Gérard de Lux
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Posts posted by Gérard de Lux
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If Jean-Claude's proposals could be realized, that woud be fantastic !
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Thank you sooo much Roger !
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It has just been pointed out on our French "DiaporamaForum" that the function "Replace Main Image - Alt+S" which was present in v. 5.1 seems to have disappeared from v. 5.5.
Is this correct and normal? Or where is now this (very convenient) feature?
Thanks in advance for your help.
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I have a Nikon D300 and a D100 (plus a dozen of lenses); but I have also a Canon Ixus 850IS (compact) which is always in my pocket or not far from it, and can be (and has been) very useful.
I also use film (should I say 'analog'?) SLRs and medium-format cameras with slide films which I scan.
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Igor,
You are a star; if you can reinstate this feature it would put the icing on the cake for me.
Tom
I add my voice to this !
Transition to & from the desktop was really a feature which, if not essential for the quality of a slideshow, was really a bonus to it !
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Do you want to improve your knowledge of PTE's Story ?
Do you want to improve your French ?
If your answer is 'Yes' to both questions, you're ready to read what follows...
Cèlou (Marcel Boi) has written a 15-pages story of PTE (with Igor's help, of course), all in sunny French of Marseilles - with pictures in universal language !
If you're ready for it... just download this 2 MB PDF file : HERE.
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We have a tight debate going on our French 'DiaporamaForum' about this simple question: Does PTE manage ICC profiles incorporated in images?
Or - is there a way to attribute a different ICC profile to an entire slideshow, before producing the exe file (as Proshow Producer does) ?
According to a quick test made by one forum member, PTE doesn't read or use the ICC Profiles. If it did, in this short .exe file [see this example], the appearance of the 3 images should change according to the integrated profile... but the 3 images apparently remain the same...
So - does PTE really use/read/manage color profiles or not ?
Is it possible to assign a specific color profile to an entire show? If not, is this foreseen for the next version of PTE or someday in the future?
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I use (since many years) WS-FTP Pro from Ipswitch, already recommended by Lin Evans above. I'm fully happy with it, and I run 2 websites and a big Forum, which means a lot of file transfers everyday, including slideshows of 60 MB and more, that have to be reliable.
But there are many popular and performing ftp softwares, among which Filezilla (see here) which has the great advantage of being Open Source, i.e. free, and well-known to the internet community (which means active support and advice through forums, etc.). Filezilla has also a 'portable' version, which I use when I travel, very convenient and performing too.
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This is great news ! With the growing numbers of Mac users (and for good reasons!), I think it is important that PTE becomes available for people of this growing community. On the French forum, we receive more and more requests; so, it would be perfect timing !
That will probably make PTE the only "Twin-Platform" Slideshow Program available anywhere inthe World.
No, there is already one software which is Mac and Windows compatible; unfortunately it is only in French and thus not universally known. It is called "La Lanterne Magique", is freeware and has been developped by one of our 'Diaporam@Forum' members. If you have a minimum knowledge of French, you can have a look and try it; see: Lanterne Magique.
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I add my voice to the well-deserved congratulations to Jean-Claude for his work.
This a remarkable synthesis of several improvements which would be nice to see implemented in a next PTE version.
I trust that Igor can manage !
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Thank you Jean-Claude !
I've seen that in the latest version, you have added 'Targets' to the menu. Could you explain what is the use of this 'Target' function and how it works?
Sorry if this is a stupid question...
Merci
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I fully support this suggestion by Lin seconded by Al !
'Differentiated dissolves' [rough translation from French] are a key feature in traditional (= slide projectors) advanced slideshows. The softwares Wings Platinum (by Stumpfl) and m.objects offer this capability of playing with the dissolve -fade in / fade out - curves.
It would be great to have also this feature in PTE !
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For existing and 'finished' slideshows, I personnally would recommend to leave them alone, unless of course you want to add one of the new effects that v5 permits. At least, you'll be sure that they will run smoothly on almost every PC. And if you have transitions like 'mosaic' or from and to desktop, they will run with v4 and not with v5.
I have converted one of my shows and the result wasn't convincing on the same old machine as I had to replace some transitions and/or timings for them to run smoothly. Very very slow dissolves (fade in/out) are a bit jerky when they were not before. I haven't noticed any improvement on the sound as it was already very good.
But, of course, for 'special effects' and easy DVD authoring v5 has to be used and it is a big step forward.
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On our French Diaporam@Forum, a problem of display on the timeline with v5 has been reported today and it seems to be a bug. I hope it hasn't been already discussed and solved here... I try to explain what happens.
With v 4.x, with the timeline activated, when one clicks on the end of the grey bar corresponding to an image and showing the duration of the effect, one can see below the waveform several numeric values :Music duration / Position (of cursor) / and the last value being the duration of the chosen effect - if one moves this grey line, the numeric value of the duration changes accordingly.
Now, with v 5, when one clicks on the end of the grey line, the duration of the effect doesn't show anymore as it "competes" with the value corresponding to the position of the cursor. Apparently, this is due to the fact that the numeric values for these two different parameters display in the same zone and not in two adjacent and different ones.
I try to upload two pictures showing what happens now with v 5, compared to what was in v 4.
I hope that my explanations are clear enough and that Igor will sort that out ...
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I am prompted to ask this question "How many of you actually use the default folder, or have you changed the default and moved the PTE Templates to a different folder and drive on your computer?
Although I have no problems finding the default folder nor the PTE templates folder, I don't use these standard folders as I'm used to having my own drive structure and organisation.
I don't like storing data on the same drive as softwares; besides, I don't like mixing sounds and pictures in the same folder - this is why I don't use the "Templates" function, although convenient it may be, but with Sy(P) it's so easy to organise PTE files, even if they are spread over different external disk drives !
