Rooskidiver

Very nice first show, Andrew! My favorite thing about the show was the music ... Enya is my favorite singer! The music did fit very well with the photos and theme. You do have some very nice photos, but I agree it would have been nice to see them larger. In the opening slides the larger centered photos were just perfect. The smaller singular slides seemed to get lost in the larger, busier background. Nice techniques and transitions, although I agree with Michel that some photos went by a little too quickly. Nice work on the text part, too. Overall for a first presentation I give it two thumbs up! Carol

Hi Ralvis, I just sent you an email telling you how much I enjoyed the show. But I'll repeat it here! I loved the style, menu setup, music, graphics, and descriptions of the singers and songs. Nicely put together ... well done! But I'm still wondering ... where are the women? Carol

Hi Lumenlux, I would hesitate if it were me to try removing any slides. That sounds like a lot of work to redo the sound/photo relationship. And each slide contributes to the story. I would be more inclined to adjust the effects for individual slides. I don't think the transitions vary everytime the show is viewed but I could be wrong. I do think that if you don't individually set the effect for a grouping of slides, PTE uses all the different effects that are checked under Project Options. Perhaps you could just uncheck the ones you don't want to be randomly used by PTE and preview the results. Might save you some time. Then if there are a couple of slides that you want to use a different effect, set their effects under Customize Slides. [i think of many other compromises I made in the presentation.] Yes, this can happen if you're on a deadline. I always look back at my programs and think I could have changed this or that. And I'm never on a deadline. But as with many things, it's a learning process. PTE keeps changing and improving and I think we will all need to improve and change with it! Carol

Hi Lumenlux, I had no trouble downloading your show from the Cottage. [i would really like your comments and suggestions.] Well since you asked ... Actually the show was quite good and gives an important message. The narration was timed well with the slides and there were some really good pictures of the people and countrysides. I had a little trouble with the speed of the transitions though ... as in not enough time to look at some of the photos. I can't see you correcting this however without removing some of the pictures. It would probably be better to change some of the effects. More fade in/outs, gates, and page effects. Less hour hands and circular effects. I don't know if you set the effects for each individual slide or let PTE randomly pick the effect, but for me it would have been easier to view if you had stuck to maybe five or six different kinds of effects. This is of course just my opinion. Like I said ... overall the show was very well put together. The message is what's really important. I buy children's books on Ebay and at garage sales all the time and send to a small school in Fiji that desperately need them. A little giving of ourselves can make a huge difference to those in need. Thanks for posting the show. Carol

I'm in agreement with ContaxMan, too. I think it would discourage new members from posting their shows. When new shows are uploaded to the Cottage and a post in PicturesToExe Presentations is made there is ample opportunity for viewers to express their likes and dislikes. I also think Bill has plenty to keep up with as it is. Carol

Well ... about the time question. That's a hard question to answer. Oleg and I have been working on the show we just posted since December but there had been a lot of emailing back and forth to get it done. On my show Journey to the Planet Ocean I spent about two months working on it. But, a lot of that time was getting the photos ready to use. Then I spent time putting them with backgrounds, frames and borders, and text. After that I spent time getting the music right. So it's hard to say how long timewise a project might take. Even if you are really experienced with PhotoShop and the techniques we showed in the presentation, there would still be a lot of man hours involved in creating a show. If I think about it the next time I put one together I'll keep a time card handy. We're glad you liked the show! Carol

Oleg has posted our new show entitled "Create Slideshow" at Beechbrook Cottage. Here are some tips for watching the show and learning the techniques that we have included in this show. There is a text file included with the zipped file that you should read. We recommend watching the show from the beginning in its entirety. The show is divided into four separate mini slideshows starting with CreateSlideshow (the introduction). If you then want to view each of the three sections and try the techniques that are show, first open PhotoShop. Then start one of the sections and use the pause key during the show, Alt Tab out to PhotoShop, and practice the techniques. The first learning section is CreateSS1 and covers a basic PSD file in PhotoShop, working with layers, and creating Shadow Layers. The second section is CreateSS2 and covers creating frames and borders. The final section is Create SS3 and covers working with text layers. This was a huge project for Oleg and I was honored to have worked with him on this project. If there is text that you do not understand I will be happy to take the blame. We hope you enjoy the show and look forward to seeing your experiments with our techniques in your future shows. Carol

