jgayman

I volunteer my time to shoot sports photos for a local high school and I also put together slide shows for the various banquets throughout the year. I have always used PTE. Two years ago I really needed to incorporate some panning and zooming features so despite my love of PTE I was forced to use another application for my shows. I figured it would only be temporary as these types of features were **coming** in a new PTE version. I anxiously kept tabs on the v5.00 development and unfortunately it still was not ready to use for my shows last year. Here I am in season three and a new season of banquets is upon me. Still no released v5.00. Even worse, I fear it has become the 800 pound gorilla and is becoming so complex as to require excessive system resources to run. I typically distribute 300-400 copies of my shows every year to students, parents and coaches and very few people have issues running them. I have a feeling the same will not be true for v5.00. I don't want to minimize the huge effort required to release a product like v5.00 and I certainly appreciate the developers efforts. But as I enter my third season of waiting and my third season of using other applications I can't help but wonder if when delivered, v5.00 will be too little too late.

If you want to really fill the room with sound I recommend a small Home Theater stereo amplifier and suitable speakers. 100 watt AV receivers are very inexpensive as are decent speakers. A system like this will take your audio quality to a whole new level. I do a lot of multimedia presentations at banquets and have been using a small Kenwood 100 watt AV receiver that I bought for $100. The nice thing about AV receivers is they have inputs for everything. So I can feed sound from my laptop, DVD player, etc. I bought a small tupperware plastic storage container at Target that holds my amplifer, speakers, extension cords, speaker wires, gaffers tape, etc. I can grab the box and head out the door knowing everything I might need is right there.

I tried three different PC's and did not get any sound on any of them. All these video tests are interesting but... it's not YOUR video card that matters. What matters is the video cards in the PCs of all the folks to whom you give a copy of the slide shows!

This is where I see the biggest concern. Am I alone in that all of my slide shows are produced and delivered to other users... perhaps 50-100 people. Or are most of you simply creating shows and watching them on your own PC? Also, the nature of slide shows seems to dictate that they will typically be run on a laptop, probably hooked to a projector and probably in front of a large audience. So how will you have any idea if your super-duper, wiz-bang show will even play on other peoples equipment? Especially laptops, most do not have the fastest processor or fastest video card. That was one thing I always liked about PTE; it didn't have huge horsepower requirements and as such it usually played fine on other peoples laptops and desktops. Ver5 has me somewhat concerned. Yes, I'm looking forward to some of the cool features but the usefulness will be limited if no one else can view your show.

That's not the worst of it. Most have probably settled on a 1024x768 laptop feeding a 1024x768 projector. With most of the computer industry (including laptops) transitioning to to wide-screen 16:9 formats we are going to have to rethink our setups. As before, having a projector that matches your laptop screen resolution makes life very easy. Every now and again I will supply the A/V equipment and someone else will bring the laptop containing the show. More often then not they show up with the latest wide-screen WUXGA+ gizmo and then we have fits trying to get it to look decent on the big screen. I for one am not necessarily looking forward to "going wide". :-)

It really depends on the projector. Even on a 15-foot screen, a BRIGHT 1024x768 projector operating in native mode can produce images that are breathtaking. The brightness of the projector is almost as important as the resolution. A 1400x1050 projector with 3000+ lumens is going to be VERY expensive.....and large.... and heavy. I really doubt if the image quality advantage will outweigh the incredible cost. Of equal importance is the color management of the projector. My 2200 lumen NEC LT245 has a sRGB mode which creates images which virtually match what is shown on the laptop screen. However, like most projectors with a similar mode, the brightness is reduced to around 1100 lumens when used in this mode. I didn't realize this when I bought the projector. When I set the projector to normal mode the colors are not nearly as accurate and whites have a tendency to get blown out. Keep in mind the intended purpose of most projectors is for Powerpoint presentations where accurate color is not an issue.

I have been producing PTE slideshows and presenting them to groups ranging from 100-300 people. I've done some shows with a Toshiba TDP-T3 and more recently purchased a NEC LT245 DLP projector. Both my laptop and projector have a native resolution of 1024x768 and as such, this is the resoluton that I resize all my images for. These shows are typically season-end presentations for high school sports banquets.

