Ed Overstreet

Returning to the original topic, ATI cards and PTE (thanks for pulling me up short on the diversion I was beginning to wonder whether I hadn't taken the thread a bit off-topic), I'm afraid I'm going to muddy the waters a bit. Great suggestion from Iceberg, so I got the Nokia test program, ran it from my (Pantone-calibrated) desktop, did a screen capture, pasted into Photoshop, saved as BMP, inserted BMP into a manual-advance PTE show, did a screen capture from within the PTE show of same, pasted THAT into another new file in Photoshop, and tiled the two screen captures side-by-side in Photoshop CS3. All this on CRT monitor run off my laptop's ATI Radeon 9700 128MB video card. Here's what I see. a) On my desktop, when I examine the Nokia top screen (grey scale plus colour swatches and bands), the grey scale looks "normal", I can see all the grey patches distinctly from white down to 3% (the darkest one on that particular screen, on a later screen I can just make out the 1% so yes my Pantone calibration does work correctly). The colours look normal to my eyes, and most importantly, the grey patches seem to be neutral grey all the way through the scale. When I view the BMP screen capture of the Nokia desktop display in the main PTE window, either in the preview window in the upper-right corner of the main PTE screen or when clicking the words "click here to preview the slide:, the colours, greyscale and overall hue (in the various grey patches, i.e. neutral) appear to be identical to what I see on my desktop. BUT -- when I click Preview to run the show, immediately the entire PTE window display turns somewhat yellowish just before the show launches. When I examine the same BMP full-screen within the PTE show preview, while brightness and contrast remain the same as before in the Nokia screen-shot, there is now a distinctly yellow-brown hue to the grey scale, noticeable largely in the 20% and 30% swatches. This is with the hardware acceleration button clicked On in Project Options-Screen (though in this case I needn't have done that, since I'm not doing any animations in this show). c) Now for the fun part. When I do a screen capture of the brownish-yellow Nokia pattern from the PTE show display and paste THAT into a new file in Photoshop and tile it next to the original, I can't see any difference at all between the two files in Photoshop. So Photoshop can colour-manage the files correctly, even though the monitor display in PTE show and preview can't. I'd gladly email these files to anyone so they can see for themselves, only if you view them side-by-side in Photoshop you won't see any difference, you'll only see the differences with PTE Preview or show displays on an ATI-card-driven monitor (maybe projector too? haven't tested that one yet, don't have access to the projector until September). If you have an ATI card, get the Nokia test program (there's a link somewhere up this thread) and replicate what I just described, you probably will see what I'm seeing. Arggggghhh Yes there is a indeed problem with ATI cards and PTE 5. So, to reprise -- given that Igor says this is an ATI problem that he can't fix (if I understand the threads correctly), our only recourse is a) live with it, keep pestering ATI to fix the problem, or c) get new video cards or new computers. Or maybe there's a fourth option someone can think of? afterthought -- I just re-ran my little test show with and without the 3D hardware acceleration button clicked on. If it's on, the PTE screen "pauses" and changes colour briefly before running the preview. With that box clicked Off, the preview launches instantly and in fact the Nokia test screen looks precisely as it did on my desktop, without the yellow-brown hue in the greys. So this is definitely related to the hardware acceleration button (as has already been said earlier, several times, by others). Just confirming what everyone else is reporting. ...

