exact zoom proportions you must start working with a calculator or an excel sheet. And if you need to work with lots of slides in such a way, it's a pain. My approach is currently to load the biggest picture, set it at 100% zoom, then load other pictures, overlap them on the first picture and work with zoom factor and offset to match them. In my case it was possible because every picture was part of an entire "animated" picture so i had guidelines to act such a way. Obviously, the suggested proportional scaling doesn't fix offsets, but at least you don't have to deal with zoom factors. Once you correctly scaled all the pictures, you can wrap them into a frame and move it. Greetings! Umberto

Daniel, I well understand your problem. I had a lot of difficulties correctly scaling a lot of images into PTE because they were part of a unique animation and they must all be correctly scaled. And, too bad, all the images were different in size. Since PTE works (correctly IMO) with a resolution independent approach, the above operation is a pain and i think it has no solution while you work with each single picture. But maybe adding a kind of "proportional scaling" that works on a group of selected images may help. Let me explain the idea. Load a bunch of pictures into the tree structure. Select them all. Then apply the "Fit to slide" or "Cover slide" command. PTE should consider the entire group of pictures for the operation and execute the scaling by considering the outer bounding box of all overlapped pictures (or max width and max height) and proportionally scale all pictures within this bounding box. This keeps the "resolution agnostic" approach of the command when used with a single picture. Greetings! Umberto

Peter, When i need to solve this problem i set only the music tracks in PTE, then render the full video to file, estrapolate the audio track, put into an audio editor (i use ableton live) and add the voice in a second audio track with the music limited by a compressor effect driven by the voice track. Then export the new audio track to file and use it as the original audio track of the PTE show. Sounds pretty complicated ad limiting... well... it is, but it works Greetings! Umberto

Dave, this topic is getting hot I agree with you that the optimal solution is to keep limited the slide total time, but sometimes this approach simply leads to a very complicated splitting, especially when you have to deal with videos. I know that it's possible to work with video links, but really i find it difficult. Greetings! Umberto

Ahaheheh Ken! You must be right... my eyes are getting older Umberto

Yes Ken, As you can see from the attached screenshot, the zoomed track doesn't provide a better information about the time points. it's only a zoomed bitmap. Moreover, while zooming i cannot interact with the track. Greetings! Umberto

I fear that this will not fullfill the requirement. Bitmap wise zooming on a two pixel adjacent time points doesn't let you fine tune them just because you don't see finer grain information but the original "big pixel" thing. Greetings! Umberto

Yes, i knew the splitter option. But collapsing the panel leaving a cluttered 100 px is so inelegant Greetings! Umberto

I wonder if it's possible to hide the pictures panel. Once i added all my pictures in the project (mostly with drag and drop from windows folders) i'd like to hide it and give all the upper part of the window to the mini player, even if it will not fit the entire width of the window. It's less distracting. I see there is an option to hide tree panel, but none for pictures panel... Greetings! Umberto

Peter, i suggest to adopt a "Photoshop style" approach to the alignment issue. Everythig is subject to a "magnetic alignment" when moving objects around. If you want the freedom to place the video/audio clip where you want you must do it by keeping CTRL key pressed when you do it. Or, maybe, the countrary, keeping pressed CTRL to activate the magnet effect, but i feel it's more safe the "Photoshop" approach. Another comment on audio clips: i noticed that if you lock an audio track and move the time point of a contained clip with CTRL+E command, the clip will move alone regardless of the locked track (i expected all clips on the trach will move). To achieve that effect i must access the customize dialog of the clip. By applying here the parameter change i get all the track clips affected by the shift. This looks counter-intuitive to me. And a final tought: i think that the behavior of slides track and audio tracks should be aligned because it's frustrating being forced to approach the same problem in different ways. Greetings! Umberto

Peter, you're right but i recently faced an issue with mask containers. They don't allow to specify a drop shadow effect (by their nature i suppose). So you are forced to do all the "child opacity" work into the mask container, and insert the mask container itself into a frame to get the drop shadow effect (this works only with a rectangular mask of course). But then you need to animate both frame and mask opacity if you want a complete fade: Example: Frame (for drop shadow, need to animate opacity) | +-Mask container | +-Picture (zooming out, i want the picture to stay inside the mask boundaries for a picture in picture effect) +-Mask (need to animate opacity) And this doesn't finish here: If i need to animate nested "groups of childrens" opacity the mask trick doesn't work because you cannot nest mask containers. Greetings! Umberto

I suppose that Claude is referring to the fact that the opacity of a frame doesn't control the opacity of its children. I think that this is due to the fact that the opacity in the frame controls the opacity of the fill style so it's difficult to merge both functions in one single option. I already suggested that it should be possible to use the frame simply as a hierarchy control for children, including not only the transformation matrix but also the opacity. I really never used a frame for its fill capacity, but only for better control of the hierarchy. There is the rectangle if i want to fill an area. Maybe adding a new "transparent" fill style that acts also as a switch to propagate all reasonable informations to the chilredn (i mean opacity but maybe some other?) will address this issue? Greetings! Umberto P.S. But we are off topic, so better continue somewhere else.

But when the user right clicks it expects a popup menu (it's the most common behavior). I suspect that Peter is looking for something more immediate? Greetings! Umberto

Hello Peter, I usually use this flag to adjust slide start time on music track, i fear that such popup window could appear even when not wanted if i click on the flag then change my mind. Or, the popup window should dismiss automatically when the mouse goes out of its scope, but can be troublesome for the user. Don't know... Greetings! Umberto