Barry Beckham

Dave I did have a read about mounting drives, but I didn't come away with any feeling that it would give me a major advantage over what I do now, So may as well stay with what has worked for the last 15 years. Like Peter, I have never been tempted to run C drive clones. Having all the software and a good regime for backups I don't feel threatened by a C drive failure. In the event of a crash, which is pretty rare these days, I'll get a new drive or format the old one and re-install. There is some new technology built into drives these days called S.M.A.R.T. About 6 months ago I got a warning that a hard drive was about to fail. It said the usual, "Backup the drive and call the administrator". It turned out to be my secondary internal drive that contained all my photos and the message was right too. Although the contents of the drive was backed up, I had time to copy what was on the drive to another internal, replace the drive and copy the files back on afterwards. The drive was a Hitachi which was still within warranty so they even replaced that too. I thought that was pretty neat, to get a warning in advance that gives you time to prevent total failure

Well, I have never heard of the 321, but I have not been into many competitions in the UK. The only one I entered was done for me by Maureen years ago. It doesn't sound like a bad idea though. Most competitions I have come into contact with in Australia have limits of 5-7 miniutes. A shorter more compact sequence may also encourage people to enter and have a go at AV, which can't be a bad thing. I encouraged one club to create a mini sequence competition section, where an entry of no more than 10 images was allowed. It was an effort to encourage people to have a go at AV and that year there were more entires so perhaps we had an effect. In some cases I still don't like to be limited to length, but I can't deny that a limit is necessary.

What do you mean by mounting a drive. Heard the term, not sure what it is and does.

I second what Dave G has said. For many years now, every time I have a PC built I always have 3 Internal hard drives fitted. (4 in the last one) One is solely for the Operating system and programs and nothing else is stored there at all. The second Drive is only for original images, work in progress, slide shows and finished images, but all of what is on that drive is also backed up to DVD and an external too. That is done when the images are first downoaded to the PC or when they are completed. That way when you need to remove anything from your photography drive as we all need to, we don't have to start fretting about whether it is backed up or not. The third drive acts a bit like belt and braces for various projects that I want extra protection for. My DVD tutorials in progress, PTE shows etc etc, personal documents. Having extra drives fitted is not generally a huge cost in the scheme of a brand new computer and I can highly recommend photographers consider this approach My fourth drive houses all my finished images going back years so I have a quick and convenient way to locate completed pictures and no fears that they are not protected eslwhere too. It is a very reassuring way to work, but it does need a degree of good housekeeping. This method has not let me down for some 15 years now.

Steve The length of a slide show is all part of the creative process and should not be determined by competition rules, so one of 3:20 would seem perfectly OK to me. However, in practice of course AV competitions do have to limit the length of entries because some people just don't know when interesting has moved into bored to death.The 321 competition you mention seems to be something unique to a club or society, so guidance should be in their rules. A maximum of 5-7 minute duration is reasonable

You will get used to the 16:9 and in a month or so you won't be able to take 5:4 anymore, that is a prediction. Your right that the 16:6 format can be a bit limited, I have spent a lifetime trying to make sure I crop in camera, so now and again I go to crop an image to 16:9 and run into trouble, it just won't fit. I like 16:10 better, or even 3:2. All formats play OK on my old 1024*768 projectors.

Eric I admire your enthisiasm to convert all those shows. I recall saying over 3 years ago that once you see your old shows on a large flat screen monitor, you regret staying with 4:3 and 5:4 so long. I certainly did, but then its easy to be clever with hindsight. I have converted a few of my older shows to widescreen, but to do them all would have been more than I could have coped with. Time to isolate 6 of the best, but move on with new work for your new monitor perhaps.

Eric Please don't take offense, but you have rushed this and it shows a bit. I appreciate its your first try at 16:9, but you have a good subject, good information and right voice for the location. I think you would be pleased with the outcome if you took just a bit more time. The verticals could do with straightening, but the commentary needs to be re-recorded. Do it in small sections and that way if you fluff your lines as we all do, you only have to re-do a small section. Once the commentary is done stitch it all together in Audacticy and it will sound much more professional.