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Yes, my mpg2 slideshows play well on Macs. BUT, apparently, they don't play with QuickTime or RealMediaPlayer but with VLC. Same thing for me (and other friends) under Windows : Windows Media Player doesn't work. Again, VLC is the solution; it gives a much better quality anyway and is OpenSource.
A link to VLC.
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Thanks again, Ken !
Everything is going smoothly
In fact, I'm not doing or burning DVDs, I'm only converting my 'old' pte shows into video (mpeg) to share with people of the Mac users type and others.
It works well, particularly with rar compression which gave me recently an almost incredible 9:1 ratio ! That makes it possible to put pte shows on line in video format for people who can't read .exe files.
I'm happy
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Thank you, Ken and Al !
It's now clear in my mind (well, I think, I hope
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I have recently created for the first time a video (mpg) from a pte project : everything went fine and I found the quality very good.
The show being around 4' duration, I was a bit surprised by the resulting mpg file : over 200 MB. Then I realized that all pictures of the original PTE show were quite big (1200 px wide). In order to produce a lighter mpg file, I used another version of the same show where all pictures were reduced down to 800 px wide.
To my greatest suprise, the resulting mpg file has exactly the same size as the previous one !
My question is straightforward : is it normal that a mpg file containing images 800 px wide is of the same weight as one containing the same images but at 1200 px ??? (the sizes of the original .exe files were respectively 11 and 27 MB and, of course, nothing else had been changed between the two versions)
Thank you in advance for your replies
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To illustrate what I said earlier, here is a screenshot of the administrators' control board as provided in Invision Board.
As you can see, there are people on the waiting list for being validated as members : we are waiting for their e-mail that will prove that they aren't robots or spammers; when we receive this 'sensible' e-mail, we just have to check the box on the right and click below (see red arrow) to approve their account.
If we don't validate them, they will be automatically deleted from the registering queue after x days (this timespan being determined by the administrator). Of course, instead of approval, there is also a choice to "delete" anyone on the queue when it's obvious that the 'candidate' is a spammer.
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The 'warning system' integrated in Invision Board is of no use concerning spammers; its sole purpose is to warn regular members that they don't respect the usual rules about posting and after a given number of warnings they are temporarily (and then definitively) banned if they still don't comply with the rules. This is absolutely not the case here !
These spammers here are 'professional' spammers - mostly robots - who register just to advertise their 'products' as long as the door is open. Banning their IPs and e-mail addresses is of no use as they use fake IPs and e-mails (sometimes and quite often, real ones belonging to real persons !); worse is when nthey use fake AOL addresses as, due to the system of proxies used by AOL, many real AOL subscribers would be banned !!!
The only thing to do is delete their posts and registration, but it won't prevent new ones (in fact, always the sames coming back, but under different names and addresses) from registering and polluting.
As I said earlier, after several months of trials on our French DiaporamaForum (which uses also Invision Board, and has more than 50.000 posts and 1400 members), the only effective way to stop spammers has been to switch to manual validation of registering 'candidates'. People register as usual and as here, but their 'membership' isn't active until validated by a member of the team. In order to be validated, they have to reply in normal words to an e-mail, stating why they want to register or anything sensible; usually robots can't do that ! We also use a few other 'tricks' to distinguish spammers from normal people but it would be too long to go into details here.
Since this manual validation has been put into force, we still have about a dozen spammers a day but they are stopped at the registering door and can't go further. It is much more efficient to spend a few minutes with them before they register than spending the same time, and even more, after they have registered and have polluted the forum.
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Set checked "Disable scaling of main images" option and click "Set for existing slides" button to apply it for current slides. Now all current and all future slides will not be resized and shown as is.
But I highly don't recommend this mode! (...) So I recommend to use new mode suggested by default - proportional scaling of images.
This is something that I don't understand and don't like
When I prepare a show, I first reduce the original images at the size I want them for a specific purpose; so I don't understand why this default option of v. 4.48 has been changed, and why you recommend not to use it.
For example, if I have voluntarily sized my images down to 800x600 px, it is not to see them enlarged to 1600x1200 if the viewer's screen is at this resolution ! Maybe that "in v5.00 resizing of images looks a little better (more sharp) than in previous v4.48", but I would be very suprized that 800 px images still look good at 1600 !
I know it's possible to change this default setting, but I fear that some users of v 4.x will be confused and that future new users of v 5 will stick to the default option (precisely because it's not recommended to change it) and that we'll see some disasters on our screens; I use a 22" monitor at 1600x1200 and I very often see this kind of disaster with shows made with Proshow whose default options are of the 'fit to screen' type.
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On our French AV forum (diaporamaforum), which uses also IPB, we had the same problem.
We have solved it almost completeley by stopping the automatic registration and using the manual alternative offered by IPB : an e-mail is sent to the 'member to be' to which he has to reply; in the meantime he is put on a waiting list. If no reply is received within x hours or days, he is automatically deleted from the waiting list. As soon as a reply is received, the acount is validated.
It takes a few seconds to go to the admin panel and validate the members on the waiting list, but this is much less trouble than having to delete the spam as well as the member.
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Hello Stéphane !
I'm very happy to see you here on the forum and that you have already presented your excellent diaporama which has received the congratulations it desserves and that I share.
Very creative and impressive indeed !
Keep up the good work with PTE
effects with Picture toexes de luxe
in General Discussion
Posted
I think that the hint given by Peter just above is a good one: it seems that the transitions are still in the "random" mode.
If you wish, I inform you that there are two French-speaking forums - it might be easier for you to get help :
Diaporamaforum
Diapositif
Feel free to have a look at one or both of them!