Barry Beckham

There is an animated gif at the address below if anyone wants to use it feel free to copy it from there. http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk

I too are looking for a good laptop for Photoshop demos, but it must be able to handle Raw images in 16 bit and I want it to run PYE5 animations faultlessly. My experience when I did a bit of research at PC world may be of use. I still havn't taken the plunge yet. http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=7255

Ken I tried the same thing with the setting you mentioned on and off and the same error occurs Later last night I copied into the file string another start.exe file from another project. It is almost identical to the one I have been trying to link to. Its a small PTE4 slide show that provides a menu for my DVD. The process worked perfectly. It seams the problem is with just this one file. Nobeefstu Brilliant, I just never thought of that especially after I got an almost identical start file from another project to fire up correctly last night. Your work around did the trick Well done mate and thanks

Ken Yes I tried that, but the problem is the same. I can't resave the original slide show in PTE5 either because it is a DVD menu structure with buttons made in PTE4. Converting it to PTE5 destroys the quality of the buttons. Can't use PTE5 buttons because they are not as good as PTE4 ones for what I use them for. Just tried it anyway and it does fire up fine, so it has to be a technical problem between 5 and 4. Barry

I am very familiar with this process, so I am reasonable confident this is not use error. I have made a generic intro slide show in PTE5 and and called it Logo.exe. I have tried to set up the Run Application after last slide option to open another slide show, but it will not run and throws up an error message. It works fine when I set it to open a web page, Photoshop or even another PTE5 slide show. It refuses to open a PTE4 slide show no matter what I do. The two files will be in the root of a DVD so the parameters to Run Application after last slide option are simply "start.exe" I tried to get around this by using a button on the last slide of the logo slide show, but the same error message appears. I have done this before, but both programs were PTE4 Any ideas guys and gals?

Jonathon When I add commentary I do so by using the free program Audacity to record the commentary in short related clips. I save these as individual sound files. Doing it this way makes it easier to record and place into your music track. It also makes it easy to correct a mistake rather than having to record the whole commentary To locate the precise point along the music to add your commentary try this. Program your slide show using the PTE time line with just the music track. When you have it fully complete, use the time line to determine where every sound track needs to go. You can read off the minutes and seconds and make a paper note of them. You can open those commentary files up alongside the music (multi-tracking) and slide them into position. That way you can reduce the volume of the music when the commentary starts and increase it again when that bit of commentary ends. (unless the commentary is continuous). This reduction in music volume is almost essential if you want your commentary to be clearly heard. After you have two commentary sections done, save the whole this as a project in Audacity and then export what you have as an Mp3. You can test the resulting file in PTE to make sure the first two are right, then go back to audacity to do the third, fourth etc, then save and test that. Build up the soundtrack slowly as your bound to want to move a slide or two as well. As long as you save a project file in both PTE and Audacity you can always come back and add changes. Another tip, save/export your project file and Mp3 files in Audacity with different names. Mixdow 1, mixdown 2 etc. That way if you do get something wrong, you always have the opportuity to recover an earlier version. Hope that helps www.beckhamdigital.co.uk

RRoberts Have a look at the link below that may help you with your question. http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/audiovisual/dvd/dvd.htm There is also a lot more about AV here http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/audiovisual/audiovisual.htm

Sadly No Bob

For those interested I am running a workshop for 4 people on the 11th November 2007 covering PTE 5. The day will be limited to 4 people to ensure everyones needs are met. The four places can be booked by a group or individually. Details are here http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/smallgroupav.htm

Imagination is more important than knowledge Now there is a powerful statement, that sums it all up in my view. You can find out the technical bits easy enough when you need them, but imagination....I am not so sure about that. Is that something your either have or you don't? I know some really knowledgable and technically superb photographers, but imagination.. No

Mario, I never have been a wedding photographer, I have been a very keen amateur most of my life. Only in the past few years have I earned anything from my photography. Lin has really covered all the bases. As a photographer, DVD's for TV viewing don't appeal to me at all and its for the very quality reason you mentioned and what Lin explained. Our slide shows are made at low resolution compared with what we would want for a 20*16 print. However, 1280*1024/1024*768 or thereabouts gives us a superb image for viewing on a monitor or via a PC projector. You have to decide if the trade off in quality between DVD/TV use and PC is worth it. I tend to think it isn't for much of what professionals and amateurs produce. Most of the time when we are presenting our images we want them displayed at their absolute best, so why buy a camera capable of 11 million pixels and then present the image at less than half a million pixels on a TV. Most people have a PC in their home now or at least access to one and the numbers are growing all the time. I would only use th DVD/TV method if there was no other option. Providing DVD's to wedding parties is as Lin says is generally an added extra to the wedding packages, but a popular one. If I was presenting my work via a slide show to the brides aunt Matilda, a DVD would probably be OK, but if I were presenting work to a Magazine editor I would not even consider a DVD. HD TV will improve all this in time I guess.

