Barry Beckham

Am I the only person who finds these long panorama/pans monotonous? No disrespect to the authors or the images, but they do nothing for me at all. In fact I don't think I have seen one used in a slide show that I have thought adds anything of value to that show. Panoramas look great on a large print, when panning slowly on and on, not for me I am afraid. Am I alone with this view or are people reluctant to say it. I don't mind a slow pan for a few seconds, but feel there is a limit reached when it doesn't work at all. I did try one in my Week in the Highlands show below, but had to take it out becuase it spoilt the flow of the sequence. IMHO of course http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/freestuffdigslidesw3.htm

I think the music now works much better with the slide show, but one point has come up because of that new music. If you look at the first two slides they don't match the music. Or I should say the second one could be placed a little better on the time line. This track has a fairly long intro before there is a cascading sound in the music that really gets it going. That cascading sound is a perfect introduction for your first image in the sequence, but that first image comes up too soon and misses the beat so to speak. You can't hold the opening titles on screen any longer than you have, so the only option would be to trim a few seconds off the front of the music and allow it to fade in. Then when that cascade comes your first image should appear with it and hopefully have a touch more impact. I find that it is these small attentions to detail are what makes one show stand out from another and it is one of the reasons why I can never undertand PTE enthusiasts having anything to do with the automatic spreading of images along the time line. Not for a finished sequence anyway. Loved the images and the presentation. Here is a little tip when putting lines around images with the stroke command. If you add the stroke to the outside of the selection you will find that Photoshop rounds off the corners a little, as it has in your sequence. If you add the stroke to the inside of the selection then you get crisp square corners.

Yaughtsman Good sequence and your voice was perfect for the poetry. I have found that I sound a lot different in the morning than I do at night. So, when I record commentary or a tutorial DVD I never leave a recording half done. I like to complete it at one sitting so it all sounds the same. The worst part is when you get a cold halfway through a DVD tutorial

Paul Track sent, hope we can see the remake soon

Paul Well, music is such a personal thing that when I do comment on the choice of music I am always a bit nervous in doing so. I could be telling someone their favorite music is orrid. Inspiration for AV can come from the music first, but my guess is most of us start with the images, because we are photographers first. In order to choose a piece of music you need a lot to choose from. Its the same with images, if you have to choose 40 images for a slide show from 45, you don't have a great deal of choice, but if you have 345 images, that is completely different. Most of us have a music collection ourselves and if we have a suitable (not for gain license) we can use any of that. Now I mention the license here to stop this thread being hijacked by the license police. Over time I have scanned all my music CD's onto my computer, partly for AV, but mostly that it is more convenient through Windows media player to search and play any track or album I want. That does make it much easier to find a piece of music suitable for your slide show as you can skip through many tracks quickly and easily. When the right piece pops up you will know it. Being an agent for 30+ copyright free albums myself I am probably much better placed with regard music than most, but sometimes I still have quite a search to find something that I think works really well with the images I have. So, first port of call is your own CD collection. Then you could always buy a CD or two of more melodic music, they are nice to listen to while working in Photoshop regardless of whether you will use them for AV. The albums on my web site are mostly melodic and you can download all the track samples in one go as a zip file. I did that so the whole album samples can be highlighted and played and you can skip from track to track to find something suitable, then just buy that one track. $5 hardly breaks the bank, thats about £2.50 What I also do while making an AV is this. I may select an album and while doing the preportary work for the show, getting images prepared etc, I would play music in the background. I have my main PC connected up to an old amplifier and speakers so I hear good quality music. Everytime I hear a track that I think might work in my show, I immediately copy that track to the music folder of my AV. By the time I am ready to finally select music I often have 10-15 tracks already waiting that all appeared suitable, now all I have to do is whittle them down from there. I normally get the images in some sort of order, prepare an auto slide show and drop a piece of music into PTE. Now you can press preview and watch a few slides and listen to the music. You will be amazed how easy it is from here to find what you want, the right piece usually makes itself known. Then you can clear the PTE auto slide show settings and make something special. I selected the samples from just one of my own CD's called The Water and two tracks stood out as suitable to me. On Angelic Wings or The Remembering. Alternatively Enya would be a good choice of music for your slide show and she has loads of albums to choose from. A classical piece would also go well, something from The Four Seasons perhaps by Vivaldi. Clannad are another rich sourse of music and their Celtic feel may work well with Lakeland images. Just had a thought.............. If you find any track on my site that you feel works for you, tell me what it is and I will send it to you with my compliments. You will have it then Royalty free. Barry Water Album http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/music/thewater/thewater.htm All Music http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/royaltyfreemusic_new.htm

