Ed Overstreet

Another useful suggestion I checked Canon Canada's website just now; there's nothing listed on their Downloads page for any digital projector, but I've posted a query to them. If there is an update, I'll reply here to that effect and post the link, if there is one. Thanks!

Thanks very much for the feedback. Yes, sadly, the projector is indeed a Realis SX50. I wasn't aware there was this problem with that projector. Unfortunately changing the projector won't be an option at this date, for me in that venue. I guess I'll just have to grit my teeth and live with it. Doesn't sound like there's anything much I can do about it It certainly doesn't seem likely that wiring my laptop to that projector would help, even if that were an option that I'd be willing to try (which I'm not, as I mentioned, it would be too disruptive that evening). Thanks for the diagram Brian. My pan is a horizontal traverse, which according to your diagram shouldn't cause "clogging," so I don't think that's the issue. It's probably the Canon. Good suggestion Xaver about trying the show on that computer wired to a monitor, which we do have for it but don't use very often. There probably won't be time to check that before the presentation, and even if there were I don't think the club would have time or want to change the graphics card (if that turns out to be the issue, instead of the projector) before the presentation. But that's something we definitely should check out for future reference and possible action.

Here’s another puzzle for the technical folks on this forum (at least, those who are a lot more knowledgeable about things technical than I am). I have a PTE show (created it in 5.1 but I don’t think that matters) that opens with a left-to-right pan through a rather large panorama stitch that I created in Photoshop from about six overlapped 10 megapixel RAW images. The file is rather large, at 4832 by 1050 pixels and a JPG size of 1145 kb. Yes, I know this is pushing the limits. But — everything that follows it in the show is a normal-sized JPG (1400x1050 is normal in my shows, generally 300-400 kb at the compression ratios I use). Here’s the puzzle. At home, when I run this show on my 4-year-old laptop onto a 9-year-old CRT monitor at 1600x1200 res, the pan is silky-smooth in spite of the file size. At the photo club, on a much newer and generally more powerful desktop CPU powering a very good Canon 1400x1050 projector at that resolution, the pan looks awful. It’s jerky, a wavy line descends the screen from top-to-bottom as the pan progresses, and the image loses sharpness during the pan, though it regains sharpness when the pan ends. The rest of the show runs just fine, as it does at home. My laptop has an ATI Raydeon card with 128 mb of memory; the club has an Nvidia Geoforce card, I think (anyway it isn’t ATI), with at least as much video memory as my card has. My system has 1 GB RAM and a 2 GHz clock speed, the club’s computer doubles the RAM and probably has a faster clock speed. Both systems use Windows XP. My system uses SP2; I'm not sure whether the club upgraded to SP3 or is still using SP2, if that would matter. (You'd hope if anything SP3 would produce better results than SP2, but that logic has, at times, escaped Microsoft, from what I infer from other comments about SP3). Neither system is networked; both are stand-alone systems. So any ideas as to why this effect looks great on my laptop/CRT combo and looks pretty awful at the club on the better-desktop/projector combo, and whether there’s anything to be done at the club to improve the appearance of the pan? I can’t use my laptop on the club’s projector, it would be much too disruptive to have to swap between computers just to run one 8-minute show during a 100-minute program with 18 other shows in it. None of the other shows have as ambitious a pan, though a few do use those frequent smallish pan-and-zooms, for which personally I rarely see any point, with no ill effects on the screen. Even if the logistics of switching computers for the projector were feasible (they aren’t), I wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize the other 18 shows. It’s not worth the risk. (I have successfully tested the other 18 shows on my laptop and monitor, as I'm the coordinator for the evening, but I haven't tried running them on the projector through my laptop, there won't be time, and there's no guarantee that other shows that run fine at home won't at the club if we use my laptop at the club, whatever happens with my own show.) It is possible to get the panorama image to a smaller JPG file, by drastically increasing the compression ratio, down to about 450kb which might run more smoothly. However, this is a very detailed landscape with a lot of blue sky, and I have found that any JPG compression yielding a file size much less than 1.1mb has quite obvious and unacceptable (to me) banding in the sky. I can’t get the file size any smaller without compromising the image quality in the sky to a degree that I would find unacceptable. And the opening pan is absolutely essential to my show, I’m not giving it up. If no one can think of a quick fix in terms of system settings or something else easily checked and done with the club’s computer or projector, I’m just going to run the show as-is and take my lumps, hoping that the audience, if it notices the jerky pan or cares about it, will have forgotten all about it by the end of the show, the rest of which is silky-smooth and (if I do say so, many audience members already have) is very impressive. But it really baffles me why an older, less-powerful computer running the same show on the same operating system (albeit on a CRT monitor) would perform better than a newer, more powerful desktop computer running a high-end digital projector, both at roughly the same screen resolution (1600x1200 for the CRT, 1400x1050 for the projector). The show’s images were all sized for 1400x1050, so if anything you’d think the CRT display would be more problematic because on that display the images have to be up-scaled on the fly, as I set PTE to run the show full-screen and 100% of the slide to show main images. On the projection system, there’s no need for image resizing during playback, since the images are exactly the same pixel dimensions as the projector setting (and the projector is running at its native resolution). Yet, as I say, on the projection system, that pan runs very poorly indeed. We ran the test that showed the problem this Monday, "show time" for the club is December 2, and I'm out of town for five days next week, and I have no opportunity to get back onto the projection system before the 2nd, though I will have maybe half an hour before the crowd starts to arrive, but after setting up the equipment, to experiment with a limited number of possible fixes. Not asking for much, eh? But I thought I'd try asking anyway, sometimes someone suggests something seemingly tangential that solves a problem (e.g., the character-name-length business with my screensavers earlier this week). Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