Just to clarify/reinforce my experience with the Pantone ColorVision Spyder: I'm not pushing this particular product it just happens to be what I use and what my club uses. With that product, I can calibrate my computer and monitor at home, and the club can separately calibrate their computer and projector. The result is that my slides look the same to me on both displays, with maybe some very minor loss of saturation in some narrow colour ranges on the projection. My monitor, when calibrated, views quite comfortably, looks "normal" to me, and doesn't require me to wear sunglasses to avoid hurting my eyes. Can't speak for other products, but that's been my experience with this product -- shared by about 100 other club members, more or less. FTR the ColorVision calibration software ALWAYS forces you to adjust the brightness and contrast of your display device so that you see a proper greyscale, before proceeding through the color calibration. That's standard procedure also with Monaco, if I recall correctly (used it a few years ago briefly). Brian is quite right, you absolutely must get a proper greyscale display on your screen before worrying about color adjustments, but in my experience a good calibration device and software does that for you as part of the drill its "wizard" walks you through. The greyscale adjustment is, however, the one area that requires a visual judgment by the user (the colour adjustments are all done by the spyder automatically). That adjustment is partially dependent on the ambient room light (a grey scale may look quite different in a dark room than in a bright room), so I have separate calibration profiles and associated brightness/contrast settings for my monitor when there is daylight coming through my window, when I'm running the monitor at night with my room lights on (which I prefer), and when I'm running it at night in a dark room (which I do sometimes but don't prefer because of the higher contrast and difficulty of reading any notes I might be writing on paper as I work). Whichever profile (and ambient lighting condition) I used in creating the digital slide, however, the slide looks just fine on projection at the club, as long as that projector is set correctly and the computer is using the profile for that projector. I have had the experience of calibrating our projector with a couple of other people in the room, and we had a bit of a disagreement as to whether the grey scale "looked right" or not. Probably one of us has low-level cataracts (maybe me?) or some other issue; we had an animated discussion as to whether or not the 5% black square was or was not quite differentiated from the 0% square. So not everyone will perceive the same display exactly the same way, but then one of my friends is red-green colour blind, so we never let him judge colour slides even though he's otherwise an excellent photographer. In spite of the subjective issues around the greyscale in the Pantone calibration process, it seems to work. I prepare a monthly slide showcase for the club, in PTE, using 6-slide submissions from usually 10-15 members, for projection at the club. I prepare the show on my monitor at home, so I get pretty familiar with how these slides from all these different members look on my monitor. Once in a while I'll get an overly-dark or flat slide from someone and will adjust the shadow/highlight points in Photoshop Levels to fix it on my calibrated monitor (but I never mess with anyone else's colour judgments though). I've been running these showcases for three years now, have had no complaints from any of the members who made submissions that there was anything wrong with the appearance of their slides on projection, nor have I noticed any differences myself in my own or in others' slides from my own monitor, except on one or two occasions when I suspected (correctly, on post-hoc examination) the projector hadn't been set correctly by the projectionist before the show ran. For what it's worth, that's been my experience. I don't trust theory much, I trust what I experience (after correcting the mistakes of course

Hi Jeff. I'm not a technician and my understanding of these things is a bit limited; there are others on this forum who can probably answer the question in better detail than I can. For what it's worth, here's my "experienced layman's" answer, others may want to correct me. (I hope we aren't getting too far off-thread on this, but I think there may be others browsing this forum who might have the same or a similar question.) Once you've calibrated your monitor at home using standard calibration equipment like a spyder and have also separately calibrated the projector and computer at the club (not necessarily with the same brand or product, they're all supposed to calibrate to the same standards, at least in theory), then yes you should get reasonably consistent colour rendering between the two displays. It won't be perfect; monitors and projectors don't use the same technology for producing an image, and the colour gamuts aren't going to be exactly the same. This is also an issue for trying to calibrate a monitor with a printer on the same system; you'll never get an exact colour match between a monitor and a print. However you should be reasonably close. You may find that some hues and saturations that you see on your monitor display will look less saturated on the projector (or on a print), but the hues should be very close. You might notice the difference, since you're familiar with the way the image looked on your monitor, but your audience shouldn't notice anything strange in the colours. Most importantly, IMO, with proper calibration, highlight and shadow detail (i.e., the appearance of a grey scale) should be the same in both displays. So you shouldn't have highlights clipping or shadows blocking up on the projector when that wasn't the case on the monitor. This, generally more than colour shifts, was the big issue at our club with the competition slides. In one memorable competition, the judges kept commenting on how no one in our club seemed to understand how to capture or adjust digital images to avoid blowing the highlights. No one thought to ask, "gee, maybe the problem isn't this a club of dummies, maybe the projector isn't set correctly." At the judging the projector was not, in fact, calibrated correctly; at the public display of the results several days later, two judges spent much of the evening eating crow about their comments on our slides ("gosh, it looks a lot better tonight than last Thursday") because someone bothered to recalibrate the projector in the meantime. Just be very careful to ensure that the correct calibration profile and projector settings for the specific room, screen, and projection distance are used. Our projector gets used in several different rooms, sometimes with low ambient room light (which affects the appearance on the screen), often with different screens (projection screens differ in reflectance and hence brightness, also they don't all have the same colour of white, an issue with digital papers too), always with different projection distances. And if a "visiting fireman" insists on running his/her show from a Mac laptop and your projector settings were based on a calibration done with a Windows computer (or a Mac laptop with a different video card), the vistor needs to recalibrate to your projector in that room and screen before starting, if they want to be sure of getting a consistent colour, brightness and contrast display. How much this matters will partly be a function of how different the systems, rooms, and screens are, and partly a function of how visually sensitive you and your audience are. In my experience, photographers are pretty darned finicky about the way their images get displayed, I know I am, but I also know that some of our members seem oblivious to these concerns. I hope this is helpful. Don't spend too much time worrying about all those complicated books (I find them overwhelming also); a good calibration system, such as those by Monaco, Greytag and Pantone/ColourVision, is user-friendly and doesn't require a degree in physics or engineering to figure out and to use with good results.