Ignore this topic )-:. I didn't realize I had posted it twice. If someone could tell me how to delete this one I will do it. Thanks! Carol

Patrick - Very nice job! Excellent photos and a really nice job of putting the show together. You made nice use of the different transitions in PTE and I thought the music was very appropriate. Thanks for sharing this show with us! Carol

Thanks so much Igor and your teammates! I love the new effects. Carol

Hi Al! Glad you enjoyed the photos. Yes ... it's cold here ... and cold in Russia ... and I am so glad the Cold War is over! Thanks! Carol

Jim, I will carry ALL the bags ... you can carry Oleg Carol

Thank you, Oleg! I, your humble student, appreciate your comments. If I had not watched your excellent slideshows last July I would still be using PTE built-in backgrounds and would never have thought to change the timing on the effect durations! This style show is harder to make but I like the results. Now we have to finish our tutorial so people can learn all our Russian/American secrets! Carol

Hi Jim! Thanks for the compliments. I did work on this a couple of days ... or was that months? If I am a good student it's because Oleg is such a good teacher. And I practice and experiment ... a lot! I'll think about publishing a program listing the creatures so you'll know what you're looking at. Available upon request of course. I like to send these kinds of shows to my mother. She thinks everything underwater has a shark lurking behind it. I wish! But it is just so colorful and beautiful and peaceful. I get hurt a lot more skiing than I ever have underwater! Thanks again, Carol

Hi Linda! My suggestion would be to first download Oleg's two slideshows as Ken suggested. This work is done in PhotoShop and each slide or frame is made first in PhotoShop and then you can add to the PTE program. There might be other programs out there to create this kind of slide but I'm not sure what they are. If you have PhotoShop and need further help just let me know. I will be happy to help if I can. But I learned everything I know from Oleg and his shows. Carol

Hi All! I wanted to make a few comments about my latest show available for downloading at Beechbrook Cottage entitled Planet Ocean. This show is a collection of some of my favorite underwater photos that my husband and I have taken over the years. Some of the photos are from the early '80's. All slides were made in PhotoShop 7.0 and most of the pictures have had some cleaning up ... mostly to eliminate backscatter. All colors are natural though and I think the most colorful shots came from Fiji and Australia. Don't expect to see sharks, whales, or other awesome underwater critters of those types. It is not that we have not seen all those things while diving ... we just never have gotten good pictures of them. I want to thank a few people for their help and support. Oleg, thank you so much for your last seven months of PhotoShop lessons, your wonderful contributions here at the forum and the Cottage, and for your friendship . Ken, thank you for your advice and guidance in scanning some of my old photos. And thank you Bill for providing us with such an excellent website to share our shows with other addicted PTE users. And finally, thanks to Igor and the PTE team for PTE! Carol

Well I think Oleg said it all, Jim! I really enjoyed watching your show and think you did a fantastic job of presenting a very interesting view of a part of Canadian history. The photos, commentary, and transitions were absolutely perfect. Thanks so much for sharing this presentation with all of us!! Carol