And the winner of the puzzle-solving prize is Nobeefstu, in one line of his reply. I don't know quite why this should matter, because my older screen savers that do work have longer file names, but I tried Stu's tip of keeping the file name to 8.3 characters. When I re-create one of the same screen savers from PTE that wasn't working using a name of less than 9 characters, I can get it to work. The one with the longer name doesn't work (in terms of still being there in the screensaver setting, instead of None, when I OK out of Display Properties and then go back in). That seems to have fixed the problem. Though why some older screen savers with file names as long or longer than the ones that weren't working are still working OK, is anyone's guess, but I guess that is Windows for you? I briefly thought another issue might have been that in some newer screensavers I had set the D3D Hardware Acceleration On in Project Options in PTE even though I don't really need it (since I'm not doing O&A tricks in the screensaver), but I've verified that doesn't make any difference to the presence or absence of my problem. For now anyway, until Windows changes its mind again , the file-name length change seems to be the solution. Maybe one of those monthly security updates from Microsoft, the ones that don't install SP3 but that I do allow to install, messed something up? Who knows? Anyway I can work with my SCR files now, so I'm a happy camper. Thanks again all for your quick and helpful replies. As always, I am amazed and impressed with what a great and helpful forum this is (i.e., what a great and helpful bunch of folks are populating it).

Hi Dave G. Thanks for the help attempt. I say attempt because my Windows doesn't behave the way yours does (why does this not surprise me? ). No matter where I locate one of my *.scr files, in System 32 or on my desktop or on my external hard drive, if I right-click on the file, the pop-up menu does not give me any choice called "install a screensaver" or any other text line that contains the word screen saver or looks remotely likely to relate to that. The pop-up menu is the same I get if I right-click on any other file with any other file extension, as far as I can tell. I have XP Home Edition not XP Media Edition; I guess it's way too much to hope that the geniuses in Microsoft would keep things like this consistent across different editions of what is ostensibly the same version of the OS. Another reason why, if I were starting computers again from scratch (I'm not, not even remotely), I'd forget PC/Windows/Microsoft and go with a Mac/Apple. Another reason why companies should never be allowed to develop monopoly-, or near-monopoly, power in what is theoretically (but not in reality) a free market. But I digress. I still live in hope that someone will hit on something that will work. If not, I'll just have to live with my old screen savers, or (gosh I really don't want to, it sticks in the throat to say it) go back to using Microsoft's lame stupid screen savers.

