SeismicGuy

Just my opinion but between the huge advances in quality of photos taken with SmartPhones and the post-processing software available these days, I am sort of at the point that I will be leaving my cameras home rather than lugging around. On my last several vacations where I was figuring one of my Fujifilm bridge cameras would provide most of the photos for my video shows, I ended up mainly using the photos taken with the SmartPhone.

I have Photoshop and On1. It was clear that wanting to do anything past the very basic photo mods required dealing with layers and masks. I went through various video tutorials for both programs but getting a comfortable feel, particularly with masks, never quite seems to totally sink in. Main problem is that it is not apparent to me when a mask would be desired or needed. It is second nature and obvious to those very experienced uses of those programs and people who use them on a regular basis. The only thing that has sunk in with me is black mast blocks and white mask is clear.

Obviously I need to learn about masks.

So I should load one of the mp4's in the timeline and will become apparent?

Very interesting effects. The link provided above downloads the mp4 clips but I didn't see any actual styles to download. Doug

To my taste the PTE editing transitions seem too abrupt and call attention to themselves. I guess how much one goes crazy with transitions and styles depends on the audience to a large extent. I tend to use unusual styles and effect rather sparingly and let the images/videos speak for themselves.

Yes this was a perfect description of the problem and solution. I was struggling with this while putting together a slideshow of our last vacation and posted the question at that time after which a solution was posted as well.

Just my unsolicited $0.02 on styles and transitions. I enjoy having a variety of these to choose from and have downloaded some of the various ones that others have posted here. However the shows I put together are almost entirely vacation travelogues intended for friends and family and I avoid having too many different transitions/styles since there is a point at which the special effects detract from the subject matter. But I understand that there are various slideshow clubs that engage in competitions and I expect that is where you would go crazy with the effects.

Yes that was also a bit of a complaint of mine as well. It does not seem easy (or even doable) to create a Style group of your own naming and then move styles to groups of your choosing.

A couple of things. Resized both images to 1920x1080 and still got the vertical lines on the second image--doesn't make any sense to me. I was also thinking about the antialiasing thing but was not exactly sure what that does. Would you turn it off for all of the objects then? Just answered my own question--turned off antialiasing everywhere I could and NO MORE LINES. I wonder if that would also have worked when the images were 9248x5202 so I will experiment with that as well. Thanks Denis

I see said the blind man! I am a bit embarrassed that as an engineer I did not figure that out but makes perfect sense. So all I would need to do is take by 9248 x 5202 image and use Photoshop or whatever to resize it to something where the first number is divisible by 5--yes?

Well I experimented again. I took one image that was 16:9 (the pixel count in the status bar is 9248x5202 which is exactly 16:9) and picked that one image for both slides in the demo style. The front side was fine but the flipped side always shows the faint vertical lines between segments. I tried another different jpg that is also 16:9 and the same thing happens--front side fine but flip side has lines.

I think I correctly cropped both original jpg's using 16:9 ratio with Photoshop Elements but I will check again. It always seems to be whatever is picked for the turnaround image is the one where there are very faint vertical lines. I guess I can try picking the same image for both the "front" and "back" and see what happens then.

Quick question. I applied the demo style (2 different images split into 5 portions). Let's say I have Photo A and Photo B, both 16:9 aspect ratios. If I have Photo A as the starting image and Photo B as the ending image (the image after the segments rotate) I notice that you can see the faint lines between the segments on Photo B. If I interchange the images so the Photo B is the first and Photo A is the second, there are again faint lines between the segments on Photo A. Always seems to be the second image. Any idea what is going wrong?

Yeah this is the old thread I found when searching based on the key words. I should have just tried copying the slide from the one project and pasting it in the other but it didn't seem like this was a possibility. Now I know.

I think that was it. I was following the directions above that said to insert a new slide so I inserted a blank and then added the objects/animation to that blank. It seems like I solved it finally by deleting the objects from that blank and then re-copying them in. Must have just been a quirk.

I know this is an old topic but I had a problem attempting this. I created a slide that has some animation and saved the sole slide as a project. The entire duration of that slide was 16 seconds. Opened the project that I wanted to insert that slide into and inserted a blank, copied the objects from the slide I created, and copied those into the blank. I set the duration for 16 seconds. However the animation seems to be running at half the speed so by the 16 seconds only half the overall animation completed. Again, the individual slide project works fine but the same slide when inserted into the target project does not run at the correct speed. Any idea what I am doing wrong?

Never mind. I reformatted the USB thumbdrive to NTFS (not sure how it became FAT32) and the Sony TV recognized the stick and the mp4 ran just fine.

What do folks do when they end up with a very large mp4? I just "published" a project and the size exceeds 4GB so I cannot write it to the 16G USB stick which has a 4G limit due to the Fat32 file system. I guess I can try cutting it down to 30fps from 60fps which should reduce the size but is there any other way to deal with this?

Yeah the key thing is to have a precise workflow which I do not have with these vacation projects I put together. I am busy pulling jpg and mp4 from 3 or 4 different sources (my phone, my camera, wife's phone, and phones of the couple we travel with) and try to cull down the jpgs and mp4's to be used. At the same time I am downloading music that seems suitable to the locations and start lining them up in the timeline. I keep going back and forth between slide arrangement, maybe combining slides into a multi-slide style, cutting/splicing mp4 clips using a separate program, sometimes excerpting portions of the audio using Audacity, etc. etc. I do try to work on smaller portions of the overall travelogue based on the location rather than trying to tackle the entire travelogue at once. But I sometimes find myself jumping from one portion to the next as some idea hits me. Then finally when I think I am done there are always last second tweaks. Probably better that the program does NOT automatically try to do any of these things and I love the customizations and effects that you can achieve with the program. The one single thing that I wish the program would do automatically is to "normalize" the volume across all of the audio clips. This happened with a couple of audios I wanted to use for my project where the overall volume of those audios was much lower than the volume of the other clips. And trying to move the volume above 100% does not do anything in PTE. So I needed to take the offending audios, load them into Audacity, increase the gain, and then export those to be used in PTE. Not that big of a deal but the program I had been using for these travelogues had a "normalize" button that would analyze and balance out all of the audio clips automatically and the results were excellent.

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.