Hi Jeff. Don't give up too easily on the issue of calibrating a projector. My photo club, partially at my urging and instigation, purchased a newer verion of Color Vision Spyder than I have at home. The newer version can be used to calibrate a digital projector (reading directly off the projected screen display) as well as CRT and LCD monitors; I believe other brands of calibration device now also can do this. Our club runs monthly slide competitions, mostly digital slides, and before getting the calibration spyder there had been a lot of complaints from members whose slides didn't look on projection to the judges as they'd looked on the monitor at home. The calibration has largely eliminated those complaints, as long as the equipment operators remember to re-check the calibration profile chosen on the system plus the projector brightness and contrast settings before the evening starts, bearing in mind that the calibration profile is unique to a specific projector, screen, ambient room light if any, projection distance, and video card (so the same projector run off different laptops likely will need to be recalibrated on each laptop). Depending on your club's budget and the proportion of members who are shooting digitally rather than with film (the majority of our members have now "gone digital"), there should be good support for getting that projector calibrated correctly. This would benefit not only AV producers (whether they use PTE, Pro Show Gold, or whatever) but also anyone wishing to show any digital slides that they've spent a lot of time tweaking to get a specific appearance (which is most of us, most of the time). Yes, this requires more attention to detail by the volunteers who run the projector, but that's just an extension of past requirements for projectionists to keep the lens clean, the bulb replaced, and monitor the focusing from one slide to the next (at least that shouldn't be an issue with a digital projector!). With digital technology comes the need for more attention to fine detail and complex controls, alas. But it's not "rocket science" and the result is well worth it, especially if as I suspect from your comments you've been sadly disappointed at the way some of your images have appeared on projection (been there, had that experience too!).

Unfortunately, though, if you disable the 3D box, you will probably find that any animations (like pan and zoom) are strikingly less smooth than they are with the 3D box clicked on. So, until ATI fixes the problem at their end, users with ATI cards (such as me) are going to have to choose between doing without proper colour calibration or doing without decent-looking animations in their shows, in PTE 5. I've tested this on my system, and my preference is to give up the colour calibration (especially since most of my shows are destined for my photo club which has a computer that doesn't, as far as I know, have an ATI card). IMO the animations with 3D turned off, at least on my system (ATI Radeon 9700 128 MB RAM on a Dell Inspiron 9200 desktop with 1GB RAM) look absolutely awful (they're stunning when 3D is turned on). The colour calibration isn't as I'd like it, but I can live with it for now (especially as I don't have any practical choice unless I want to get a new computer with a non-ATI card, maybe that's something we should start mentioning to ATI in our complaints -- they're going to lose business from some of us if they don't fix this. Next laptop I get will NOT have an ATI video card in it, otherwise). Please see other posts on this Forum about where to go to complain to ATI about this. The more of us who complain, the better (I hope).

I've finally gotten around to using PTE Deluxe 5. First, let me add my congratulations to all the others -- the new version is quite remarkable. Especially as I was able, after some initial and unfounded trepidation, to get the pan-and-zoom to work remarkably smoothly on a massive 4500x4000 pixel 3.9MB jpg of a map that I wanted to zoom into at fine detail. Ran without a glitch on my system, extremely impressive. I just have one regret, and probably an addition to a wish list for an update. In Version 4.48 and earlier versions, under the Screen tab under Project Options there were two very useful check boxes, Show First Transition Effect from Desktop, and Show Transition Effect to Desktop, enabling me to fade from and back to the desktop at the beginning and end of a show. These boxes are not on the Screen tab in Deluxe 5, and I can't seem to find them anywhere else in the interface. If in fact these features were dropped for some reason, would it be possible please to put them back into an update fairly soon? I've always really liked the fade-to-and-from-desktop effect in version 4.48, and I find on my system that the transitions from and to the desktop at the beginning and end of a Deluxe 5 show very abrupt and even jerky, which can be a bit jarring to a viewer. The smooth fade effect to/from the desktop is sorely missed, at least from where I sit. Of course, if those two controls were moved somewhere else and I just can't see them maybe someone can kindly put me out of my misery and tell me where they've moved. Otherwise, the program is wonderful, I look forward gradually to finding other good uses for the Animation effects.

Apologies for delay in posting this, but I've been off-line for the past four weeks and am playing catch-up. Also apologies if this isn't the best current thread for posting this, but it was an appropriate place on May 1 so here goes. Have downloaded Igor's two demo shows and was able to run both of them successfully with no visible problems at 1600x1200 screen resolution (using a CRT monitor wired to the laptop) on a Dell Inspiron 9200 laptop with Intel Centrino 1 GB RAM 2 GHz system and an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 AGB graphics card with 128 MB of video memory. Haven't tried the shows on the laptop screen but that's a moot point, as I never run AV shows on that screen nor use it for serious editing of photos nor AV shows due to colour and contrast calibration issues. Whether/how often I'll actually use the pan and zoom feature in the final release remains to be seen, but the shows run just fine on my system FYI. Will hold off trying the software until the final release, I have limited patience with beta releases especially early ones, but I assume if the shows run OK on my system the software should too.