Hi Brian and thanks again for taking the time and trouble with my question. My screen savers aren't in any special folder, they're just sitting in c/windows/system32 along with everything else that Microsoft puts in that folder. I do this because all the Microsoft screen savers that came with my system are in that folder, and when I do a Windows Explorer search for *.scr I can't find anything with that file extension except in that location. When I store my own screen savers there, they automatically appear in the drop-down menu in Display Properties>Screen Saver, and I can't find and don't know where to change the drop-down default to some other folder. All my own screensavers I created in PTE, which as you know generates an *.scr file, same extension as the Microsoft screensavers. Those PTE files (at least the ones I created a while ago) run the same (or did) as do the Microsoft ones, from this drop-down menu. I'm not sure where the "slideshow" versus "static images" setting is in Windows that you're mentioning, I can't seem to find it. There is a settings button next to the drop-down menu in Display Properties>Screensaver, which I logically thought might contain something that I should check, but whenever I click on that button the button merely blinks at me and nothing pops up, nothing happens. Maybe that's part of the problem, in which case the issue is, whatever happened to that settings button and how do I get back into it when it won't open when I click on it, like all the other settings buttons in Display Properties do. And of course the very last thing I'd do (in fact, won't do) is to reinstall the operating system to bring that button back, which would be a bit like using a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito (Don't laugh, I once had an ISP techhie recommend I reformat the hard drive and reinstall the OS to fix what turned out to be their server problem; I cancelled my account and changed ISPs immediately, without even thinking of following his advice

Thanks for the suggestions, Brian and Peter. I tried them both, and neither fixed the problem. I have Windows XP Home Edition SP2 (I have studiously avoided "upgrading" to SP3). My system stores all the screen savers in c/windows/system32. I renamed "My Pictures" in My Documents to something else, and my new screen savers still wouldn't work. I renamed one screen saver that did work to the same name but adding the word "saved" to the file name, then renamed a new screensaver to that old file name. Not only did that not work, but when when I renamed the old screen saver back to its original name (deleting the string "saved" from the file name), now I can't get that one to work any more either! I hate Windows and Microsoft Anyone have any other ideas? This is getting ridiculous. I hope Bill Gates invested all his money in sub-prime-mortgage derivatives before the crash last month

I have recently noticed a problem with several screensavers that I've created in the past couple of months. This problem does not arise with older screensavers that I created a couple of years ago. However, it arises whether I create the screensavers in PTE 4.48 (which I think some of the older ones is what I used then) as well as in PTE 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5 The problem occurs whether I use the "display slides at random" feature or not. I suspect the problem may be something in my operating system, though I can't figure out what. When I go into Display Properties, Screensaver tab, and select one of my recent screen savers and click Apply, I can then preview it and it works fine. But then if I click OK and close Display Properties, it doesn't come back, and when I re-open Display Properties and go to Screensaver the drop-down menu has changed to "None" for screensaver. As I say, this only happens with relatively recently-created screensavers, but I have trouble seeing any consistent pattern in terms of which PTE version I use or what options I select in Project Options. Does anyone have a suggestion as to what the problem might be and how I might fix it? I'm getting a bit bored with some of my older screensavers and would really like to use some of my new ones Thanks.

