Manual slide control issues in version 5

[wildscenes]

Hi all

I may be missing something simple here but using Version 5.00 I can't seem to make the manual control of slides work. I have set the mouse buttons to be left=next slide, right=previous but it doesn't work. I use PTE for my lectures as a wildlife photographer and rather than simply create AV's, I set all slide timings to 6 mins which allows me to move on at my pace as I talk, so could be a few seconds per slide or a minute or so if I'm telling a tale. Any ideas? I'm wanting to introduce some panning etc during the talk but still have full control of the show.

TIA

John

[alrobin]

John,

The mouse controls are not activated yet in v.5. However, you can pan in v.4 using the "push" effects and a panoramic image cut into 2 or more slides.

[wildscenes]

John,

The mouse controls are not activated yet in v.5. However, you can pan in v.4 using the "push" effects and a panoramic image cut into 2 or more slides.

Thanks for the response Al. Not sure why the mouse controls aren't activated in v.5 as this is basic functionality in the previous versions and I would have thought that a new version would do everythinbg the old version does and more besides

Oh well, guess the audience will have to wait for the complete version of v.5 to be released. Your suggestion of the push effect would work for pan but I also wanted zoom etc. so too much effort for now.

John

[Lin Evans]

Hi John,

It's the nature of betas to introduce only a few features into the new code at a time to facilitate testing and debugging. The beta development has been progressing for some time now with each new beta having more and more functionality.

The next beta (beta 9) will have "most" of the full functionality of the release version of 5.0 but we must be patient. The vast majority of software developers do not allow the general public access to to the beta versions and we are all very thankful that Igor and his team allow us all that privilege so we have the opportunity to learn to use the myriad new features. There are many, many, thousands of lines of code in the program which require great skill and patience to put together so everything works smoothly. If you want to see what happens when you release a product before it's ready for prime time, go over to the Proshow forum and see the many complaints and problems (over 300 "fixes" since the release of version 3.0 a scant few months ago).

Have patience, the full functionality of version 4.48 plus a host of new powerful features await us with the release of version 5.

Best regards,

Lin

Thanks for the response Al. Not sure why the mouse controls aren't activated in v.5 as this is basic functionality in the previous versions and I would have thought that a new version would do everythinbg the old version does and more besides

Oh well, guess the audience will have to wait for the complete version of v.5 to be released. Your suggestion of the push effect would work for pan but I also wanted zoom etc. so too much effort for now.

John

[ksf]

John,

As Al has pointed out the features you want to use are not currently activated in the Beta 5 release. I take your point that perhaps these features should have remained available but I rather suspect that these 'basic' functions as you refer to them will no longer be 'basic'within the new version. We must remember that Igor and his team have more or less rewritten the whole program to give us the brilliant and promising features already seen in v5. I suspect that it is no longer simply a matter of switching from one image to the next at the press of a mouse button especially as each image could now have objects and animation applied to them. The process of switching between these images would be more complex to achieve - hence we will all have to wait for them to be reinstated once Igor is happy with them.

With regards to your comment about wanting to zoom as well then this would open up a whole new bag of worms to sort out if you wanted to also have this under manual control. How would it be controlled?, what pace of zoom?, which area of the image to zoom? etc etc.

You could try making use of the push effect that Al has mentioned to provide your panning effects (it works quite well if the panoramas are correctly aligned) then follow certain key images with an enlarged (ie zoomed) version of the image which you could fade in/out using the currently available v4 functions.

It may not be as ideal as you would like but nothing should be "too much effort" when preparing a presentation.

[volker]

Hello,

I don't have a solution here but maybe I can help to kick

brainstorming by giving my experience with Microsoft

Powerpoint with the manual slide control..

A feature for navigation that I sometimes use in MS

Powerpoint is typing a slide number and then pressing

enter. The key sequence "2", "9", "Enter" would jump

to slide number 29. Maybe this would be a nice feature for

a future PTE version. In powerpoint, as far as I know,

slides not shown yet would start with their first animations

while slides already shown would be presented in the

"final" state of the animation sequence. This seems

meaningful, when somebody in the audience asks

"could we just see again that slide where you showed..."

and the "end" state is what you expect when going back.