Hi Ron. For the record, the version that I downloaded is Peace#8.exe. The date associated with that file on my system, which is probably the date and time when I unzipped it, is April 13 at 7:25am Eastern Daylight time, which would be 12:25 in England. So it seems to be the version you have. I'm happy it runs well on your system. It doesn't run well on mine. Nor on Patrick's. Nor on Patrick's friends'. To others in this thread: I don't want to add much to what Patrick said, I thought rather eloquently, but to say there clearly is a problem with the way this show is constructed (I'm referring here to what the computer is being asked to do in terms of transitions), or with the software, or perhaps, but only perhaps, with some of the equipment that is running it, I'm not sure which, and I have neither the time at the moment nor the expertise with which to debug any of the above. But I honestly don't think the problem has anything to do with my motivation, nor with Patrick's. I think it unfortunate when someone attempts to point out some problems, we only get personal attacks in response. Instead of "blaming the victims," how about finding a solution to the issues? I think I've said all on this thread that I want to say. I see no point in continuing my participation in this discussion, and I am removing my subscription to it as soon as I close this post.

I'm glad that Patrick replied; so it's not just my eyesight or my system alone. My laptop is a fairly powerful computer, in fact it was the top-of-the-Dell line (or arguably one small notch below the very top) when I got it a year and half ago, it has 1 GB of RAM and a 128 MB video card that is one of the high-end ones listed by Igor in his survey of peoples' video cards. Yes I know that many of today's higher-end systems have more than thise amounts of RAM and video memory, but ... Saying that we'll have to upgrade our systems to use the new features isn't gong to encourage many people to rush to adopt the new software; I for one have no interest in having to upgrade what was a very powerful computer only after eighteen months, I can't afford that kind of buying behaviour on my pension. If that's what it takes to do pan and zoom, well I'll just do without pan and zoom -- probably not a great loss, given the generally tacky and tedious over-use I've seen some people make of that feature in some other software lately. I'm concerned and disappointed that a show that a lot of us believe in and cared enough to contribute to is going to run so un-smoothly on some systems that some viewers, like Patrick, will exit and move on to something else before the show even ends. That rather defeats the whole idea, IMO. BTW I thought maybe the problem was with my screen resolution (I generally run my system at 1600x1200, my eyes have grown accustomed to the tiny fonts but I love working in Photoshop on images in that resolution). So I reset to 800x600 and re-ran the show this morning, and there was still some jerkiness especially in part of the Buddha/lotus sequence. So I don't think it's a screen resolution issue. And the credits at the end still race by too fast for me to register all the names; maybe on the fourth or fifth viewing I'll have figured out who all the people are. But what's the point of having a text slide on the screen so briefly that you need multiple viewings to figure it out? I would hate to see many shows (and version 5) become something that only a relative handful of the technically (and financially) inclined can afford to use properly, because that will limit not only the market for the software but also the market for the shows it produces. Yes, eventually I'll replace my laptop with another one with more bells and whistles, but I'm not doing that for a few more years yet, 'cause I can't afford it and am not interested in constantly feeding money into the computer industry. There are a lot of folks out here (many of whom belong to my photo club) who are very interested in producing and viewing shows like this but who can be very put off by anything that requires frequent, expensive, and sometimes technically-intimidating hardware upgrades to get it to look right. Please, don't market-marginalize a wonderful medium and some great software by making it too esoteric or overly dependent on high-end, expensive systems! (Sorry if this isn't the most appropriate thread for that last bit, but I think the comment needs the context of this show as an example.)

I would like to thank Maureen for the having undertaken the challenging task of pulling together some pretty disparate images into a nice show. Having worked on "group" shows before, I appreciate how difficult that can be. I would second John Barnett's comment above, however. I felt some of the images needed more time on the screen to be appreciated (and not just those of mine , and I felt some of the transitions were a bit too rushed. Some of the transitions, especially the Buddha/lotus ones, I thought were quite effective, but I'd have liked to have seen a similar gentler pace in some later parts of the show. Also, I think the credits at the end need to be up a couple of seconds longer, I didn't have time to read all the names before the slide disappeared. However, one can always quibble with Av productions, and there are different tastes in how to do these things. I'm sure if I'd produced a show with these images, others would have reservations about some of the things I might have done, and that's probably true with most of us. One curious thing, possibly more a function of my computer (or whatever my system was doing in the background when I ran the show) than of the show itself, the first time I ran the show, I was very disconcerted to see some images appearing, disappearing and then re-appearing jerkily for no apparent reason (especially in the afore-mentioned Buddha/Lotus sequence). However, the second time I ran the show, this didn't happen, and things went a lot more smoothly (though I still found some of the later images weren't on the screen as long as I'd have liked). I say this in case anyone else plays the show through and sees what might be some glitches in the early sections; wait a couple of minutes and try running it again, it should look a lot better the second time through. Or maybe my aging eyes were playing tricks on me that first time through Or maybe I got the perhaps-buggy version that was alluded to above, though by the time I downloaded it several hundred others had done so, so I'm not sure ... But something definitely didn't look "right" the first time I ran the show. I'm glad I waited and tried running it again later. Maybe I'll go back to the site in a few weeks (I'm away on a trip shortly), re-download it and run it again. Thanks again to Maureen and to everyone else who worked on and believed in Damor's idea.