Perhaps we could send the camera out on wheels and have the pictures taken for us so we don't have to do anything at all.

Gary Yes a couple were Kookas and the vivid blue ones are the Blue Satin Bower bird. You still have to go to where the birds are, like all places the birds are in the areas they feed and nest. We get very few birds in our garden, because its just not the right environment for them. However, with what I have learned I wish I had given this a go when I was still in the UK. Its the patience thing that is the key, you need time. Most of the shots were taken when we were away with our caravan, so we were sort of on the spot for longer and we didn't have to keep rushing home. That helped

Peter Nor did I or Lin. I think Eric viewed his animation on a smaller monitor and that is where he saw the moire.

Gary Thank goodness for that, I don't mind getting the wrong end of the stick sometimes I agree with you. Exposure remains the holy grail of photographers. In fact I think the exposure today is more critical than in our slide and B&W days for this reason. Our expectations in those days, were pretty low compared to now, although we didn't know it at the time. I have a number of lectures coming up in the next few months and those lectures are on Photoshop and PTE of course. However the theme is about getting the exposure as good as you can, prior to any Photoshop work. I do one to one and group tuition here and what amateurs are doing is this. They do not understand contrast and exposure and therefore the images they take into Photoshop are often already way beyond redemption (even for Photoshop). Well, for any decent images they are. They know PS is powerful and it sort of makes them take their eye off the exposure ball, thinking I can fix that later. Often they can't because either the image is too far gone or their PS expertise isn't quite good enough to do what they would need to do. Only last week a photographer sat beside me and said they under-expose ALL of their shots 1 stop to control highlights. It was advice given to them at their camera club. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous. Compensate when the camera is going to get it wrong, but reduce exposure across the board is just daft. I always say that, yes. Photoshop can come to our aid at times when we make a mistake, after all, we all do that sometimes. However, if it can right some exposure mistakes, think what you might achieve if you started off with a better exposure in the first place. What is the point of having to climb a steep hill, just to get to where you should have been when you pressed the shutter?

That is odd, because it was made on Windows 7. Could it be something to do with virus programs, does your other machine have a different anti virus running?

Eric The tool is like finger painting, to if there is a little contrast or an edge that causes the moire effect, you can smudge just that tiny part with a small brush and kill the moire. The bit you smear is so small its not seen on the main image. I used to use it a lot in the early days of animation, but as I said yesterday, the moire seems to be very rare these days

Gary I downloaded and tried the PC show and it works fine

I liked the challenge--no darkroom to fix mistakes Well all I can say to that is you really must make a tutorial and tell me how you do this, because it is often well beyond me and the equipment I have.What we view is very different to what our cameras are capable of recording and image manipulation/darkroom work is a means of closing that gap. I find I do have to adjust the tones my camera records because it often cannot record them correctly. Now I use a computer, once I used a darkroom, so I guess I must have made loads of mistakes. Yes it can fix mistakes and do other things too, but to say you get it right in the camera and don't use anything to fix mistakes, well words fail me. Have a look at this slide show http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/slideshow/slideshow/exposure/exposurePC.zip let me see if I can change your mind

Well, to be honest I was unsure what to do with them. You can't make a slide show with a story, ie start , middle and end and the only thing is to just put the images to music. For some reason that didn't seem enough, not sure why. I was happy with the images and wanted to show them, so chose that path. I considered adding the bird names, but decided not to. Words would have distracted and most people wouldn't recall the names the next day.

I wasn't suggesting batch cropping at all.

Eric One way you can test your show to see if there will be any issues on a monitor that does run 1920*1080 is to view your animation in the Objects and Animation screen, with the size set to 100%. You won't be able to see the entire screen in total, but it may be enough to track down trouble spots. Just one thought though. A few years ago dealing with the Moire effect was something I always included on my tutorials for PTE. Last time I went to do the same with PTE 7 I had a devil of a job to create the Moire effect. I don't know what Igor has done in the engine room of PTE, but whatever is was its darn good. PTE is now miles better on that score than it used to be.

