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This may have been covered elsewhere but I will mention my experience today. I had to purchase a new computer last weekend after a major crash of my other 6 month old machine. (I fell asleep working on a project, woke with a leg cramp and kicked the puta and glass top off the table followed by a glass of water, glass of strawberries and wine, cup of black coffee all of which proceeded to give the puta a bath) But that's another story. I did purchase another laptop, this time with Vista and promptly started the project over again, thank goodness for having a backup only a few days old. I put the girlfriends project together again about 180 pics 325megs, reduced to 5.5 megs with Batch Image Resizer, and all went well with creating an exe, with music. When it came to the video burn the first attempt, 18mins only to create, failed for unknown reason. No problem, try another disc etc. After fiddling and changing discs I finally got it to work on the fourth attempt with an RW disc. Great final production as was another I did not long ago for a kids art exhibition for the school, Now I finally get to the point of the post, is there any way to, or future plan to, be able to stop the temp file being deleted on any failure to burn, this would save a lot of time waiting for it to be created it again.

Folks, I think I may have raised this before but can’t remember the reaction. I would really like to have, as an option, the ability to see the key points of more than one object displayed simultaneously on the O&A time line. I appreciate that with many objects this would become very confusing. However, I feel that, perhaps by using different colours for each object, this could be overcome. I can’t envisage a situation where one would want to show every key point for every object simultaneously, in a sequence of multiple objects but I am convinced that the ability to show the relationship between any two or perhaps three selected objects would be very useful. The ability to optionally designate specific key points (e.g. Fade or end of Zoom) for different objects, to show on the time line, could be one way of achieving this without cluttering the time line. Just a thought! John

Before I saw the light I used ProShow Producer, it had a nice feature in that it would run an intro movie before showing the DVD Menu. This looks very professional, it enabled me to display a disclaimer and run my logo animation. I believe that this would be a nice feature in future PTE versions. I have also commented on the wish to be able to play music over the DVD Menu.

hello - this is a corrected version of a former post, which probably got misunderstood: I think many of us are resizing their images before putting picture shows together with P2E, with all the "organizational overhead" that comes with it: batch conversion of the puctures, storing them in a separate directory and keeping them as well as the originals as long as you might want to come back and change the pte show. Is there any intention to include picture resizing into P2E - it would just make a great program even better! thanks much for any input -

Watcher Defined Music Files I create a lot of slideshows of outdoor trips to share with friends who were on the trip. I do my best to put appropriate music to the slides, but my friends have a wide range of music tastes. The idea here is the slideshow creator would pick transition time points (ability to define fade characteristics would be nice too) while making the show and the watcher or end user would be able to substitute their MP3 files for the ones included in the EXE. I would think this could be accomplished in several different ways, but it seems the easiest would be using a standard naming convention (1.mp3, 2.mp3, etc) and have the program look in the directory it is executed from to see if they are there. This function is specific to sharing slideshows with friends and would not be useful for slideshows created for artistic A/V purposes. If people were worried about others changing their work, an option could be added to disable the feature. However, it might be useful for those wishing to stay clear of copyright issues for professional shoots like weddings. Create the show with the customer's desired songs, then provide the show without them with instructions to include their own music files. Steve Newcomb Tucson, AZ USA

Sometimes I want the work I'm doing in O&A to synchronize to music. It would save a lot of time if the music played when I hit the play button in that view.