Excellent question. I, too, am very interested in the answer.

I completely agree with Geoff's suggestion, if it's technically feasible. There is a significant number of users, such as myself, who have little or no interest in DVD authoring and who are primarily interested in creating EXE files for monitor or projector display. DVD authoring, and playing PTE shows over television monitors, is a separate issue. I would rather see the PTE program (and developer energies on that software) devoted to the EXE files; getting decent-looking DVD-and-TV-ready shows from these files is a separate (and seemingly very complex) issue. If I want to go that route at some point, like Geoff I'd be happy to lay out a few dollars for special software for that purpose. In the meantime, I'd rather use PTE the way I do now, and keep the software uncluttered by the complexities of the DVD-and-AVI-or-whatever issues. No doubt not everyone will agree, but let's face it, there are lots of different uses for PTE. As with any software or other complex product, "one size fits all" is not a model that generally produces ideal results for everyone nor even for anyone, at some stage in complexity.

Another feature that's related, which I'd like to see, is a diagonal "wipe" where you can control the angle at which the wipe occurs as well as the corner from which it starts.

A wonderfully-executed show. I think the sequencing of the images was excellent, as were the choice of music and the tasteful and appropriate use of the transition effects. I realize these are the Hubble's photos and not yours, but wouldn't it be nice to include a couple of these in the World Peace show being constructed by Forum members? Certainly your show evokes a very peaceful effect on the viewer, though of course when one reflects on the physically rather violent processes involved in the creation of some of the nebulae and other objects depicted in the images, this is perhaps misleading. Great show, I'm happy to add my congratulations.

I must say I can understand many of Patrick's reservations about some of the images already uploaded, though I think I can also understand the rationale the photographers had in most, perhaps all, of the cases. The problem is one of "chicken and egg," though -- we don't have enough images of any sort to work with yet, and until we get more images we aren't going to have any show at all, or not have enough images that we can afford to be selective or to ask individual photographers if they mightn't have something else that might be less subject to un-peaceful interpretations by reasonable viewers. Personally, I would (and have) avoided images with flags, even though I can think of some that might work in some perspectives. For example, there's a wonderful monument in Ottawa recently erected to honour our soldiers who have served in UN peace-keeping missions, but the statues show people all wearing military uniforms and many are carrying small arms -- which is the reality of peace-keeping forces, like it or not. It's also pretty hard to photograph it well without including the Canadian flag, of which there are a number surrounding the monument -- and I must say I have some pride in my country, its flag, and its contributions to UN peace-keeping efforts these past decades. But where does one draw the line? I deliberately omitted such images from my own submissions, though I could understand someone else submitting an image of that monument if there were some way of communicating the context without having to write a paragraph of explanation. This is a slippery slope -- what is un-peaceful or potentially offensive to one person may not be to someone else, and in a collective effort how much editorial power do we grant to the producers? Peace also means trying to understand and accept (within reason) the well-meaning views and values of people whoses views and values are different from our own. Speaking as a potential team member, I'm reluctant to pass judgments on other peoples' images and ideas and visions of peace, because we all come from different perspectives and backgrounds. I can understand someone wanting to honour those who have fought and died so that we might have peace, which I think may be the rationale for some of the images Patrick mentions. Ruling out such images (or any other images) is a tricky judgment to make in a project that is supposed to be collective and to reflect acceptance, tolerance and understanding, and it's a judgment I would not make lightly. Which raises another point, a delicate one but Patrick has raised it and it's very valid. Language. If the idea is to increase world understanding and peace through this show, my inclination would be to avoid words entirely -- no singing, no poetry, no slogans, no quotations, just non-verbal music and images which are universal and which don't require a short essay or even a formal title (in which language{s}?) to communicate the message intended. Even ruling out text or spoken words, if we rule them out, there remains the potentially thorny issue of what to do with a title slide and how to head the credit slide ("photographs by ...") -- that wording, of the title and of the "photographs by", arguably should be in more than one language, but then that raises the question of which languages and how many languages before the slides get so cluttered they lose their meaning and impact for most viewers. These are issues the producers will need to grapple with, among others. But it's all moot if we don't have enough images to work with. I uploaded three more images in the last 24 hours, which now appear on the website. I wasn't totally comfortable myself with all the other images we had, for some of the same reasons as Patrick, but I'm willing to keep contributing images that convey my vision of peace, up to whatever limit Bill and Dave want to set. I'd rather try to help by contributing more examples of what I think could/arguably should be in the show, than to hold back and contribute nothing. I do hope we can get this off the ground; it would be sad if we couldn't. It won't be the end of the world if the project fizzles out from lack of contributions, but it would be nice if we could make this work somehow. PS Of course as I was writing the above, a bunch of other posts appeared in the background that I didn't see. Apologies for the length of mine, some of my points are covered also by others more concisely. Three cheers indeed for Maureen.