I don't disagree with a word Lin has said, but what people know is right for a slide show is not what they appear to do. The result in my view is the exact opposite of what a slide show should do. It drives you away rather than inviting you to stay and I find myself reaching for the escape key more and more of late. I don’t think any rules were trying to be laid down and if nothing else, the opinions expressed prove one thing perfectly. You can please all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but not All of the people All of the time. One man’s meat etc Every effect should be appropriate to the circumstances, but we are all human and we will all stray a little at times. If we are not careful when we are in full creative slide show mode something very odd happens to our senses. An invisible mist descends upon us while we in this creative flow and it robs us of good taste and restraint. It prevents us from knowing when to stop a manipulation when working in Photoshop. It prevents us from seeing the obvious fact that the colour saturation is too high or the sharpness over done. Its not unique to digital or PTE as it used to happen in the darkroom too. This mist descends under safelight conditions and prevents you from seeing the most obvious mistakes on the image you have just sweated blood over. It’s the same mist that stops us seeing all the mistakes in that really creative letter or tutorial we have just written. However, there is a solution, TIME. Just come back to what you thought was a brilliant masterpiece a day or so later when the mist has lifted and then you can sometimes wince at what you have done. Once I complete a slide show I put it on my desktop and I will play it at least once a day while drinking a coffee. If you can sit through your slide show 10 times in a week and see no problems with it, you’re a better man (or woman) than me. It is horses for courses though with any transitions and animation, but the majority of slide shows are what I term pictorial. They are the ones that suffer the most when the mist descends.

Perhaps one point : pans or zooms should start and end by their first and last image, still for a few seconds. I think there must be fulcrums. Patrick Sorry Patrick I don't agree at all. Apart from some picture in picture techniques or animated text, I don't think animation looks good at all when it starts and stops before the transitions. I think an animated slide show has far more charm when the next image gently appears on screen while the movement is progressing. We don't have to see every inch of the panned image to get the effect and most of the zooms I see are wildly over done to the point that the image is broken up and ugly. The whole point of AV is to create something that has a charm to it, something that creates a mood if possible and something that flows well on screen. It is supposed to captivate the viewer and in my view (there are exceptions of course) images with the animation starting, stopping and zooming all over the screen destroy any chance of that. Remember these effects add nothing to the quality of your work and they are not a substitute for it. We will all over use animation a bit, especially while it is new and fresh, that’s life. The question we need to ask ourselves as we open the Objects and animation screen is "What is my proposed animation going to do for the slide show" I guess a lot of the time we may have some trouble answering that and if we do, perhaps we should leave that image static.

Generally speaking a slide show on TV looks pretty good covering the screen. Try making your slide show with the mode setting in the Objects and animation screen set to cover slide.

I have been rumbled, I though that if I did a lot of work on my mug shots in Photoshop I could pass as 25.

I took a number of shows to the store and the one that I tried first was the one called PTE5 demo here http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/slideshow/pte5.zip The second one was a fairly heavy wedding AV with lots of animation, its about an 80 meg file and I don't have that one on my site. Any problems with a laptop capable of coping with animation will soon be shown up by the PTE5.zip demo above. With regards to graphics cards I recall Igor saying sometime ago that I should avoid a laptop with shared graphics memory, so I stayed away from any of those. Had another interesting experience yesterday while in Tescos. A laptop for £299. What surprised me was the fast dual core processor, half a gig of ram and a very respectable Nvidia graphics card. Sadly they were not set up so I could not try them, but that would be ironic to find a laptop for that money in Tescos that copes with animation. Seriously I also need a powerful laptop for Photoshop demonstrations. Now we are in the RAW age I cannot reduce resolution to allow the laptop to cope with what I want to do in Photoshop and I do place a little pressure on Photoshop when I use it for demos Barry

I hope forum members agree with me, that the older gentlemen Like Ron should be made to have a medical examination before being allowed to purchase a Canon 1Ds MkII I am only thinking of his health of course.