How come a program in its 5th version still can not fade music at the end of a show ? With all of the powerfull and advanced features why do we still have to use a 3rd party program to do something so simple ? Here are some of my suggestions. 1. Ability to fade music in and out. Its such a pain to get your show set up like you want, then use another program to fade your music and then oops...I made a change and now I have to do it all over again. Yuk. 2. Would be great if we had the ability to see the transitions between each slide in the slide view and change them from there like most other slideshow and video programs do. 3. It would be great if we could cycle thru the slides when the "Customize Slide" window is open. To change things like transitions on a slide by slide basic you have to open the customize window, make your change, close the window then move to the next slide. How about some arrows at the top of the window letting you cycle between slides like you do in the "Objects and Animation" window. 4. Pre-made caption effects. 5. Some kind of grid or the ability to add lines to the work area in the object and animation window with snap-to abilities. Has anyone ever used a program like Print Master/Print Shop. You can add overlay lines anywhere you want with snap-to ability to help line up objects. This would be very helpfull in P2E. These are my suggestions for now. The first 3 would really help with usability and speed of creating a slideshow. Later

Could you add options to add Vol Up and Down. So we could add the option for viewer to turn up or down the Volume on the computer while viewing.

Would it be possible to turn off hardware acceleration in "customize slide" Charlie.

Can someone tell me why PTE5 has discarded the 'transition to desktop' effect at the end of the slideshow? On version 4 it was a very useful and versatile effect. Now, the only way to end a show is abruptly with the final frame of the slideshow cutting straight to the desktop - no fade or other transition can be used. It looks terrible. Alternatively, I can leave the last photo hanging there.... not a very satisfying way to end a show. What made you take out such a useful function? And when are you going to put it back in again?????!!!!!!

Hello, It would not be judicious to envisage a button to record work when we are in the editor of object. It is true that by the keyboard via the keys “Ctrl+S” it is possible to do it, but the majority among us do not have these automatisms. Thank you in advance for the answer.

Production Notes (or Project Notes) Window within PTEs GUI with capability to enter/save/display any notes or comments ... this would be relative to the currently opened .pte project file. This would allow one to keep the current state/ history of the project by inserting any personal text notations. It also would be a very helpful reminder when opening the saved .pte project file after some lengthy time period or when uploading for another users benefit. The information would be saved/contained within the .pte file and only viewable from within PTEs GUI. Something like below :

HD video usually comes with a higher-definition soundtrack than CD-quality (16-bit, 2-channel). Could PTE support this in the future?

Hi Igor, The following might be a useful idea for people wanting to easily and quickly create audio timesync'd slideshows... especially those who create slideshows for weddings, engagement sessions etc Provide a facility for the user to listen to the audio track on it's own (no slides etc). While listening to the audio, the user can add a timecode marker by clicking an add button (or pressing a key - eg spacebar). This would make it easy for someone to put markers in on beats, or at key points during the audio track. once they finished listening, they could then add slides to the project and choose an option to sync slides using these timecode markers. The slides would then be distributed along the timeline with their durations set by each corresponding timecode marker. - eg slide one starts with the music, slide 2 with timecode #1, slide 3 with timecode #2 and so on. This would make it very easy for a user to sync music & slides together. OK, the sync may not be exact, but for someone doing quick repeated 'production' shows (such as weddings), then it would be a great timesaver. A couple of other ideas to add to this one: + Allow the timecode markers to be saved as a template (then the songs can be re-used again easily without having to redo the listen/mark each time.). + Add the abilty to generate an intial set of random motion effects across the entire timeline using the pan/zoom and cross-fade effects as default. Again, this would save a lot of time in the initial setup of the slideshow for people making lots of them. They would only then need to review each slide and make sure that the pan/zoom effect was centred on the right 'focus' - eg a persons face. Feel free to e-mail me if you want any further explanation of the above!