I think you have injected a lot of charm into those images and I am pretty certain they are more interesting now that they would have been without the treatment. Sometimes the lighting just does not work for us and then this treatment really works well. All comments are a personal thing, but your choice of music leaves me cold I'm afraid. In my view that syle of music is more suited to an urban landscape AV, not the soft dreamy images you have produced. Your images are creating a great deal of charm, but in my view your music takes 70% of that charm away. I am convinced that a different piece of music would make the world of difference.

A few years ago a royalty free album (got it right this time Maureen ) was released called Overdub. It was a series of sound effects that were suited to AV workers and I used a few myself around that time. It was withdrawn a few years ago, but I still get emails about it and where to find it. This prompted me to see if I could get it released again. I have managed to do that and it was added to our list of music yesterday Quick link here, right at the top of the list "Overdub" http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/royaltyfreemusic_new.htm

Yaughtsman I think you have misunderstood me. I wasn't referring to the quality of the music in the sense of how a piece would sound through a good quality stereo or a cheap PC speaker system. I was referring to the charm of the music, that ingredient that makes us sit up and listen, the part that inspires us. It is the music itself, the arrangement, how the intruments are used and how they are put together. Much of the music you can download from the Internet cheaply lacks the exact ingredient that we AV workers are looking for. It stands to reason when you think it through. If it had that something extra,it would command more money, be more popular and unlikely ever to be released as copyright free. Of course there are always going to be some exceptions I am sure.

I have now configured the Copyright Free Music tracks in our on line shop so that individual tracks can be selected across any of our 31 albums and a maximum of 50% discount on 10 of those tracks is applied. Just select the tracks you want and place them in the shopping cart, our software will work out the discount for you on exit. This will make it better to select just the tracks you want.

Yaughtsman But the music lacks that richness you get with the right orchestra playing it. I had to buy New World Symphony as copyright free for my Black Country AV. The music is good, but not in the same class at the one I have played by a top orchestra. Its all about choice and what you want?

Yaughtsman I have been to that music site before and downloaded a lot of tracks. Now there must be some good stuff on there somewhere, but I could not find anything with the charm I was looking for. Not all of MGMusic is going to be suitable for an AV, it depends what sort of show your making, but there are some beautifully inspiring pieces that have grabbed me. Try Heartsong or Sungrass from the album below to name a couple http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/music/wedding/wedding.htm When I contacted MGMusic about releasing copyright free music, the price of a CD was less than I paid for one track on one copyright free site I visited. I thought what they did to release there music so cheaply was pretty good.

Adda I just ried the three track samples you mentioned and they all downloaded fine for me. Barry

JEB I agree, if you are creating slide shows not for gain a license is great, but if you do want to add the AV to a disk, or there is some gain, then your license doesn't cover you does it? Horses for courses

RON Mp3 format

Yaughtsman Its not compulsory to buy! Iys just another recourse if you want it. You can actually get discounts on tracks, up tp 40% on selections from an album. If you only want 4-6 tracks that is a great way to get them. The way I have the music configured we can not currently offer those discounts on tracks across albums. I would have a lot of work to do to enable that, but given time I may do so. The overall price is not of my making as the music is copyright to MGMusic, but if you can get copyright free music for 65p and it is what you want, who can argue with that. Personally I have found much of the copyright free music I have heard lacking in the charm and appeal necessary for a great AV, there must there must be exceptions to that I am sure. Its not likely that every track on an album will ever be usable and if you expect that then perhaps that is a little unrealistic. What I Like is a lot of music to be able to choose from as it is sometime hard to find something that works really well. The more you have to choose from the better the AV. (generally) For the future I am trying to get agreement to sell a batch of CD's even cheaper so enthusiasts could build up a stock of music that for their projects now and into the future. Perhaps a 20 CD batch. Given the massive discounts I thought I would remind potential users of it and the fact that it just got a lot cheaper.