So your putting music into the Project options and individual slides too. Well, PTE can't play both and something has to give. Generally, as soon as you begin to get creative with music you should turn to a music editor like Audacity. Its free and there are loads of users on this forum. Editing sound is very similar to editing images really. If you want to mix music and have one track ending at a particular point and another coming in, you will get a better result by using something like Audacity. You can work in multi-track mode and get your soundtrack just right before exporting it as one Mp3 file. That multi-track file will then be flattened into one sound file. Now you only have one sound track to add into the PTE project options > Music tab. Advantages, you control the exact point the next music/sound effect/speach starts. You control the fade in and out of these sound files to get the balance perfect. You can make a soundtrack worthy of the BBC with Audacity and its fun too.

I think we need more information to help 1. Can you see your sound file when you browse for it? 2. Is the file in Mp3 format? 3. Can you see your background music in the large white box under the music tab? 3. Does sound play when you put a domest Music CD into your PC? Barry

Ron. Done, I get your 1Ds Mk2 for £500 and you can have a copy of every tutorial at 50p each. When can I come over and collect. Seriously, IFA has the answer, I turned away from backpacks for years because you have to take them off and put them down every time you change lenses. I didn't want to do that, but that is a small price to pay for ease of carrying gear in a backpack. I have used a backpack style for some years now and would not go back to a standard bag. When your kit is supported across both shoulders you almost forget its there. When you are taking pics at least the heaviest bit of kit is then in your hands and the rest is easily supported. B

Jacques Personally I am not keen on watching small web sized slide shows that generally have lost all their impact and quality by streaming them from the internet. Apart from an advertisment or a teaser I would favour the viewer having to download the full slide show as a zip file. Just as we do from our sebsites or Beechbrook I would want the viewer to see my show the way I intended it to be seen and with internet connects getting faster and faster that isn't such a problem. My reasons for saying this is that AV is all about presentation and I want my presentation to be at it's best.

Ron You should have thought about that before buying a Pro camera. If you can't handle that Canon 1Ds mk2 I will take it off your hands for a few quid. I could carry that and my 1Ds and save changing lenses. I'll give you £500 for it, no questions asked

Jeavons It's interesting how different people work with PTE. If I use commentary I set up the entire slide show first, so that the images are in sync with the music. Then I use the time line to indicate where commentary of sound effects need to go in relation to the images and the time on the background music. I then take them into audition and mix the two together, reducing volumes where needed. I generally do a number of sound mixes and just adjust the number of each sound file name, just in case I get something wrong. Its more or less the same as you really and it achieves my aims, but just a slightly different approach. It does allow any animations to be checked and time allowed for the animation to complete, before finally adding any other sound files.

I did think about using the hard drive, but my thought process went like this. If I can find one that runs perfectly from a DVD, then I am assured of it running from the hard drive. If it works on the hard drive, but not from a DVD, perhaps that is too close for comfort. Well, that is what went through my mind. I abandoned laptops a while ago for demo purposes because they seemed unpredictable, but I have to say I was surprised at how many laptops could not handle animation. The fades were all right, but they couldn't do both together. I will look at the Dell and I see there is also another Toshiba with a 256 nvidia card. I will probably be buying one some time this year, but no rush. This time I want to make sure what I get handles CS3 raw files and PTE5

I had an interesting experience yesterday. I went to PC world armed with a DVD of PTE5 slide shows containing animation and tried the disk in various laptops. The view I have come to after that excersize is that you cannot buy a laptop for this sort of animated slide show without testing it first. The most expensive laptop in the store at £1299 with what appeared a good Nvidia graphics card could not handle the animation. Most of the others couldn't either, but we didn't try the real cheap ones. We tested most of those they had in the £600 range and higher that gave a high spec with 2 gig of ram and a known graphics card. Only one seems to handle all I could throw at it and the cost was £999. It was a toshiba Satelite P200-143, ironically the same name as my current laptop that has passed its sell by date. The spec was: Intel T5500 17 inch screen 2 Gig ram 1.66 GHz 200 MB hard drive 128 Nvidia Gforce Go 7600 Graphics card http://tinyurl.com/28wxcx