If you are running Windows XP and want to associate JPGs with Photoshop, do the following: - Go to My Computer - In the menu at the top of the screen, select Tools>Folder Options - Under Folder Options, click on the File Types tab - There you will find a drop-down dialog box of Registered File Types. Scroll down it until you find JPG (JPG File) and highlight it. The display box below this will now tell you what program is currently "associated" with JPG files. Presumably on your system it's something other than Photoshop. Click on the Change button that you see; a box pops up; Windows should list Adobe Photoshop (your version) as one of the "recommended" programs. Select it. If Windows doesn't list Photoshop there (unlikely), click on Browse and navigate to the Photoshop exe file under c:\program files\adobe\Photoshop(your version) and select it. - Now keep clicking the OK buttons until you're back in My Computer. - That's it; from now on, whenever you double-click on a JPG file in Windows Explorer, My Computer, or try to launch a JPG from within other software (like using Ctrl-W inside PTE), Windows will automatically open the JPG with Photoshop. Sorry, I have no idea how to do any of this in other versions of Windows (though it's likely very similar).

It just occurred to me that some folks might find it difficult to locate the submission site, which Bill posted about forty messages earlier on this thread. I had trouble finding it myself a few minutes ago; here is the link for uploading image contributions to this project: http://www.beechbrook.com/avp/

I wasn't going to stick my oar in again, but maybe someone has to, so here goes again. C'mon folks, how difficult is it to find three images that make you think of peace or of things peaceful? I contributed three images (five actually, two alternate versions of one to give the producers something to work with). I didn't spend hours and days brooding over this; it wasn't "rocket science." I've contacted damor privately and offered to help with production, but only as part of a team effort, and I don't want to be involved in the music selection. But we need more than one or two people on the production team. This should be a diverse international effort, in my view anyway, or it's not worth the candle. We also need more than 29 images. And it wouldn't make sense to me, if I were the one doing the music selection and copyright negotiating or whatever is needed, to start going through all that until I have a clear idea of how many images are going into the show. I don't start selecting music for my own shows until I have a clear idea what images, and how many images, I'm going to be dealing with. Twenty-nine images isn't worth it. We need more. Where are they? Instead of finding reasons not to contribute or participate, how about finding some reasons to do so, and just do it (like a handful of us already have)? Hello? (Apologies Dave, I found I couldn't wait for a more diplomatic wording from you as I suggested. So be it.)

I also am rather surprised and disappointed at the low response on the Beechbrook site. Maybe one option, if we don't get more people responding, is to open up the number of contributions from those of us who are willing? I can think of a number of other images I could contribute besides the three I posted very early on. But it would be better if we had more people chipping in.

Hi Al. I was in the midst of drafting a clarification on the matter of image aspect ratio (which can be totally different from the canvas aspect ratio, as you of course know) when I saw your reply. Glad we clarified the misunderstanding; and I agree that in spite of how the photographer chooses to present his/her image on the canvas, the producers may have to make some (hopefully not too extreme) changes to it so it blends more smoothly with another image in the specific show. I have no problem with a 1024x768 canvas as long as I can place an image at some other aspect ratio onto that canvas, and fill the empty canvas space with whatever makes sense to me. Also, I'm a lot less concerned about producers changing what I did to that empty space than I'd be if they changed what I did in the actual image; in fact, I don't care what the empty space is filled with as long as it looks good with my image, though of course were I to submit a non-4:3 image on the canvas I'd fill the blank space with something that I thought worked, as a suggested starting point for the producers. I don't agree that nothing looks worse than aspect ratios changing on the screen through a show -- I can think of lots of things that look worse, I guess I have different tastes. However I agree that if the aspect ratios change, one often needs to make some accommodations to the canvas content underneath the images, to the edges of some images (sometimes with layer styles, sometimes by rendering them less linear), or in terms of what transition effects one uses in going from one aspect ratio to another, to make things look less jarring than they might look otherwise. This is particularly necessary when going from landscape-format to portrait-format images, and I've always thought it ridiculous to contend that AV should never include portrait-format images, even back in 35mm days we evolved several ways of going smoothly between those orientations. Also, one doesn't have to centre all the images in the middle of the canvas, one on top of the other; one way of dealing with variable aspect ratios is to shrink the images somewhat and place them on the canvas so they don't centre or fully overlap or don't even touch each other. It's all a matter of taste, judgment, and trade-offs. Coming up with pleasing and creative ways to blend varying aspect ratios can make life more challenging for the producers, but that challenge is part of the fun for me as a producer -- otherwise, the process becomes pretty mundane IMO. Again, a personal taste. As I suggested earlier, peace to me doesn't necessarily mean unified. Unified has a lot of connotations that don't strike me as particularly peaceful, depending on how the unity is achieved and at what price or prices. I think we can be peaceful without being unified and by being diversified; I realize that's a cultural value that perhaps not everyone shares, but it's value that I hold to. Peace at the price of ramrodding everyone into one mold isn't worth having, in my view, and failure to accept and respect diversity is often what causes peace to break down. Maybe I'm waxing over-philosophical here, but it seems to me that in a show like the one we're contemplating, it makes sense to be philosophical and to mold the technology to the concept and not the other way around. I think more flexibility and less rigidity is what's called for. Awright, so I didn't shut up ...