Gary That is all fair enough, we all have our own ways of doing things and if it gives you the result your looking for, who is anyone else to say you should do things another way, but I hope you don't mind if go ahead and do just that. You said:- I do use Photoshop CS5 for Levels and USM, mainly. I also use Faststone (free program) for batch renaming, resizing and quality reduction (80 or so). This gets them ready for PTE. I've got many other photo programs but these are my main ones. I don't get too fancy (I don't know how to get fancy). I am not at all surpirsed that you don't know how to get fancy in Photoshop, as you put it. In my view its not likely you ever will. You have the best program on the planet that will do everything you want to do (CS-5) , but you choose to use all these different editing programs. Ever heard the saying jack of all trades master of none? What I have found in my travels is that those who use lots of progams to do the same thing (usually because they have means to aquire them, if you know what I mean) never get the best from any of them. There isn't enough hours in the day to become competant with them all. Of course some claim they are, but they spend so much time becoming a technical expert that they rarely produce anything of value. I appreciate that once you know how to do something in one program, we can be reluctant to learn all over again in another, but by their very nature, image editing programs are all very similar. Give some thought to dumping all those other programs and use the Rolls Royce you already have installed. The one thing Photoshop does have over many others is a vast array of automated tasks. Perhaps there is a way that you can use those in time to speed up the process of creating a slide show. eg. I have an action that will run on a single button press in CS-5. It will save an image as a Jpeg at any level compression I desire. It will also save the file into the folder where I am making my slide show, so I don't have that tedious browsing around my PC. It even removes that image from the screen revealing the next ready for me to crop to shape. I think DaveG said that in the event that you later want to make a change to that cropped image, its a 20 second job to redo it, or change it.

At the top of the page here http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/slideshows_3.html

I have a sheet of plywood down my shed, which has a hole in the middle. I need to block that hole up to use the sheet of wood. The hole measures 8 inches by 4.5inches (16:9 format) The good news is that I have a spare piece of plywood that is 8 inches by 5.3 inches (3:2) that I can use to plug the hole, but for the life of me, I can't make the second bit of wood fit the original hole correctly. I am baffled, can anyone help Hang on, the penny has just dropped, if I cut some of the wood off the edge of the spare bit, it fits.

Gary I don't have any experience of the software your using to prepare images, but can I risk another suggestion. If the majority of the photographic/AV world around you is using Photoshop or Elements, you may want to think about doing the same. Sometimes is great to be different, but sometimes, not so much. Elements isn't that expensive and you can crop and size your images in one simple operation. You can then easily make your images truly 16:9 and put all these issues behind you. I have made a short video for you that may help. You can download it from MedieFire below. http://www.mediafire.com/?clx9po2gom5uhad

Eric I applied a pan and zoom to the image you posted and struggled to create the same issue you describe. You can still smooth out those Moire wrinkles with the sharper/smoother option which took the place of the mipmapping from earlier versions. However, there are some other options: 1. The image you posted is twice the size of the 16:9 HD format. This is quite a lot, unless you intend a long animation. You could dial back your intentions a little, make the image a little bit smaller and you may find the moire effect will disappear. 2. If you previewing a 16:9 show on a monitor less than 1920*1080 or perhaps you are just looking at the animation in the Objects and Animation screen set at 75% or less. Then you are compressing your image even more and you are more likely to see the moire effect in these circumstances. View the show on a full size 16:9 HD screen and you may not see them. 3. If you do get a little moire in an isolated spot, take the image into Photoshop/Elements and look for the smudge tool. Used at a low setting I find the offending area can be softened to the degree that you cannot see it (too small), but its enough to kill any Moire effect. In fact I think its the only use I have ever used that tool for. It saves having to soften an entire image just for a very small spot.

Tom I can't offer much advice as I don't use Itunes for my PTE music. However, I did have a recent contact who had all sorts of issues with a music track and from memory he experienced much the same as you. He also converted his music via iTunes. It just so happened that I had the very same piece of music and when I provided it to him as an Mp3 every worked perfectly. We came to the conclusion that there was some glitch in the music and assumed that taking it from iTunes was the cause. Can you locate/create the track in another way