Barry Beckham

Well, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't force them to drink

Ralph Thank you, you probably noticed that the inspiration for the slide show came from a degree of anger too. I just got fed up with intelligent people who for reasons I still don't understand still believe that the camera is an instrument that is designed to record exactly what is there. It isn't and it doesn't and the sooner the penny drops for them, the sooner they start to produce some decent images.

Igor Lately I have had quite a few questions asking me about PTE fully working on a Mac and another came in this morning via email. I usually say that it is not likely until 2011, but that is only my guess. While appreciating I am asking an almost possible question, are you able to give a best guess so that the infor I pass on is from you, rather than me.

Peter With a graphics tablet you don't use a left mouse click, just touching down on the pad is the equivolent. I have managed to get the selection of the music controls a little better by making the tip feel of my pen very soft, but I have been using a Pen for 12 years or more and never had to do that before. It just seemed to me that if there is a tolerance that Igor uses in these boxes, perhaps it could be relaxed a bit. If it's an automatic thing, I will have to live with it. Even now with the pressure set as low as I can get it, when I touch down on the music time values they often do not select. I have to make a concious tap harder than usual to get it to work right As I have said, I have used a graphics tablet for many years and never had any difficulty in selecting any values in any boxes until now

PTE Beta 15 I have continually found it fiddly and annoying to place my cursor into the selections in the music > Customize options. I place the cursor and drag and nothing happens. I find myself having to do this a few times before it pickes up and highlights the value so I can change it. I use a wacom Bamboo graphics tablet, but I just tried it with a USB mouse and it is still a bit tricky to highlight the value I want to cjange. Has anyone else who uses a tablet noticed the same.

From confused of Brisbane Well, I have looked at comparison images with this box ticked and unticked and you can call me thick if you like, but I can't come up with a circumstance when I would possibly want this option or in what circumstances. If I am being dense, please enlighten me, after all I am only a beginner. Stick it in the menus at the top of the screen for the 2 people who may want it

Peter I edited my post and while doing it you got in first

The "low quality of resizing" is actually more accurately called "nearest neighbor" resizing. It isn't so much "low quality" as it is "imprecise" resizing. Since it stops at the pixel level rather than the sub pixel level of accuracy this line is eliminated in some cases. For most this feature need not be used." Thanks Peter and no offense is meant by this but that is techno babble that the average user of PTE will not even contemplate Here is a question for forum users Who uses it and why? This is what goes through my mind and I appreciate it sounds a little arrogant, but here goes. I am the fussiest person you will find about about image quality, the Moire effect and any other imperfections and I have never found any reason to even investigate what it was. So, my question is, why have it? If you do have it, please dont call it Nearest Neighbor Resizing as that will mean even less than the current label. Better still tuck it away in the menus for those few who may use it and don't have it on display where we all say, What the hell is that .

Am I the only one who really doesn't know what this option does. I am an experienced user of PTE, but I don't know ? I never use it, probably because I havn't done any tests to establish exactly what it does. Igor Can you explain the thinking behind the tool and give me some idea when you think it would be of benefit. I understand and use resample in Photoshop but can't quite see the link with PTE

PTE Beta 14 I noticed today that if you go into the light box while the slides are shown as thumbnails it is easy to copy and paste an image. However, if you move into the light box from the time line you can't. It threw me for a minute as I could not quite understand why Ctrl+C - Ctrl+V worked one minute and not the next. Is that supposed to be the case?

Photogman To save me typing a lengthy explanation perhaps you can read this on my web site http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/audiovisual/dvd/dvd.htm If your going to play back your DVD on a TV, then firstly the TV will not look so bad as trying it on your monitor, which I guess you have done. Also you will be viewing the TV from a much longer distance than a PC monitor and that makes the image look acceptable. If you expect to re-create the exe quality in a DVD, you won't unless you create a HD video and I guess the short times scales rule that out. You sound really concerned about this and my approach would be to consider taking a laptop, projector and a screen, but then I have those to hand. If not, just go with what you have made, if it is to be seen on a TV, it will look OK. Try it yourself, don't look at a DVD on your computer, that just makes the difference between the exe and a DVD more marked.

Yes, whatever we say or do in this fascinating hobby there will always be exceptions, my own son uses PSG to make slide shows (DVD's) mixed with video for his car club and for that they work pretty well too. Generally we still have a way to go to see the quality we really must see in our AV on line. I am not against movies on line and in the fullness of time, I think the youtube thing will oust TV. Instead of TV moguls dishing up to us what they want when they want to show it, we will dial into anything we want on line and feed it to our TV I just get disapointed when I see a show have the edge taken off it by the medium its displayed in. In fact I have the same views on many of the clubs and societies I visit, they just don't have any common sense. One buys the latest Photoshop for the clubs laptop with a view for members borrowing it. It never happens of course and all the while they are desparate for a decent screen and projector. Perhaps I am too obsessed with end quality as there seems precious few people who want to join me

