A little help for a newbie?

[DawnLT]

Hi all, so glad to find this forum!

I have a problem with my P2E and would like some advice, first are their some cut and dry rules to always remember?? Specifically about image size? I did peak through the messages and saw some post about skipping, but nothing that really answered my questions so I'm hoping this is not redundant. It seems that when I create a slideshow on my computer, it works fine, but when my customers play them on their computers, many times (most of the time) they complain of skipping and sometimes it hangs up on one image and has to be restarted.

I first thought it was because the images were so big, so I did a batch resize to 72 dpi and created with that, but still had the problem, so I'm wondering if I need to batch size another way to help this problem? Maybe even with a 72dpi they are still too big?

Since I just dove right into the program without any guidance, I'm just wondering are there a few things that I should know that help foolproof the show?

(Oh and I use Photoshop 7 for my image editing)

I'd appreciate anything you have to offer

Thanks in advance

Dawn

[ContaxMan]

I resize all my images to the pixel dimensions of my screen i.e. 1024 by 768 pixels. In order to do this, I sort them into two folders - one for landscape & one for portrait. I then run actions in batch mode that automate the process for me - landscapes are resized to 1024 wide and portraits to 768 high. Incidentally, the 72 pixels per inch figure you quote has no relevance to images intended for screen display. If you look at the image resize window in Photoshop you'll see that this figure comes under "document size" - i.e. it refers to a printed output. (I can let you have my actions by email, and a tutorial on their use, by email if you wish).

The actions include steps to convert 16 bit images to 8 bit (where necessary), flatten and resize the image, then sharpen using unsharp mask - with the user being able to adjust the values of this for each image as the actions run. All resized images are automatically saved by the batch process as jpgs at compression level 6 or 7 (aiming for a file size of around 200k per image).

Music is added as a single mp3 file - if necessary individual tracks can be joined together in software such as Audacity (a free download).

The only other issue of note is that it is best to run the exe show produced by pte from hard drive rather than cd (as some cd drives, particularly those on laptops, can be slow).

I hope this helps.

[DawnLT]

Hmmm, thank you Roger for taking the time to help me and I appreciate your offer of the actions, though I think maybe I can just write actions to resize since I don't need any sharpening done to them as I do this in my proofing, I'm glad to know that information and that the dpi is not the real issue. I will give it a try this morning for a presentation that will be picked up later today.

As for viewing as a pte, since I burn these to CD as exe's so that my customers can view them. (I use this method for them to view their proofs to order prints from) They would need P2E in order to view them as pte files right? Do you think i twould be better if they save the exe file off the CD and then view it, maybe the problem lies in the CD? Just looking for anything that might help here

Again thank you for your help! If you think that your actions and tutorials would still benefit me, please let me know and I would be happy to have them.

Dawn

[ContaxMan]

As you say, users can't actually view the pte version of your show without the software.

The exe file is the one to distribute, and it's best to install this on the users hard drive rather than try to run it from the cd.

If you look back though the "pictures to exe" section of this forum, you'll find references to "multishow free utility" which is designed to help with this.

By the way, you may still need to sharpen after resizing as the values needed in the unsharp mask tend to be different where the image is intended merely for screen display. I sharpen images mor efor the web than I would for print.