I am cross-posting the following from the Beta 5.6 thread, where I'd originally posted but where another forum member suggested that I cross-post here to make sure the suggestion doesn't get lost. "Forgive me if this is redundant to another post, but I have only returned to this forum recently and don't have the time or patience to go through all the earlier threads on beta 5.6 ... "I am delighted to see that one of the enhancements in beta 5.6 is having the sound play during playback within the Objects and Animations window. I have long been frustrated by the lack of sound in earlier versions in that window, since I take great care in timing all of my visual effects and moments, even in O&A, to specific moments in the music. "Would it be possible also to incorporate into the O&A display that portion of the waveform display that is appropriate to the time slice affected by the current O&A display? That would make timing of moments to the sound even easier. "Thanks, hope this isn't too late to make the suggestion and that it is feasible and reasonably easy to accommodate on top of your other no doubt long list of priorities for updates and fixes. "

Forgive me if this is redundant to another post, but I have only returned to this forum recently and don't have the time or patience to go through all the earlier threads on beta 5.6 ... I am delighted to see that one of the enhancements in beta 5.6 is having the sound play during playback within the Objects and Animations window. I have long been frustrated by the lack of sound in earlier versions in that window, since I take great care in timing all of my visual effects and moments, even in O&A, to specific moments in the music. Would it be possible also to incorporate into the O&A display that portion of the waveform display that is appropriate to the time slice affected by the current O&A display? That would make timing of moments to the sound even easier. Thanks, hope this isn't too late to make the suggestion and that it is feasible and reasonably easy to accommodate on top of your other no doubt long list of priorities for updates and fixes.

Thanks very much for this link and tip on the utility, Brian. I've downloaded it and have run it on my own system. My favourite part of this program is the "Startup Manage" module, which for the very first time ever has given me some understanding of what all those different utilities in my Startup menu are all about and some good advice on which I really need and which I really don't. Not being a techhie but being reasonably intelligent, I've always been a little worried about disabling stuff in Windows Startup but I had a go at it after reading through the utility's analysis and comments about all the flotsam in my Startup menu, and my system now seems to be running a lot cleaner. This is the first system resource I've found that can explain to me the functions of all those Startup items that I've accumulated over the years in language that doesn't require a degree in software engineering to comprehend. Very nice, I think I'll keep it on my system. thanks again very much for the trip

Interesting thought, Colin. Hadn't occured to me. It was a desktop unit, not a laptop, thought I don't know that would matter. I'm not sure if it was running through a surge protector or a fused power bar, or just through a plain-vanilla extension cord. We were running in a large rec centre, they aren't known for power spikes that I'm aware of (though back in the days when I still used the club's wet darkroom, I lived in terror of a hockey team hitting the showers elsewhere in the building while I was developing film, until the club got a temperature-control gizmo for the water supply in the darkroom -- nothing like watching the temp gauge on the water tap drop 20 degrees C in 15 seconds when you're rinsing the film ). Happily I got rid of my last film camera four years ago ... Jim, if you're still monitoring this thread, do recall what we had between the CPU's power cord and the electrical outlet on Tuesday night?

That was also my thought (I'm the producer of the show in question, and was as baffled by this as was anyone else; never have I had this happen on my system at home, with this or any other PTE show). I hope Igor's suggestion is what it was, but we'll keep an eye on that User Account, eh Jim Thanks for the very fast reply, Igor. Computers, you can't live with them, you can't live without them

Getting back to the original topic, the comparison between CS3 and Elements (especially the new Elements 6). A long-time user of full versions of Photoshop, who recently upgraded to CS3, I am increasingly of the opinion that I wasted my money on the upgrade. I recently installed the trial version of Elements 6 on my laptop, after making a complete list of all the things that I actually do in CS3 (and in Nikon Capture NX, which in my opinion is a much better RAW editor than CameraRAW and in which I probably do about 75% of my editing anyway not in Photoshop). The list of things that I would miss if I only had Elements 6 to work with is very, very thin, and the things I would miss I could work around easily enough in Elements 6 or in Capture NX. The combined (full, non-upgrade) price of those two programs in Canada is about the same as what I paid for my CS3 upgrade, and is about 1/3 of what you'll pay for a full-price purchase of CS3. I posted a summary of what I found in my club's web forum. A member of my club replied to my post, appending the link below, which is I think an excellent summary of why for probably the majority of photographers (certainly of amateurs, even serious ones like me), really could be quite happy with Elements 6. As my colleague summarized the somewhat lengthy post in the link below, "yes you can use a Rolls Royce to do the grocery shopping, if you have the money, but what's the point?" The full article makes a lot of very good points, with which I fully agree. Check it out: http://www.graphic-design.com/Photoshop/vs_elements.html