(A great trick would be if you could indicate if you want

the full animation or just the final state, eg when using

the numerical keypad the final state is navigated to,

when using the normal number keys the animation starts

over again).

When PTE slides are closely in sync with audio, it's maybe

difficult to define the appropriate behaviour what audio

should do when such "jumps" are made. (Maybe, if the

jump leaps over the end of a playing song, the music

could fade out and the new song could fade in. Maybe

jumping should not influence presently playing music

at all)

Such a "got to slide x" navigation could correspond

exactly to how PTE behaves with interactive buttons

that contain a "go to slide X" instruction.

If such a navigation would be solved in general, the behaviour

of "next slide" / "previous slide" is merely calculating which

is the next or the previous slide and executing this as a

regular (but just small) "jump".

Volker

[alrobin]

A feature for navigation that I sometimes use in MS

Powerpoint is typing a slide number and then pressing

enter. The key sequence "2", "9", "Enter" would jump

to slide number 29. Maybe this would be a nice feature for

a future PTE version. .............snip............

You present some interesting options here that I would be all in favour of if and when they could be designed into v.5. I suspect Igor has enough on his plate for now, but they would be worth pursuing once the current development is complete.

[nickunwin]

John,

It is frustrating that the keyboard controls aren't up & running in V5 as it also prohibits the use of any wireless remote presenter/clicker units to control the slideshow.

Until Igor unlocks the keyboard and mouse controls in V5, the only way around it is to try and split your slideshows out into separate sections - use V4 with the bits you want to run manually, and then run the V5 pan/zoom slideshow to continue from the end of the V4 one. The only downside with this method is that you get a brief flash of the windows desktop between the two slideshows - which doesn't look very good. It's far from ideal, but it's the best we've got at the moment .

Need to catch up with you at some point as I might be looking for some help on studio flash units .

Cheers

N

[volker]

You present some interesting options here that I would be all in favour of if and when they could be designed into v.5. I suspect Igor has enough on his plate for now, but they would be worth pursuing once the current development is complete.

Absolutely, Al - I did by no means want to ask for any additional features that could delay V.5 - maybe a hard-coded "right mouse button = next slide, space bar = pause" (pause = wait for another space bar hit or right mouse button before going to the next slide) for the next beta 9 would not be too much work and help Nick for the moment..

Volker

[wildscenes]

Thanks for all the input guys.

I understand the complexities of programming, I worked at a large bank as an IT technical specialist for the past 20years but have given it up to do photography full time

I perhaps shouldn't have called the manual control 'basic' functionality, I meant 'original' functionality - I need this expressly because I use PTE for giving lectures so I use a remote pointer to move the slides on manually. Introducing pan, zoom and rotation should have no bearing on the complexity of this as KSF implies, I merely want to tell PTE when to change a slide. Any motion built in should just happen as planned.

I've only just really started to do AV talks having bought some Bose speakers, but I have to confess that I am using Proshow Producer to do the intro with all it's motion effects and multi-slide layering etc, this then kicks off a PTE main body of the talk and PTE in turn kicks off a big AV finale using PP again. The only glitch is when PP kicks off PTE as there's a brief flash of the desktop. However, when PTE kicks of PP it is seamless I just figured that rather than simply have the static nature of the slides in the main part of the talk, I could throw in a few slides that zoomed and panned etc.

Lin - any chance you can link me to the Proshow forum? I have some complaints of my own I'd like to throw in.

Nick - send me a mail re studio flash at any time. I'm a Bowens man FWIW.

John

[Lin Evans]

Hi John,

There's one on Yahoo as well, but this one is a dedicated PSG and PSP Enthusiast forum with lots of nice people:

http://itsmygallery.com/ProShow/

Best regards,

Lin

Thanks for all the input guys.