I've been a long time, VERY happy user of PTE. I use it mostly for assembling banquet slide shows for our High School sports teams. I have been asked to include some text on the slides. Does PTE have the ability to add text to a slide? If so, can text be added to multiple slides at the same time? They want to highlight each player on the soccer team which means having the players name at the top of the screen while THIER particular series of photos is displayed and then repeat for the next player. I've seen someone do this with Power Point but HEY... I'm a PTE guy. I could also add the text with Photoshop but editing 200-300 photos isn't my idea of fun. Is this a feature I've been missing? Thanks.

Thank you very much for checking. I can't image what I could be doing wrong. I have 178 slides currently and 6 mins worth of music and no matter what options I choose, when I have "random" and "synchronize" both checked I see the slides displayed in the order they show on the time line; 1... 2... 3... 176... 177... 178. Every time. I've even tried each of the three synchronize options on the timeline window. Now I'm really puzzled.

I took a look at PTE v4.40 beta this evening and was pleasantly surprised to find a new feature I've been wishing for in PTE. That is, the option to display the slides in random order AND synchronize the length to the music. On previous versions as soon as I would check the box for "synchronize to music" the "display in random order" box would be grayed out. However, despite being able to check both sync-to-music and random the show still seems to display the photos in sequential order. Is there something I'm doing wrong or is this feature not fully implemented yet? My wish is to be able to select a thousand images and 15 minutes or so worth of music and have PTE display the slides in a random order but adjusted to fill 15 minutes..... in other words; synch-to-music length and random. :-)

Ok... since you brought this up I thought I would relate a problem I just had. It resulted in a goofed slide show in front of about 100 people (my fault really). We were using an A/V receiver with only two speakers. I could not launch the slide show to test so instead I had Musicmatch loaded and played a bunch of songs to check the sound levels, etc. Everything was good to go. The time for the big show came and upon launching the music started fine BUT... the vocals in the songs were virtually non-existent. We were horrified. Sitting in the dark (literally) and not knowing what to do we rode it out. After it was over and the lights were up we discovered the speakers were attached to the R/L REAR instead of the R/L FRONT. When we changed to the front all was well. Why did the receiver process the PTE audio differently ? Had the vocals been suppressed on my test tracks from Musicmatch I would have instantly checked for problems but since they played fine I figured I was good to go. Bottom line... test test and retest. Heck, even had I checked with headphones I would still have not found the problem. Ideas anyone as to what was going on ? Thanks !

Marcovelo - thank you VERY much for the reply. I had originally tried that and it didn't work. BUT - what I had failed to do is CONTINUE to hold the shift key while right-clicking. Also, I was initially using the normal Windows sequence. That is, left-click first item, SHIFT left-click the last item to mark the entire range. Haddock also mentioned what I was initially doing. Bottom line - Sys(p) works and this ONE feature alone will be a great time saver for me. And to think - I was looking at Pro Show Gold. :-) Thanks !!!!!

Sy(p) looks very interesting. There is ONE missing feature I need in PTE that I was hoping Sy(p) could do. That is, go to my show and adjust the transition timings of multiple slides at the same time. Sy(p) allows me to select multiple images from the list but upon right-clicking it only allows one image to be changed. Does Sy(p) have this ability and I'm just not finding it ? Example, I have 300 slides in a show and I need to go in and change the transition duration (or type) for slides 150 thru 200. Currently I have to do this one slide at a time in PTE and it takes foreever. Thanks !

The more I use PTE the more I love it. There are only a couple things which would really help me. One of the biggies would be an option to automatically sync a group of slides with the length of the music AND have the slides displayed randomly. At the moment I can select "display slides in random order" OR "Sync slideshow to music duration" but I cannot have it sync the duration of the show AND display the slides in random order. Would it be very difficult to add such an option? Thanks !