I am in the throes of writing and editing a PDF book on travel photography which I hope will be for sale over a website in a couple of months. In it I, too, give a plug to PTE 5.1 and the URL for wnsoft. I also plug my favourite lens sites (Nikon and Sigma) and several third-party Photoshop plug-ins that I like (generally better than I like Photoshop). Good products by good producers who give excellent consumer service and consideration to user suggestions always deserve plugs wherever and whenever we can give them.

I have a Dell Inspiron with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700. The driver update on the ATI website will not install on my system, I get an error message instructing me to get the update from Dell instead. Dell doesn't have an update for the driver, and their tech support site just sends me an automated reply telling me to download their latest driver. I don't get a response from a live person because the warranty has long-since expired, and I'm not going to pay to have someone tell me what I already know -- the latest driver for the 9700 on the Dell site is dated 2005. So until (and if) Dell posts a driver update that I can install, I'm still in the lurch too. Will have to wait for Igor's fix in a later PTE version, I guess. (The fix that Igor posted does install even though I can't install the driver update, but the colour calibration problem isn't fixed without the driver update, at least not on my system.)

Igor, bless you for all the hard work you put in, lobbying with ATI to fix the drivers, and in providing fixes and work-arounds! Best wishes for the holiday season

Our photo club has competitions with both prints and slides (almost all of the latter are digital, in the last competition out of about 60 competitors only one submitted film slides). For the judging, the judges view the actual prints (judging is at a separate meeting from the competition presentation to the club), but at the club presentation print images are displayed through a digital projector. Printers who printed from a digital file are strongly encouraged to submit a for-projection version of the original file, for this purpose (I don't know what proportion of print submissions are from digital files, but I suspect it's probably the majority). Other prints are photographed on a digital camera and those photos are displayed; these invariably are inferior to the appearance of the original print. However on the display night, all the original prints are on display on tables at the back of the room, and the audience is encouraged to view these during the break or before the meeting. Before digital projection, volunteers would hold prints over their heads and walk around the periphery of the audience so people could get a glance at them, but this was time-consuming and fell by the wayside once the club got a digital projector. We've never used PTE to display competition images, a couple of members who are software engineers wrote specific software to do this, part of a larger process in which digital slides are submitted to a password-protected website which screens them for technical acceptability (pixel dimensions, colour space, file size etc). So I can't answer Ronnie's original question about how to use PTE to display images for a competition. My point is, while digital photos of prints are inevitably very disappointing and never do justice to the actual print, one can have one's cake and eat it too, in the manner just described. As our club has nearly 300 members, of whom maybe half or more turn out for competition evenings, the older way of displaying prints was less feasible. Though with 150 folks queueing up to view prints during a 15-minute break, things get a bit cramped, but there's no way around that really in a large club. We are blessed with being part of a large recreation centre which has granted us a large expanse of wall space near the main entrance to the building as a print gallery; we typically have 15-20 prints on display at any given time, the exhibits being changed every month or so. This gives members (whether competitors or not) an opportunity to display their work in a venue that permits, indeed encourages, relaxed and careful examination of the prints at close range, behind glass frames to protect the prints from fingerprints and other carelessness by viewers.

