SeismicGuy

Yes but the point I was making is that, though no fault of the program, there is a bunch of fiddling you need to do in some fashion when dealing with syncing audios to the slides, especially when making any changes that alter the time. Maybe not such a big deal in a 5 or 10 minute project with only one or two audio clips but a chore when dealing with a 45 minute project with a bunch of particularly timed audio clips--here is an incomplete portion of my audio characteristics for my current project:

I am playing around with a short example to see if what you suggest is true and so far no luck. In my "test" case I have one clip placed at slide 1 and the placed at slide 12 with a crossfade overlap (see first image below). When I right-click the second clip and hit "link to slide 12" the crossfade disappears and I cannot easily manipulate things to get the crossfade back.

Yes the crossfade/volume adjust was because I originally had the clips on different tracks and was not sure how or if I was going to overlap them. Once I decided on the crossfade I was just to lazy to get rid of the audio keypoints and adjustments. I think no matter how you look at it placing a slide in or removing a slide or any other timing changes with the slides requires a lot of work in readjusting the audios. Moving one right or left requires that the ones following down the line (or up the line) will also need to be moved in a case like mine where I want specific clips to start with specific slides

I will play around with the linking but may or may not be a working solution for my case. Here is an excerpt of the timeline where I have one audio fading out and cross fading with another and then that happens again shortly later. If I drop another slide in say between 54 and 55 it will screw things up unless I position the audio clips I think, unless I can link both the beginning and ends of audio clips to specific slides. But I suspect it could just be easier for me to manually do things like this.

I am also interested in techniques that folks use to re-synchronize audio when making alterations to the slides after the fact. For example I am essentially done with my 46-minute latest travelogue that includes 309 slides (some of which are short video mp4), with about 20 audio pieces (give or take). I arranged the audio segments to coincide with pertinent slides and there are fade-ins, fade-outs, crossfades, etc. Some are on the same track and some are on different tracks. Now my wife wants me to add a slide here and remove a slide there and shorten some of the video segments by a couple of seconds, etc. Perhaps with a single track it is possible to lock the beginning and end of the audio to particular slides (maybe?) and I would think that if you add or delete a slide the program would automatically adjust the durations of the original slides to compensate--yes? no? But I think for my case I will just have to "brute force" it and somehow manually realign the various audio clips to match the revised slide configuration unless there are some tricks I am not aware of.

Thanks--I'm looking forward to trying it out. The thing is I don't do short 5 or 10 minute projects intended for competitions or judging but, rather, mainly travelogue-type shows meant for friends we have have traveled with and/or other family/acquaintances. Our best friends have also been our traveling companions and after our trips for the last almost 20 years I always put together a fun show. The one I am working on now is from a recent cruise and so far includes about 300+slides that include mp4 clips as well and is now about 50 minutes long. So far have also included more than a dozen different musical audio selections that are pertinent to the various locations we were in (and placing and modifying the musical clips and synchronizing them is a chore in itself). Going slide by slide to apply a style is tedious so applying a theme to a bunch of slides is somewhat easier. By and large I like to use a moderate Ken Burns effect on most slides and the program I had been using before PTE allowed for applying this to a bunch of slides and then automatically "randomizing" the effect. I would still need to eventually go through slide by slide with some tweaks but the ability to have a decent starting point applied to umpteen slides was a bit of a time saver. And then there is the occasional slide or group of a few slides that I end up combining mainly to achieve some humorous effect and of course those take more time.

Yes that seems to be the case. The reason this came up is that I was applying the default Ken Burns theme to a number of slides. The theme has 8 styles which are typically horizontal mild pan with some zoom. But a couple of the styles are apparently vertical pans and sometimes pans with rotations that I did not care for. So I just figured I could modify the "offending" styles in that theme to do what I wanted. Of course there is no option I could find to either edit the theme or look at or alter the styles that make up the theme. It would be nice to duplicate the theme into one where edits could be made but I guess another workaround is just for me to create and entirely new theme and built it up with styles of my choosing.

So I take it there is no way to "deconstruct" a Theme?

I couldn't quickly find the answer but I am sure there must be a simple answer. I have a decent understanding of styles and often will apply various styles to various slides and then tweak here and there using the Objects and Animation process. I also understand that a Theme is just a collection of Styles and you can create your own theme(s). The question is that when choosing a Theme (e.g., Ken Burns) it shows that there are 8 styles in the theme. But is there a way to see exactly what those 8 styles are? I know that when you are creating a theme you choose the styles and the list of styles shows up at the lower right as you are choosing them. But once saved is there a way of again seeing what that list of styles was?

Also I discovered and ended up solving another issue. When putting a jpg on a slide you can control when it seems to "appear" on the slide with key frames by starting it off the viewable area and/or having it transparent until some predetermined time. I was trying to do the same thing with a mp4 file in that I wanted it to appear at some point near the middle of the overall slide duration (for argument's sake say the duration was 10 seconds and I wanted the mp4 to appear after 5 seconds). The problem is that the mp4 content itself would start playing 5 seconds into the mp4 rather than right at the start of the mp4). I discovered the OFFSET option on the video property tab and looks like that I can actually have the proper start of the video occurring after 5 seconds (or whatever I choose).