With all the harping about video integration, Its not harping Ken, streaming video is just not good enough yet. Have a dabble if you like, but don't expect those of us who work hard at providing quality images to welcome it with open arms, it has a way to go yet. It takes so long to see a streaming video, holding it back until enough comes down to play that you may as well download the exe file. I see no advantage to the likes of us. i figgered the logical thing that would happen on a shoot would br to take some stills, then switch your camera to video record some action then revert back to still mode. Then make your show -- is this not the game plan? Possibly, but only with HD video and only then if there is a seemless change from the quality of the stills and the quality of the video. If the video stands out like a sore thumb in a stills AV then No. Of course there are always going to be some instances when using youtube or streaming video has a use and I guess the same will be with video in a stills slide show. However, for general AV use (the stuff we see mostly) the last thing we need to do is drag down the V side of AV just because we can use video. The inclusion of video for stills AV enthusiasts has hardly been a must have has it, if I want to use video I will buy a decent video camera. I just had a thought as I pressed the button to add this post. Am I out of step here? Are you all in the starting blocks with your videos made ready for the day you can insert them into an AV.? Are you not as concerned as me to make sure the V in your AV has good quality images? I will make a prediction now, long before we get video. If some of you think that adding video clips will add impact an appeal to your AV shows, you are going to be sadly mistaken. When we ARE able to add HD video it will need to be added delicately with thought and tatse, or it will do just the opposite, just as over animation does now.

Ken Its a video, how is that comparable to a stills slide show? The moving image hides a multitude of sins.

Ken Instead of turning their nose up at shows on youtube etc they should be thankful that they are put up No I shouldn't, youtube is OK for those who don't know any better, but for those of us who do, its not good enough. How can anyone into AV, which is solely about presentation of images, then present them badly?

I am not a lover of on screen videos and I cannot really understand the fascination of them for the high resolution slide shows we make. Even uTube HD isn't a patch on what was originally made. Maybe it's just me, but what is the point of spending all that money on equipment, spending hours manipulating images, producing a slide show your proud of and then deliberately presenting it within a format that is poor. Having said all that I suppose technology needs to start somewhere and sometime in the future we will see a completely different result, but until then, it just doesn't cut it for me.

;)Over the top of my simple head Peter sorry

JudyKay Thanks for the response, but as a new computer and 64 bit I didn't install the drivers I originally got on disk, I went to www.wacom.de and downloaded the latest drivers. I also did re-install them just in case installing some of my other software interferred with the Wacom. The thing is I have been using Wacom tablets for maybe 15 years and one thing about them, for me anyway, is they have always been faultless However, I have tried to recreate the fault today and find I cannot. Computers, they certainly know how to give the runaround

Peter I managed to watch it with your intructions, but its not quite the same as the Exe file. Yachtsman What do you mean when you say transitions weren't my cup of tea and didn't appear to have consistant times, I am not sure I understand what you mean here?

Peter. This is purely a personal thing with me, but I doubt that I am unique with these views. I just can't be bothered with uTube. We don't have super fast broadband here and it's just too tedious to wait and even HD shows don't seem the quality the exe files has. If I am going to watch a slide show made by a PTE enthusiast I want to see the exe and see it as they intended or I would rather not bother. I have no problem downloading large files, unzipping them and watching them when I am ready.

Peter I am about as non technical as you will ever find in Photography and much of what you said about camera clubs I fully agree with, but this..No No No No AV is all about presentation, image size and format is essential to that presentation. It is also very clear that this issue concerns people. Anyway, this is the way of a forum and subjects often drift and become of interest to a wider audience, they peter out of their own accord when they are exhausted. Relax

Mac Users Please help Our Camera Club uses remote judging and I record the judges comments and put the results into a simple PTE slide show. I did that this month using PTE Beta 10 and put a Mac and a PC version up on Media Fire for club members. One guy using a Mac book pro. 2.4 ghz. 4 gb ram. Mac osx snow leopard reported that neither of the two Mac versions I posted worked for him. I quickly made a second small 3 image test using PTE 6 and he reported that this DID work for him as did my There is no such thing as the Perfect Exposure Mac show made with PTE6. I have put two small demos on media Fire for Macs, can Mac users out there please try them and report back on how they play, just in case I have discovered a small bug. http://www.mediafire.com/file/mn2dcew2jtl/mactest.zip

Dave An interesting poll and speaking for myself I produce 16:10 shows and I havn't made a 4:3 show for just under two years and wish I had moved to the widescreen format sooner, but its not until you get a nice large monitor that the penny drops. There are plenty of large wide screen format slide shows available for anyone to try on their system, if they have concerns about their PC being able to handle the larger size. I think that generally speaking many will be pleasently surprised It will be interesting to do the same poll in a years time and perhaps this tells me that if I wanted, I could consider moving to a wide screen video format for tutorials.

Igor More practical work done today with the Envelope tool adding commentary and adjusting the music volume. I found it frustrating that every time I went back into the Envelope tool the magnification I needed to apply the settings in the first instance were reset and I had to enlarge the wave form and locate the area I was working again and again. In the practical world we will need to go back and forth to get things right and I think the magnification should remain until the user decides to change it.