Hi All! I just wanted to thank Bill for his past, present, and future efforts to keep his website available for us all to share and view our PTE presentations. As Bill has stated he has had some bandwidth issues and I think there are things we all could do to help his situation. There have been several good posts in the past that directly relate to this issue and I'll try to touch on some of them. First, I think it would help if folks could try to keep file sizes down by compressing the music in the shows, using smaller resolution jpegs or if using Photoshop by using the save for web setting for jpegs. Oleg posted a really good little slideshow that shows how to compress music. I used this on a show that had four songs and it cut the size from 32 Mb to 21 Mb and I couldn't tell a difference in the sound. Of course this is one I did not upload. As I understand it, the more people downloading and uploading creates a problem with Bill's "bandwidth police". Especially if the files are large. I generally only send folks to his site that need examples of shows or for the tutorials. If hundreds and thousands of people start downloading from his site we could all be in trouble ... for that could cost Bill tons of extra money. So ... although I don't think his site should be kept a secret ... it might be wise to limit the referrals for awhile. Which also brings me to donations. There were recent posts about this topic and I would just like to remind folks one more time that you can help by sending a donation to the Cottage. From the main page just click on "Click to Donate to PTE Housing Costs". Just think of the number of times you've downloaded shows ... or uploaded shows. A small donation from everyone might make the difference that the Cottage needs to keep going. So ... these are just my thoughts for the evening. If anyone has any more suggestions I'm sure we'd all love to hear them. Carol

Another Happy belated New Year's to Igor, your remarkable team of hard workers, and to all the members of the PTE forum from an unseasonably warm Indiana. I hope everyone has a safe, healthy, and prosperous 2004 and am looking forward to seeing some more excellent slideshows! Carol

Happy Holidays and the best for the New Year from Greenfield, Indiana! Thanks, Igor and your team for such a wonderful program. It has given me years of challenges and fun!

Well, I had the best results using 1024x768, fit to screen, not windowed mode, and 85% of screen. That worked for both SVCD and DVD. There is just a little bit of black showing around the edges when I use these settings. I tried using 90% but there was still quite a bit of cropping. On an LCD 50" tv played in normal mode the show worked perfect and the quality was real good. On my 52" rear projection big screen tv the right side of the picture always looks a little warped. I also tried it on a regular tv and the right side was just a tiny bit warped.

Oleg, our very talented Russian PTE slideshow contributor, has posted another excellent show at Beechbrook Cottage: Beechbrook Cottage This presentation has some very good photos by Igor Novikov, and Oleg has done another fantastic job of putting the show together. The frames, effects, and his techniques are spectacular! It sure looks cold in Moscow in February! Thank you Igor for some really great photos! And thank you Oleg for sharing this presentation with all of us! Carol

Okay my last try went pretty well. I used the option to Create custom AVI file and set the Width and Height to 720x480. Then under Project Options I set the screen size to 85%. The entire picture is in view now with just a small black border around the outside. It came out really good! Now for a question, anyone. What does the FPS stand for ... frames per second?? It was defaulted to 30. What does this mean and should it ever be changed? Carol

Back for another update. I noticed when I imported the PTE .avi file into Roxio that it had a lot different specs than the intro file that came with the DVD Builder program. This is a short clip that can be used as an introduction. It had 720x480 for the media size, 4:3 for the aspect ratio, and NTSC for the video standard. When I checked the specs for the PTE .avi file that I had imported I found the following: 720x540 for the media size, VGA for the aspect ratio, and Unknown for the video standard. I couldn't find anywhere in the Roxio program to allow for this difference so I first used TMPGEnc to encode the PTE .avi file using DVD>NTSC, CBR MPEG-1 Layer II Audio (MP2), and 4:3 525 line (NTSC, 704x480) for the aspect ratio. I left all other settings at default. Using those settings the final screen before encoding shows the final file will be 720x480 for resolution. So ... to make a long story short ... after encoding the file in TMPGEnc I then used Roxio DVD builder to burn to DVD. It did the encoding again but it only took half the time it does when doing it straight from the PTE .avi. The results are it's much better. The picture is centered and I can barely see the edge of the outer frame that I'm trying to get to show up. But when I created the .avi from PTE I forgot to change the percent of view from 100 so I think now I'll try about 95% and repeat with the .avi file everything I did on the last DVD. And then maybe someone can remind me why I'm doing this. Oh yes ... lots of my friends don't have computers.

Just an update ... I tried using 90% for the percent to show and now have the top and bottom border showing with just a little bit of black above and below. The left border shows about half and the right border is not visible. I'll try 80% next. I think that the entire picture will be in view but there will also be a noticeable black area around the entire picture.