eXposer documentation

Q: I'm used to hearing a sound when capturing a frame. I see nothing in eXposer to make it do that.

A: Go to BeOS->Preferences->Sounds, select the event Capture and pick a sound file. From now on, you will hear a sound when eXposer has finished capturing a frame onto disk.

Q: X-sheets don't open in eXposer when I double click them!

A: There is something messed up in your BeOS MIME-Database. Go to BeOS->Preferences->FileTypes and expand the text super-type in the window that comes up. Find x-xsheet and select it. Under Preferred Application, pick eXposer. Doubleclicking x-sheet files should now open them in eXposer.

Q: Is there a way of renaming files from within eXposer?

A: Yes, in the source media list, right click the item you want to rename. Only one can be renamed at a time. This will rename the file as well.

Q: Jeesh, I messed up my x-sheet!!! I moved the frames into a different location on my harddrive and now the x-sheet entries stay empty when I open it.

A: Well, don't be afraid! The file format used by eXposer for saving x-sheets is an XML text format. That means, you can just open the x-sheet file in your favorite text editor (right click the file, chose Open With >) and search&replace the string with the wrong path with the new path. Be aware that BeOS is a case sensitive OS. That means that PathToFiles/ will be different from pathtofiles/!

Q: When I record sound in SoundRecorder, those sounds don't appear in the sound file list, as images do when capturing them.

A: SoundRecorder is an external application. It doesn't notify eXposer of saved sounds. So this is a known limitation. Maybe one day we'll implement a recorder module just like for capturing frames, but SoundRecorder is really good at what it does, and you only need to drag&drop the sound files from the Tracker to overcome that limitation.

Q: What is going on when I start eXposer? Sometimes even audio chokes - I'm not used to this under BeOS!!

A: eXposer needs to allocate continuous chunks of memory, which for some reason seems to challenge the BeOS. After allocating these buffers, the system should be smooth again as always.

Q: I am desperately missing feature XYZ!

A: We work very hard to make this program as comfortable as possible and to address any arising limitations. Please contact us, if you encounter problems not mentioned here and that you need to bring to our attention. You can take adventage of the fact that you contact the programmers directly, there is no support department between you and us, so you speak to the people who can really help you. We're very glad to get feedback and feature suggestions.

Q: What are your future plans for eXposer? Is there a roadmap?

A: Certainly eXposer can be improved. For the next major update we have plenty of ideas on how to extend eXposers capabilities:

printing
speed optimizations
maybe handling transparency in other ways
more flexible handling of sound files (only 44100Hz is supported)

For a future version, text levels for the speech of characters in the sound files would be a nice one and a whole new kind of levels for supporting backgrounds with programmable camera movement - pans and dollies and all this kind of stuff. But we will try to keep eXposer as simple to use as it is now, not complicating the interface more than necessary. Intermediate updates fixing bugs will be made available, or even sent to you by email. After all, eXposer fits on a single floppy disk.

Q: Why is this FAQ so short?

A: Because we couldn't think of anymore questions! Please contact us and ask what you need to know! We will put all questions into this FAQ for future reference.