I understand the complexities of programming, I worked at a large bank as an IT technical specialist for the past 20years but have given it up to do photography full time

I perhaps shouldn't have called the manual control 'basic' functionality, I meant 'original' functionality - I need this expressly because I use PTE for giving lectures so I use a remote pointer to move the slides on manually. Introducing pan, zoom and rotation should have no bearing on the complexity of this as KSF implies, I merely want to tell PTE when to change a slide. Any motion built in should just happen as planned.

I've only just really started to do AV talks having bought some Bose speakers, but I have to confess that I am using Proshow Producer to do the intro with all it's motion effects and multi-slide layering etc, this then kicks off a PTE main body of the talk and PTE in turn kicks off a big AV finale using PP again. The only glitch is when PP kicks off PTE as there's a brief flash of the desktop. However, when PTE kicks of PP it is seamless I just figured that rather than simply have the static nature of the slides in the main part of the talk, I could throw in a few slides that zoomed and panned etc.

Lin - any chance you can link me to the Proshow forum? I have some complaints of my own I'd like to throw in.

Nick - send me a mail re studio flash at any time. I'm a Bowens man FWIW.

John

[nickunwin]

Nick - send me a mail re studio flash at any time. I'm a Bowens man FWIW.

John

Aww, had hoped you might have had some of the Elinchrom heads - will give you a shout sometime soon.

[thedom]

As far as I know, Igor will introduce the ability to design your own navigation bar.

"What's new in v5.00:

+ Improved Navigation bar.

> Added support of skins. You can add any images of buttons and background,

Navigation bar can be semi-transparent and has a shadow. See folder "NavBar

in PicturesToExe's folder. Just add new folder to create new style of Navigation bar."

The navigation bar is not displayed during the show yet but you can already play with the options (scale, hue of the Sky Style Navbar). It's really looks great!

In C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\PicturesToExe\NavBar\Readme.txt, you can read :

Navigation bar for PicturesToExe

You can create your style for Navigation bar in the new folder.

PicturesToExe automatically finds newely added styles.

Note: Please don't modify default styles which will be automatically renewed after new installation of PicturesToExe.

The wait's worth it!

[Peter S]

Apologies if this is a bit of a simplistic question but I would dearly love to know how this works.

Some long time ago a member called Andrew Chadwick produced a rather good tutorial (vertsion 4.42) showing how to create a menu. In his tutorial he used a little tool bar in the bottom right hand corner with a house (home) left and right arrows, pause, exit and help buttons - just like a form of video control. Can anyone please explain how this is done and if it will be possible in the final version of 5?

Peter

[Lin Evans]

Thanks for all the input guys.

I understand the complexities of programming, I worked at a large bank as an IT technical specialist for the past 20years but have given it up to do photography full time

I perhaps shouldn't have called the manual control 'basic' functionality, I meant 'original' functionality - I need this expressly because I use PTE for giving lectures so I use a remote pointer to move the slides on manually. Introducing pan, zoom and rotation should have no bearing on the complexity of this as KSF implies, I merely want to tell PTE when to change a slide. Any motion built in should just happen as planned.

I've only just really started to do AV talks having bought some Bose speakers, but I have to confess that I am using Proshow Producer to do the intro with all it's motion effects and multi-slide layering etc, this then kicks off a PTE main body of the talk and PTE in turn kicks off a big AV finale using PP again. The only glitch is when PP kicks off PTE as there's a brief flash of the desktop. However, when PTE kicks of PP it is seamless I just figured that rather than simply have the static nature of the slides in the main part of the talk, I could throw in a few slides that zoomed and panned etc.

Lin - any chance you can link me to the Proshow forum? I have some complaints of my own I'd like to throw in.

http://itsmygallery.com/ProShow/

Lin

Nick - send me a mail re studio flash at any time. I'm a Bowens man FWIW.

John

[Peter S]

Yes.

In a few days, Beta 10

http://www.picturestoexe.com/forums/index....ost&p=40224

Tom

Tom,

Many thanks. I look forward to being able to experiment with this feature.

It looks as though you have a large well organised library of screen shots to answer other members questions! Or do you have a quick way of producing these rather neat explanations?

Peter