Interesting thing about that tutorial and the "main image" box but it still is not quite sinking in why you need a main image checked for one or more of the images in the style.

I think I figured it out--I had the Main Object box checked (not even sure what that means). But when I unchecked it that seems to have solved the problem.

That's the first thing I tried but when I change the second file to the one I want with the dropdown arrow it also changes the FIRST image to the second one. So now I have two images that are both the second one instead of the first and then the second.

I'll try and accurately describe what I want to do. I want to create one slide with 2 images and want to duplicate the movement animation of the second image with the first but at a later time. I started by applying a style to one of the slides--it happens to be a style where the image moves onto the screen, flips over, and then disappears from the screen. Not sure it makes a different but the "image" happens to be an mp4 rather than a jpg Anyway in the Objects and Animation screen and in the attached the 151302 mpg works exactly as I like. I want to add in a second mpg (151416) and copy all of the key frames from the 151302 into 151416 since I like the rotations a movements. I will then shift all of those keyframes down along the timeline. Is it possible to copy the keyframe animation properties from one slide onto another slide or do I need to manually enter those? I hope what I am trying to do is clear. Basically take a style intended for one image but add a second image with the identical animation properties. Doug

I had not noticed what you mentioned about the slides being repositioned like you describe, but I just played around with some and you are indeed correct. It would be a nice option then if you could turn off the repositioning feature when deselecting slides from within a group of slides when applying a theme.

But could you do things like trinming pieces from the middle with crossfading of the pieces and/or splicing on another video?

I think I know the answer already from playing around with practice projects. But as I understand it a Theme merely attaches a sequence of styles to however many slides you select. For example if you apply the Ken Burns theme to 10 slides each one has some pan and zoom. But if one or more of those slides are actually mp4 clips it looks like the Ken Burns effect is also applied to that one the same as if it was a jpg--yes? So basically the program will not "skip" over the non-jpg slides, right? If you want to exclude the mp4 slides then you have to de-select them when applying the theme--yes?

That's why I believe the best way is just to create a brand new video from the edited video(s), place that new video into the slide line, and leave the original video(s) intact elsewhere on your computer.

I hadn't used Movavi for a year or so but on the "show" I am putting together now I have a few Smartphone videos that needed tweaking. In addition to trimming from the front and shortening the end there were spots in the middle that needed to be removed. Turned out being a breeze in spite of my not having used the program for quite a while. One nice feature also when cutting pieces out of the middle is the ability to easily adding a transition at the splice--I used a cross-fade feature. The result looks "professional" and it was easy-peasy. I end up exporting the resulting clip to a new mp4 and then using that for the PTE project.

I am not familiar with Lossless Cut but I think the few times I used Movavi for removing clips here and there also allowed me to have nice transitions at the cuts versus an abrupt cut in the video which was a nice feature.

Funny I was just dealing with the same issue in one of my video clips. I have often also had cases where I want to shorten the video by removing stuff from the middle. I have found that the best way to accomplish those types of things are using a dedicated video-editing program such as Movavi. Doug

Yes cumbersome but at some point you will likely need to properly sort items and it would be most convenient doing within the program

The only "foolproof" workaround is to first get all images/videos into some folder somewhere. Sorting on exif or date taken/created will almost never quite work for a number of reasons and I have always found the MP4 files never end up in the right place anyway mixed in with jpg. So using a program like FastStone Viewer you can first sort on date if you like and then manually move around the incorrectly sorted images to fit in the proper sequence. This creates a "custom sort" and the next time you open FastStone the custom sort is automatically applied. FINALLY you can use the Batch Rename tool to add something like "Image ###_" to the name of each and every image so you end up with Image 0001_Original Name, Image 0002_Original Name, etc. Then when you open that folder in PTE AV sort the File List window on Name and there you have it. The key to this organization is doing everything first outside of PTE to create the properly sorted folder and then transition to PTE. This all became obvious to me when I had initially put all of the jpg's and mp4 files I wanted into a folder and opened it in PTE. As I was dragging down images into the slides many times they were correctly sequential in the File List window but sometimes I had to go to the very last thumbnails to find those images that had been obtained from another device or from a shared cloud site.

Yes exactly. Also I sometimes later want to add photos or other things to the folder and would like to move things around in the Folder list view

When considering a new vacation highlights 'project" I create a main Project folder (with name of the project) and then subfolders. One subfolder is usually contains Images/Videos, another subfolder contains the music I may want to use, another subfolder might contain special slides I have created that will somehow fit in the presentation. The problem I always have with the Images/Videos folder is that the files come from a variety of sources--usually my Smartphone, my wife's Smartphone, our friends' Smartphones, my Fuji camera. When bringing all of the files together into the subfolder they are often not in the correct order if trying to sort on "time taken". This can occur since the photos from our friends' phones will end up with the date they were sent to my phone or computer or the date I may have downloaded from some common cloud site where we share the photos. Also, the mpg video files are NEVER where they are supposed to be if trying to sort by date. I know there are probably some workarounds where you can fiddle with the timestamps or manually sort the files somewhere and then rename them all numerically ascending or some other way. But it would also be nice to be able to move the images/videos around in the File List panel (similar to a Custom Sort that is available in a program like FastStone viewer). Unless I am missing something I do not see a way of moving the thumbnails around in the File List panel but it would be nice.