In my experience, the problem with transparency on an image comes in the image-editing software (in my case, Photoshop CS3), when you save the file. If you save it as a JPG (and I think I've also had this problem with PNG), Photoshop insists on replacing the transparency with a white background, which defeats the whole purpose of the transparency. In Photoshop, maybe in other software, the solution that worked for me was to save the file as a GIF (which PTE also accepts), using the Save for Web feature instead of Save As, and making sure to tick on the little box in the GIF dialog screen that says Transparency or "preserve transparency" or whatever in your software. If you do this, when you view the GIF in PTE's light-table, folder display, or on the display at the bottom of the main screen, you still see a white background where you had transparency. But that's because PTE isn't actually displaying the file, it's displaying the thumbnail saved with the file, which is either JPG or some other format that doesn't correctly display transparency. But when you insert the GIF into your show, or for example add it as on object in the O&A window on top of another image, you do in fact get transparecy where it should be, the background object/image shows through as it should where there is transparency in the top file. Be careful about feathering the selection mask before deleting material to create a transparency; Photoshop's Save for Web feature can give you a very unnatural and annoying checkerboard or other mottled display along the selection boundary where there is partial transparency. I hate this, others must find it useful otherwise why did Adobe do this, but for me the best results when deleting material to transparency after making a selection, is to use a hard-edge (no feathering, 0 pixel radius) for the selection. That way there's no haloing nor other strange display along the selection edge in the final GIF. Maybe someone else knows of a way to save as a JPG without getting that pointless white background where there should be transparency, but I haven't been able to figure it out in Photoshop. So I use GIF instead, for slides where I want to have transparency. (Normally I use JPG for PTE slides.)

Not sure if this is what you had in mind, but let me give a different spin to the subject of fading in and fading out. Any effect that you access through the Effects tab under Customize Slide, including fade, seems to work as follows. As soon as the slide on the screen begins to fade (or whatever else it does) off the screen, the next one starts to come up. One comes down, the next comes up, the first one starts at 100% opacity and (for example) fades to 0% after 4000ms while the second starts at 0% opacity at the same time and is up to 100% opacity at the end of 4000ms. In this case, at 2000ms both slides are on the screen at the same time at 50% opacity. The exciting thing about the new Objects and Animations window in Version 5, for me, is the Opacity slider. With that control, and judicious use of keypoints, you can change the overlap of the fading in/out of the two slides so they are no longer lock-stepped. For example, you can start the fade out of the first slide 1000ms before starting the fade up of the second, and depending on where you position the "final" keypoints of the two slides you can have the first slide off the screen (0% opacity) before the second slide is up to 100% opacity. If you do this, you have much more sophisticated control over how much "overlap" there is of the two slides on the screen at any time point. In the old analog days (in my club we used Clearlight two-projector programmers) we called this effect "fade to black," which it isn't really, but by using the Access A/B button on the programmer we could uncouple the standard linking of the two projectors, where B normally began to fade up exactly as A began to fade down -- but the Access button temporarily de-coupled the two projectors and let you start the operation of the second projector independently of the operation of the first one. Used properly, this effect makes for a much smoother-looking transition between landscape-format and portrait-format slides than you'll generally get with a standard fade. The trick also helps sometimes when fading between two slides of the same aspect ratio, where the slide contents are such as to make for a messy-looking transition if you use a standard fade. You don't need to touch the Pan, Zoom and Rotate controls in the O&A window during any of this, in fact it's arguably better if you don't -- you can just use O&A's Opacity control alone for this effect. Such use of the Opacity control is the exact "digital analog" (sorry for the oxymoron) to the use of the Access button on the old Clearlight programmer. This point hit me as I was reading the final pages of Lin Evans' superb PDF draft tutorial on O&A (see his post elsewhere on this forum for the link, if you don't already have the document). That realization made my day -- this trick is the one and only trick from my old Clearlight days that I've been sorely missing, no other software until now (that I've been aware of, anyway) could do this. That alone is worth the price of admission to version 5, in my book! Try it, I think you'll like it.

Thanks very much for the tip about lowering the screen resolution while running the menu show, Stu. That seems to have cleared up the problem, without needing to resize any of the images. I guess that means when I run this on projection at the club, we may need to scale back that system to 1024x768 instead of our usual 1400x1050 (that latter option isn't available on my video card but is on the club's), to play it safe. If I arrive early enough and there's time, I may run a test at 1400x1050 and see what it looks like, failing that we'll scale back the screen resolution. Interesting how PTE can handle one monster pano file (about 6600x1050 pixels) resizing on the fly through the menu show down to 1024x768 equivalent size and still look very smooth (just one little blip about halfway through, but much smoother than when I ran it through the menu show at 1600x1200). Must remember this trick if I stumble into the problem again ... Cheers and thanks again.

