Barry Beckham

Igor I am almost reluctant to ask this given all your hard work, but I will all the same When can we expect the next beta and what will it include? Barry

Igor I think I am a bit late replying here. What I find is that the movement of the balloons is faster in the objects and animation window, than it is when the demo show is created. It doesn't speed up, its just faster in the preview mode Barry

Igor We spoke about this, but it may help to keep things all in one place. I would like to see a global setting to ensure that slide shows created at 1024*768 display as they would in 4.48 To do this now every image has to be accessed via Objects and Animation, Properties tab, Mode > original Position > Pixels I appreciate this is not high priority and we can use both versions for now. Regards Barry

Igor One or two people have said my balloons are moving a bit fast in my slide show demo To be honest they are probably right, but its only a demo. However, I notice that the speed of the animation as seen in the objects and animation preview window is slower than what I actually get when the final animation appears in the finished exe slide show Barry

D67 I think you have picked up the wrong end of the stick mate. The whole purpose of the beta is for us, so called experts to assist Igor with any problems we might find. Its not the finished article Barry

Igor I think your aware of these issues already, but it might help to keep them all in one place. My balloons demo is closing on the last slide now, but the music is repeating. I do not have the repeat music box ticked and I do have the close the show after the last slide selected. On the project options main tab the line of text that says Permit control of show with keyboard or mouse is cut off halfway through the O in mouse. Starting a preview of the slide show via a right mouse click repeats the music from the start. Wherever you start the preview the music starts from the beginning. I think you are aware of this already. Barry My Demo is here if you want to download it again http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/pte/balloon_demo.zip

I agree and thanks to Maureen I have used a set for a few years now and even use one set on a home PC. The sound quality will fill a large hall comfortably Barry

Ken If copyright music is required I will purchase the CD and donate it to whoever puts this show on the road. Just let me know what he/she requires. Barry barry@beckhamdigital.co.uk www.beckhamdigital.co.uk

Contaxman No, it never occurred to me as I suppose I didn't look forward enough to the day when we could leave 1024*768 behind. I always have the originals of course BB

Mike OK, I thought I had the answer, but it appears not. I recently bought a state of the art Acer laptop with the right graphics card for PTE, but as soon as it was plugged into a Projector the display on the laptop flickered and detroyed any chance of showing a slide show. It went back and for less than half the money I bought a desktop with twice the spec. Barry

Seabird You will have to cancel your holiday mate. I could go in your place. Barry

When Pan and Zoom becomes available perhaps we should look again at our workflow. It is unlikely that we will want all the images in a slide show zooming or panning. I have been thinking about this and perhaps the answer is to put all the selected image in a holding file at the highest resolution we can get from our camera. Then size images from there into a working folder at the resolution of our monitor. As the show starts to come together and we want the odd image larger for pan and zoom we can go back to our high resolution folder and adjust the size that one image a little bigger than the others to allow for the effect. Or wait till Igor has polished the program and lets it loose on us with his recommedations Barry

When you say the music stopped do you mean it stopped midway or the misic played the full length but ended before your images did. If it is the second option, it sounds like you put together an auto slide show and did not use the time line. Barry

Yes, you need to wait a few weeks until version 5 is released Barry

A great idea for any work, is as soon as you get the project/image started save it to a unique name. Then every couple of minutes hit Ctrl+S and your work will over write the last saved version. Barry

I recently bought a new laptop for use in digital lectures where PTE plays a large part. The machine came out well in maga zine comparisons and it had a 2 GHz porocessor and 2 gig of ram and a pretty good Radeon graphics card. Certainly one that should work well with PTE and Photoshop As soon as I unpacked the laptop (bought on the internet) I thought it looked a bit flimsy and cheap looking, but if it worked well I wasn't bothered with that. At my very first lecture when I conected the laptop to a PC projector it went haywire. The graphics flickered like a flourescent light and running a slide show was just impossible. I had to quickly revert to my old laptop and did the demo with that. My confidence was shot with that make as I don't weant that sort of nonsence at all. The upshot is that I am ditching laptops for my demos. My view is that I have to carry a car load of stuff anyway, so a small tower case will not make much difference. I use the PC projector to demo anyway and only need a small keyboard with the case Comparing the rough spec Laptop 2 GHz and 2 gig of Ram - Radeon Graphics card - 80 gig hard drive wiz bang DVD writer that I don't really need for this work. £1700 Tower Desktop 3.4 GHz and 2 gig of Ram + Top of the range graphics card, upgraded sound card - 2 * 160 gig sata drives - A DVD CD rom drive - £800 Twice the spec at half the price. Wouldn't want to have the desktop under my arm for ant length of time though. Barry

lyndongrove Once you have created your action and with the actions palette open look down the left side to the right of the ticks. If the little boxes to the right are highlighted remove them. These tell the action to stop and wait for user input. Try the action again and this may be the problem solved. Other than that re-record the action. You can make mistakes and I have done that lots of times. For example, if you create an action for a flattened layer and try to run the same action on a layered file it sometimes will not work. It depends on what you are asking it to do. There are two possibilities to try first. www.beckhamdigital.co.uk

I was asked to create a tutorial DVD for Wedding Photographers and did so a year or so ago and it has proved to be very popular. It covers all I could think of at the time and has 6 hours of videos and demos on it. http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/weddigitalslide.htm Barry

Igor I had it in my mind from somewhere that you were considering an increase in price for version 5, the software is worth an increase? Barry

It sounds to me that this project needs the picture in picture technique so that you can standardise on 1024*768 and fit everything into that format no matter where it comes from. However, you would need software like Elements or Photoshop Barry www.beckhamdigital.co.uk

I would like to inform the forum users that I have been able to discount our copyright free CD's from 19.95 to 15.99. Once purchased you are free to use the music for any commercial or non commercial venture short of reproduction on TV Barry Our Music list is at the link below http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/royaltyfreemusic.htm

I don't think the download size is such an issue any more, not with regard to how long it takes. I would just start the download and let it continue working in the background, whats the rush. Alternatively hit the download when you don't need the PC. The issue is bandwidth and making sure you don't get unexpected bills from your web space provider. One I was with was very cheap for the space, but bandwidth was like gold dust. Barry

Amy Go to the time line and make sure there is a small gap between the numbered tag of an image on that timeline and the grey bar that signifies the transition time of the previous image. If they are too close those errors occur. Just leave the image on screen for a short time once the transition has ended and you will be fine Barry www.beckhamdigital.co.uk

Scott No, thats not as good as it gets. I project PTE shows at huge sizes using a Mitsubishi Digital projector and get great results, certainly no jaggies. Barry

Scott Is your projector set for a resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels or higher. If it is set at 800 by 600 that may not be helping. Are you resizing your images too small or compressing them too much. Try cropping to a resolution of 1024*768 @ 72 ppi and save them as a jpeg at compression 6. Hope that helps Barry