AV News 197 - August 2014
O b je c ts & A n im a tio n (p a rt 4 )
Howard Bagshaw ARPS MPAGB
In the last three articles about objects and animation (O&A) in PTE, I've looked
at the 'objects' aspect. Now it's time to move on to look at animation. Just a little
reminder, I don't propose to make these 'step-by-step', 'how to' articles, but more
about when you might use the animation facilities. There are excellent guides to
the mechanics of these features for most versions of PTE, on the web at
www.wnsoft.com/picturestoexe/help/ and an online help for PTE version 8 can
be found at http://docs.picturestoexe.com/en/main
The basis of animation in PTE is that you can change a feature of an object
over time. The feature might be the position, size, opacity, colour or even
'blurriness' of an object. The animation takes place on one slide and is controlled
in the O&A window.
So how do you start? On the timeline, select the slide that you want to animate
and click on the 'Objects and Animation' button. This opens the O&A window with
which you should now be familiar. Lets imagine that there is a single image object
and that we want this image to zoom in slightly while the slide is on the screen.
The essential of all animation is the use of keyframes. These are points in time
along the timeline. At any keyframe you decide what you want the image to look
like. If this involves any change from the previous keyframe, PTE will work out
each of the intermediate stages. (In films this is called 'tweening')
When you look at an object, in this case the picture of the 4x4 in the desert, you
will find that it has a keyframe automatically inserted at time 00:00. Since there is
no other keyframe related to this object, while the slide is showing there will be
no change in the image (other than the usual fade-in and fade-out).
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