Many of you already are aware of the 31 albums of copyright free music that are available on our web site at www.beckhamdigital.co.uk Well, that music has just become a whole lot cheaper and it was already very good value to begin with. Music for Photographers was designed for AV enthusiasts like us, once we purchase the music we are free to use it for our slide shows without any licenses or fear of breaching copyright laws. Our web site shop on line has now been configured for Australian dollars following our move to Australia. However, you can check out of our shop in either US dollars, British pounds or Australian dollars and see the price of your purchases and your discount before committing to that purchase. Many of you may already see some reduction in music prices due to exchange rates, but we have also priced the music very competitively as you will see. But the greater savings are in the discounts we can now offer on multiple purchases. We have managed to persuade MGMusic to offer the same great discounts on their music that we already offer on our movie tutorial CD's and DVD's. For Example:- You can get up to 24% discount when you buy 6 or more copyright free albums or more on CD. You can get up to 30% discount if you buy 6 or more albums as downloads You can also get up to 40% discount if you buy 6 or more 6 tracks from any one Album. The discount builds up from 2 purchases to 6 or more, to the maximums shown above. You can find the music at the link below http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/royaltyfreemusic_new.htm

18,000 images on a hard drive and no backup at all off the computer? Surely not?

A confession Many years ago I made a serious blunder that I hope I have made up for now. Like Igor I was fascinated by slides and my very first visit to a Camera Club was an Ausio Visual show. This would have been around 1975 and the hardware would have been a bit crude, but it worked because it captured me. I went home and told the wife about it and that we would have to have a go at that. Well, in time we did and found ourselves visiting loads of Camera Clubs in the South East of the UK for many years with our Visual Impressions AV's. Our Kodak carousel projectors and a Kodak dissolve unit cost us a fortune, then we needed a 4 track tape, amplifier, speakers, magazines that were £7-10 each, but we managed and it filled a large part of our photography in the early years. When digital photography came along I was introduced to a very early version of PTE, but here is the confession. I took one look at the file size of the download that was very small and said to myself. This can't be a very good program at 1.4mg and I ignored it. BIG MISTAKE Just goes to show you can't judge a book by its cover, or file size in this case. In my defense, I was used to the huge file sizes of programs like Photoshop and I wrongly assumed file size equals quality. I hope I have made up for my blunder over the years and have never made the same mistake again with PTE or other software. So, with a new year close, I raise a glass and say Cheers to you Igor and everyone else of course. Incidently what is Cheers or the equivolent in Russian? Well the internet tells me it's АПЛОДИСМЕНТЫ So АПЛОДИСМЕНТЫ to you Igor and I just hope the translation is right and I am not saying something rude to you instead. Happy New Year

It sounds like you could be using images far larger than they need be and as the show plays it overwhelms your operating system and drops some of the effects. I have heard this same thing before and that was the cause. If you are using images directly from your Digicam, then take a look at reducing image size closer to the resolution of your screen.

Well, lets be honest. Who has seen a slide show with randon generated images or music and said. Wow that really captures a mood ? Might be OK for ProShow Gold, but not the Rolls Royce of AV software. Well, not for me anyway Might as welll send me camera out on it's own too

All we need is someone to organise something in Adelade and we can think about coming. A full days lecture or even a two day event is possible. All we need is our expenses and ticket sales should cover that.

Audio Visual has two main ingredients that give it the charm and interest and that wow value. Are we sure we really want to hand over 50% of what makes a great show to a random setting?

It sure is, in the UK this would be equivolent to August. All the children are off school for their summer hols and Christmas and they go back at the end of Jan It seems odd to us at the moment, but I guess we will get used to it.

Well Ian. Are we going to get to see the full Monty before the Christmas holidays are over.

Well Ken, as you may imagine, no sign of snow here. Its 8:45 in the morning and just climbing above 25c. As soon as my PC's arrive my first PTE slide show will be our new life in Australia and we will include a tour of the house, but still I doubt I can conjour up snow. Unless it's Photoshop snow