Hi again, it’s me your resident gadfly. I gather from the minimal reply to my earlier post on the subject of aspect ratio for images for this endeavor, that the consensus seems to be that we go with 4:3 (1024x768 completely filling all those pixels with the image). Before throwing in the towel (on this one project) and submitting to that, I thought I’d come at the issue from a philosophical angle which I’d like everyone to think about before finalizing this. There are different ways of arriving at what one might call “peace.” The grave has been said to be peaceful; I don’t want to live in a graveyard. A police state, at least one with a sufficiently ruthless police force and a sufficiently submissive population, can be said to be peaceful I suppose, but I wouldn’t want to live in one of those, either. A society of conformists where everyone is the same, thinks the same, acts the same (at least within certain boundaries) can also be said to be peaceful, though some of us might also describe it as rather boring. There can also be a peaceful society where everyone is different but everyone also is tolerant and accepts the diversity of others and respects everyone’s rights to be diverse, as long as the diversity doesn’t hurt others. That’s the model that I subscribe to. Now, where does telling participants in this project that all images should be in the same aspect ratio fit into this philosophical structure? Think about it, please, before you all decide that all the images for this production should be displayed in 4:3 cropping. I’ve never (as far as I can remember) produced a digital AV show (and very few 35mm AV shows) in which every image had the same aspect ratio, and I probably never will produce such a show on my own in future. Having said that, I will also say that I want to participate in this particular project badly enough that I’ll crop all my images to 4:3 if that’s what I have to do to participate. But I would find it more-than-a-little ironic (and perhaps even a little scary) that a project on world peace would go that route. Yes, I know there are some technical things that we need to standardize, but I really don’t think that image aspect ratio is one of them. There, I’ve said it; the gadfly will now retire to his nest for a while and shut up. PS Al, I have some trouble understanding your statement that standardizing on 1024x768 (if by that you also mean standardizing on 4:3 cropping of the image) will maximize participation in this project. I'd have thought it might constrain participation in this project, but maybe I'm overlooking something.