Reducing all the images to 1024x768 in size does seem to reduce the problem, though it doesn't completely eliminate it. However the smaller images are very problematic for some of my pan and zooms, resulting in very-soft low-resolution close-ups in some animations. So the resizing option isn't tempting, even before considering the amount of work it would entail in my case (nearly 600 images spread over the seven shows). I never had problems running shows from menus at 1400x1050 in version 4.48, but of course none of those shows had animations. If good animations in shows intended for display via a menu are going to require images be kept to 1024x768, for me at least that is a pretty serious limitation which will weigh against my using menu shows at all. If I can get what I want through Windows Explorer (and I can, in the case of these particular examples), but not through a menu show, then I'll just have to live without menus. Unfortunate.

Thanks for the tip. The hardware acceleration checkbox was disabled in the menu show, but I re-compiled it and still replicated the problem. Maybe the 1400x1050 size is part of the problem. I'll re-create a copy of the menu show and one of the other shows to 1024x768 and see if the problem persists, will post another reply with the results when I've done that.

I don’t know whether what I’m about to describe is unique to my system components or whether it’s a more common problem, but I thought I should report it here. My system is Windows XP Home on a Dell Inspiron 9200 laptop with 1 GB RAM and an ATI Radeon 9700 128MB video card. I am using PTE 5 Deluxe to create the shows described below, sizing all shows for 1400x1050 pixels and running on a monitor set for 1600x1200 pixel resolution. I have created seven shows, ranging in length from about 3 minutes to nearly 24 minutes. All of them use animations, some panning and zooming, but also some of what I call “fade to black” animations, which involves adjusting the opacity of fades between specific slides so the fades overlap somewhat when the first image is nearly black but not quite (useful when transiting between portrait and landscape format). All the animation effects work very smoothly on my system, with the 3D hardware acceleration switched turned on in each show, when I run a given EXE show on its own from Windows Explorer. However, I created a menu “show” in which each of these shows can be launched from a button within a single-image stationary “wallpaper” design. Whatever I do with the hardware acceleration switch on that menu show (on or off, doesn’t seem to matter much), the pan-and-zoom animations look very jerky. The “fades to black” opacity animations still look OK however, but honestly the pan and zoom effects look so bad when I run the shows through the menu that I’ve decided to abandon the menu approach and to run each of the separate shows instead from Windows Explorer, which I know will produce a smooth animation appearance. The menu show consists only of three slides, the wallpaper with the buttons and a black slide before and after that wallpaper slide. It is totally controlled by the mouse buttons, and there is no music attached to the menu show (all the other seven shows have sound tracks for the full duration of each show, in MP3 format). I can provide more technical information on the show sizes etc. if that would be of any help. Has anyone else encountered this problem? Any suggestions for a fix? (Please don't tell me to replace my ATI card, I'm not doing that for now, and besides the card is quite able to run the animations smoothly via Windows Explorer though with problems concerning color calibration as discussed extensively elsewhere on this forum.) I can live with running these shows (for a presentation at my photo club) out of Windows Explorer if I have to, but it would be nice to use the menu-and-button approach if I can do so without ruining the quality of the pan-and-zoom animations. UPDATED: On some further investigation, I have discovered the above-mentioned problems with the quality of pan-and-zoom animations only seems to occur when I run a show through a button in the menu show which was launched by clicking on the menu show in Windows Explorer (i.e. run as an exe). If I open the menu-show project in PTE, launch the menu as a preview, and then launch any of my seven shows by clicking on its button in the menu when run as a Preview in PTE, the problem does not replicate. This problem seems to be unique to the exe file of the menu, not the pte file. Why would that be?