I would like to be able to see which images have animation applied while I am working within the time line. That way I can make allowance in the timing for the animation. Perhaps a change of colour to the blue flag Could the slide list be made to scroll while the timeline is on screen. I don't mean automatically, but being able to slide it along to see what images are coming up without having to close the time line would be useful. I doubt its practical to add a tiny thumbnail to the timeline in place of the blue flag that would do the same thing. Sometimes when going between the image editor, sound editor and PTE5, slides get applied to the time line even though the option to automatically add slides is turned off. They appear right at the far end of the time line which is very confusing until you tumble whats happening. Why does repeat music after playing always appear ticked by default. Isn't it better to do this the other way round. In objects and animation would not Cover screen, Fit to Screen and Original be a better label than fit to slide and cover slide? I would like to be able to easily create buttons of exactly the same size as each other despite what text I apply to them. At present, unless I am missing the solution the button grows if I add more letters than the previous. For the sake of newer users of PTE why not call the Time Line the same inside the dialogue as well as on the button rather than Customisze Synchronisation All for now Barry Beckham

A feature to link "Comments" to opacity fades, etc. You can easily fade out an image but "comments" remain on the screen which rather defeats the aesthetics. An option to also fade out or control the amount of time "comments" remain on the slide would be helpful. Best regards, Lin

Hi Igor, Something for the future. Possibly a "fade-out" and a separate "fade-in" transitions. One thing which has been problematic is matching precisely the end of a slide which is zooming in with the start of the next slide to continue the zoom in a seamless fashion. Perhaps if there were separate "fade-out" and "fade-in" transitions it would be easier to match these to make a seamless transition rather than the fade out/fade in. That is so that the timings could be different rather than the same for the beginning and end of a slide. If it were possible to end a fade out on slide "A" while slide "B" was beginning a "fade in" then when each are set to linear and with the same slide timings and zoom ratios and identical points and sizes on the timeline where one begins the fade out and the other the fade in then if the timings for the fades were identical the change from slide "A" to slide "B" would be virtually indistinguishable provided that the images were carefully matched for color, saturation, sharpness, contrast, levels, etc. Best regards, Lin

This is really a question for Igor. There are a number of default setting parameters defined within PTE. For example in the "objects and animation" window under the "common" tab, the default setting for "mode" is "fit to slide". Question : Are these defaults defined in the .ini file, and if so, can this file be edited to change the order of the defaults, e.g. change "fit to sldie" to "cover slide"? Jeff

Minor request for future version. Would it be possible to choose a default font - something other than Times Roman - anything but Times Roman! Thanks, DaveG

Hallo! For the next Version my desire: Support Dolby Digital (ac3) and/or DTS for Burn DVD with VideoBuilder No create ac3 in PTE, but Support for existing files! Is that realizable? Thanks for answer Uwe

Hi, It would be nice to display pixel size image somewhere in status bar. This will help to know if image need to be resized for slide show. here is a screen copy to illustrate. Alain

Hello gentlemen, I am using now PTE, spending many hours to learn the software and I have suggestions : 1) - Can we in the future to have the name of the sound in the timeline mode, right now the end of each sound is pictured by a vertical red line, and when the project is long, it is difficult to see which sound is curently played à this position. 2) Actually when we play at the current slide the 1st sound starts, and we don't know the position of the sound in regards to the slide. Is it planned in the future to get this function ( may be I don't know how the software works). This software is very fantastic , and I hope you will issue the help file for the finale release showing the whole functions. My best regards Your best supporter.

Another poster has posted this somewhere else in the forum's but I can't find it just now so thought I would make it a seperate heading in "suggestions". I have spent some time programming shows of late and am finding after I synchronise some transitions to a soundtrack I might want to insert some silence or a title sequence and I need to shift the current slide plus all slides to the right backwards or forwards along the timeline. Would be very useful in the timeline window to be able to right click a transition point and choose the option "Select current slide and all slides to right..." this would make it easy to shift all the affected points to resync with your soundtrack and tweak as necessary. Andrew

You can associate a sound to a slide. It is very useful to include sound sfx. It would be nice if you could specify a delay for this file sound to be played (by example, sound starts 1,3 seconds after beginning of slide, 0,7 seconds before beginning of slide).

In the timeline window, to help the user to mix his soundtrack, it would be very useful to have the ability to display time delay between two points. Left click on the timeline to choose the beginning and right click to choose the end of slide with "display time" in the popup menu.