Here’s another technical issue maybe worth kicking around before we go too much farther along: aspect ratio. Do we prefer that everyone’s images fit into a standard aspect ratio, or not? I can see arguments on both sides, and I can live with either result, but I’d like to know which way we’re going before I finalize my entry. I know a lot of the Supercircuit shows seemed to have all their images in 4:3 aspect ratio, which of course maximizes the amount of screen real-estate you’re using and arguably maximizes the images’ impact. However, the universe doesn’t fit into 4:3 most of the time, and my cameras all shoot in 3:2 which is the way I compose most of my shots. I often crop what I shoot, and my cropping is always based on what I think works best for me aesthetically, without regard to the aspect ratio produced by the cropping. Not a problem for individual images especially when printed, but of course varying the aspect ratio from one image to another raises some issues for AV. I’ve selected three images. For now, they’re all cropped as 4:3 (though that’s not how I originally conceived any of them). For two of the three images I don’t think it matters much (in fact, in one of those two the 4:3 cropping arguably is better than what I’d done originally), but I think the third looks better in more of a panorama format, which is how I had originally cropped the 3:2 slide from which it was scanned. I can live with the 4:3 cropping, but if feels a touch claustrophobic to me, perhaps it wouldn’t to someone else who hadn’t seen the original image (or who hadn’t been in the original location, which is anything but claustrophobic). Any views on this? There are all sorts of ways of sequencing images that don’t have the same aspect ratio, by softening the image edges, using non-fade transitions, compositing images so they don't overlap or only partially overlap (but that means reducing the image size on the canvas and hence also reducing its impact), or other ways of reducing the discordance that can result when the image boundaries shift from one frame to the next. I know some producers and viewers like those effects and some don’t. Forcing everything into one aspect ratio eliminates the “shifting image boundaries” problem, though there can still be situations where you might prefer not to centre two images on each other because certain elements in the two images blend in the dissolve better if they aren’t centred. But that makes the producer’s life more complex; certainly production is simpler if everything is in the same aspect ratio and at the same size. However, simplicity isn't always a virtue. So, when we are saying “make your images 1024x768 in size” are we saying “crop everything 4:3 and resize to 1024x768" or are we saying “make sure the image is no wider than 1024 and no higher than 768, but if you want 1024x681 or 520x768 or whatever else, that’s OK?” Obviously, if we go with a fixed 4:3 ratio we're telling everyone "no portrait orientations, only landscape orientations" which is how a number of Supercircuit shows ran, sometimes to their disadvantage I thought. I can live with the consensus, I’d just like to know if there is a consensus and what it might be. As it happens, I’m giving a presentation Monday night to our photo club’s AV group which addresses the aspect ratio issues in some detail, with examples of how I’ve dealt with it in one particular group show I was involved in a couple of years ago. I’d be interested in hearing your views on this before Monday night (-5 hours Zulu), not that it will change my presentation or how I normally do my own shows, but it might provide some grist for the mill of our discussions Monday night if we have time for discussions (it’s a full program). I have mixed feelings about raising this issue in this particular forum thread; while it's sparked specifically by this forum AV show, the issue is much broader than that and might deserve a separate thread. But I'll leave that to the forum moderators and the rest of you; if someone wants to start a separate thread on this issue I monitor the forum daily and will spot it. Thanks.

Looks great to me, I don't see any problem. I also like the button that lets me re-set standard times to all existing slides if I change my mind once I'm in the middle of a project, though I don't often use standard times in my shows. Great work, looking forward to playing with the beta whenever it's ready

I like John/Ebenist's suggestion of posting a list of what music is available free and then vote on the music, or at least express views and let the producer who has to live with the choice make the final decision. I also like "Imagine" if there's any way it could be made available without cost. But I think listing what music is accessible and choosing from that list is a practical way to proceed. In terms of size of show and whether we need to have chapters or a single big show (good points about length Maureen), maybe the best approach initially is to identify one or more collection points and see how many images we're dealing with (once a reasonable time has elapsed for people to post images; maybe we need a preliminary cut-off date at least to get a reading on numbers, we can always extend it if we want or need to). I say "we" but actually it should be damor since it's his idea, obviously we need one focal point and decision-maker for logistical issues etc. Once we have a ballpark number on images and an idea of what music is practicable, the planning for length, size etc becomes a lot easier for the folks who are doing it. I agree on further reflection that having many short sound clips is probably not going to work, at least not very elegantly. It's a nice idea in principle, but it could turn into a nightmare for whoever is producing the show and result in something very disjointed. It's probably possible to pull it off, but I think it would take a huge amount of work to do it smoothly. I certainly wouldn't want to be the one to do it. It sounds like having this hosted/produced in the UK by those of you who have a license makes lots of sense. Alas at the moment such licenses aren't available or affordable for the likes of me here in Canada, and at the moment trying to shift our licensing body's viewpoint has been like trying to nail jelly to the wall, or maybe drawing blood from stone is a better analogy .

I agree with Al about letting the producer have some leeway in editing or montaging images if that's the best way to fit them, though I would hope the original image as submitted would eventually find its way onto the screen at some point, if only for a few seconds. For example, the producer might make a duplicate of a particular image and change the copy's colour balance or some other aspect of it to ease the blend from the preceding image in the sequence, bring that edited copy up briefly then fade into the original image, then proceed ... or do the reverse, if editing a copy of one image makes fading into a new one easier. If people are contributing what they think peace means to them visually, I'd be reluctant to take many liberties with their images, certainly not the liberties I sometimes take with my own images, hence my suggestion that if liberties are taken, the original image still appears somewhere in the show if only briefly. There's a fine line in a group show between how much the show belongs to the producer and how much the show belongs to the photographers, and I think that line should be crossed very carefully. The show isn't about specific photographers, but neither is it about specific producers. It's about all of us and respecting each others' points of view, which is a big part of what I think peace is all about. I still think if someone has what they think is a specific sequence it should go in that way, but in my own case it's probably a moot point, as the more I look at what I thought was going to be a three-image sequence entry, the better I like some other slides I'm thinking of putting in which don't need to go in any specific place or order. However I think the option should be there for others if they want to pull together, or better yet shoot specifically for this show, a three-image sequence. So far the only posts I've seen on this thread are from English-speaking countries; I dearly hope some of our many friends in other parts of the world are seeing this thread and are planning to contribute some images