Is it possible to change the transition for a group of slides all at once ? Example... I have a slide show with around 300 slides that contains 3 songs. The slides during the first song are fast with no transition, the slides during the second song are slow with a 500ms fade transition and the final segment of slides has a combination of slow and fast transitions. Once I have everything timed on the timeline, is there any way that I can change the transition type and duration for say 100 contiguous slides at the same time ? Up till now I've had to go through all 300 slides and set the transition for each one. A very time consuming process. I keep thinking there HAS to be an easier way. :-) Thanks.

I had this problem not long ago. The show ran fine on the 2.4GHz P4 on which it was authored but when I ran it on a 1.2GHz P-III laptop the music got out of sync at the end. It was recommended that I reduce the size of my images. Since they are being displayed on the laptop screen or projector I resampled them all to 1024x768 and increased the compression slightly. This gave an overage image size of only 70-80K. I could then play the 12-minute show on both machines and it stays perfectly in sync.

How would I then take the generated random list and get my slides back in to PTE ? I have a list of 350 slides that will play over a period of 9-minutes. I would like them matched to the music length yet random. Does PTE allow importing of file lists ?

I'm putting together some high school sports slide shows using ver 4.2 and I would like to somehow have the slides displayed randomly AND yet be synched to the length of my music track. So far I can only figure out how to do EITHER sync or random. If PTE does not have this ability does anyone know a simply way to randomize a list of filenames such that I could easily put them on the timeline ? Thanks !! - John

Does PTE support nested menus ? Example, I would like to create an object that has two buttons... one labeled BASEBALL and the other labeled FOOTBALL. When you click on BASEBALL it would take you to a second menu page where there would be buttons for each baseball game. Each button would link to a PTE slideshow. Likewise for the FOOTBALL button and submenus. I would also need the ability to return to the main menu. So far this ability has not jumped out at me. Is it possible ? Easy ? :-) Thanks. - John

My bad ! Silly me, PTE was saving the rebuilt executable into a different location. I finally looked at the time stamp on the file and said EH? :-) It works. Sorry for the interruption, I now return you to your properly working program already in progress.

I have a slide show sync'd to the music and I have the box checked to end after the first slide. So far it just keeps starting over. I've rebuilt the project and same thing. Has anyone else ran into this ? I'm running version 4.1. The problem is I've built projects that did end. Not sure what might be different. -- John

I certainly appreciate everyone's input on this problem. Backwards compatibility is a constant source of headaches. I do a lot of video editing, DVD creation, digital photography, etc. and it's always a challenge trying to second guess your audiences PC capabilities. I'm using a 2.4GHz P4 running XP Pro and 1GB memory. I keep fairly up to date with patches, hotfixes, codecs, etc. I can't tell you how many times I've encountered problems with other folks who even though they are running Win2K or XP on a fast PC, have never applied a single update, etc. and as such have problems with certain types of multi-media. Aside from this one incident, PTE is still the greatest slideshow program I have used to date ! - John

I had done some tests on machines without an MP3 player and the slideshow still worked I just didnt have sound. Also, I specifically used a WAV file for the music soundtrack. Wouldn't this negate the need for an MP3 player ?

Here's an odd one. I've created a few slideshows with music and thinking PTE is just the greatest thing since sliced bread. All the slideshows have been playing great on my Win2K and XP machines. So I gave one of my shows to a friend who runs Win98. He has a 300Mhz PC with like 256MB memory. My slideshow .EXE contains a WAV soundtrack and is approx. 72MB in size, setup to autorun. When my friend put the CD in his drive it completely locked up the PC. He finally rebooted and the machine would only boot in safe mode. He eventually got the machine back up but now Win98 no longer sees the CD drive. I have not been able to look at the Win98 PC myself so I'm just going by what he told me. Has anyone else ever experienced anything like this ? The hardware/software requirements for running a PTE are pretty minimal. Don't you just wish everyone was at least running Win2K ? - John

Thanks Bill ! That is exactly what I was doing. Duh ! I turned off sync and the menu buttons appeared and worked fine. As you mentioned, I have to decide which works best. I just recently discovered PTE and it is exactly what I've been looking for. It's an amazing product. Thanks again for the help and the quick reply ! - John