Comments from the ancient gaseous emissions corner...
What MS callls a "dissolve" in PPT is more correctly called "pixel
dissolve", not what most people consider to be a "cross-dissolve, or
cross fade".
There was a transition effect called fade through black that worked in
PPT 3 through PPT2K, IF you were in 256 colour mode (8 bit), and had
graphics acceleration turned way down or off. For our application,
white letters on black background, it works perfectly. For anything
resembling "photo quality", it was painfully inadequate.
(And for those keeping track, I now have several clients using the
PPT3 viewer, having converted the file from PPT2K via PPT4.)
In PPT XP (2002), MS added a transition effect called "fade smoothly".
This is in fact a true dissolve. Unfortunately they kept the dissolve
transition which is still a pixel (blocky) transition. The problem
with the transition effects is that the speed/rate control is limited
to fast, a little less faster, and even a little less faster, and not
what was fast, medium, and slow, which was under PPT3 or its viewer.
However, in PPT 2002, MS added animation effects which offer a large
range of control of speeds/rates. The downside is that they are not as
easy to program and use as are transition effects.
And at first, the animation effects did not look that great either. It
took a lot of CPU power. For a while, to get "fade smoothly" to work
reasonbly smoothly, we had to set the output to 640 X 480.
On one show, the graphics were produced by a retired television
director, who having discovered PPT 2002, commented that he found it
quite incredulous that MS still hadn't figured out how to do the
second transition effect invented in TV, namely the dissolve, which
was what 50 years ago?
What I've noticed recently, is that with XP machines, and PPT 2003,
the fade through black and fade smoothly look much better.
Also, an alternative for slow dissolves is to have two pictures on the
same slide, and have the one on top to be set for an exit animation of
fade, slow. The result will look like a slow dissolve..
Enough rambling for now...
Regards,
Villem Teder
Toronto
