trouble with slide show

[Jaz]

I tried to do a slide show on my Dell Laptop. It has a Pentium3 and 512megs of RAM which I think

is plenty of horsepower. At times, it was running so slow that the

transitions were choppy and the show went really out of whack and only

showed the 1st two slides repetedly out of about 140 slides. The slide show

was about 220 megs. What gives? Am I overloading it? What is the optimum

dimension of each slide?(ex. - 1024x768 at 72 dpi?). When I ran the show on

my Dell, it was a test for a slide show I want to do infront of the local

garden club using a digital projector. I'm going to need to project the

images 10-15 ft wide. Is there a slide dimension suggested for this big? Any

help would be greatly appreciated.Thanks.

Jaz

PS I also want to do a very fast strobe effect on 4-6 slides in my slide show. I slowed down each slide to show it - 0 seconds and 10 ms. but it doesn't seem to slow it down that slow (maybe one half second). Is there any way to accomplish this? Thanks again!

[alrobin]

Jaz,

Welcome to the Forum!

If you click on "Quick (no transition)" (a "cut") at the bottom of the "Customize slide / Effects" menu instead of inputting a small transition time for some other transition, such as a fade, the images should cycle through quicker. Otherwise they tend to slow things down, and get out of sync with the music where there are images close together. Note that when you select "Quick transition", there is still a time showing for the transition time, even though it is a cut - just disregard the time in this case.

I regularly run shows satisfactorily on my P3 laptop, but can't have the transitions (even "cuts") closer together than around 20 to 30 ms, depending on the size of the image files. On other pc's this limit may vary to as much as half a second. If you find them dragging, try compressing the image files involved down to lesser-quality jpegs.

Hope this helps.

[Jaz]

Al

This didn't seem to do the trick. Got any other suggestions? Thanks in advance for your help.

Jaz

[alrobin]

Jaz,

What size are your image files? What jpeg setting are you using? What music files are you synching to? mp3, midi, wave, etc?

You might have to be satisfied with longer time separations between images until you invest in a P4 computer. I have no trouble running animations using quick transitions on my P4 with 1024x768-pixel jpegs, around 1/10 of a second apart. I also have a good video card with 128 Mb of RAM so that probably helps too. For music, I stick mostly to mp3.

[Jaz]

Al,

I changed the file size to 1024x768 @ 72 pixels per inch. The were JPEGed at 12 the best quality. This made it go much faster. My question is that if I show these slides at the above size, will they look good being 10-15 feet across? Thanks for your help.

Jaz

PS If I use MP3 files for the music, will this keep the slide show at a quicker rate?

[paulnewsom]

Hi Jaz

I have 2 suggestions

Your graphics card may be a contributing factor if it is slow or low on RAM.

You compressed to JPEG 12. Try compressing to JPEG 6. You will not notice any difference on screen and the file size will be much smaller and less memory hungry.

Try the latter first - it should work (and I guarantee you will not see any difference other than solving your problem)

Paul

[DaveG]

My first reaction to Jaz' post was that he had "overlapping" slides.

If you look at the timeline you should be able to see a little "daylight" between all slides. If you can't then try creating some daylight and try again?

DaveG

[Barry Beckham]

Jazz

Once you have created your pictures 1024*768 and at 72ppi, they will project perfectly at any size your projector can throw.

I did a demonstration recently in Ely Cambridge shire and showed a number of my slide shows made at 1024*768 on a cimema screen.

They looked great.

On screen these size files will look no different to those which created your 220 meg file and it will only be a fraction of the size and will run perfectly

Barry Beckham

[alrobin]

Jaz,

What sound files are you using? I find that mp3 works best, but then I have not had any experience with Ogg files. I have used wav files but found on a couple of occasions that the music "stuck" while playing off a cd. They are much larger files in general, so take more time to load and make your exe file much larger.

By the way, you don't need to worry about the "72 dpi". If you save your files as 1024x768 px at 2 dpi you will get the same effect and quality on screen as the same size at 72 dpi. The dpi is significant when scanning or printing. It's the total number of pixels that matter when projecting, and also the quality of the jpeg.

I generally use around 7 on a scale of 1 to 12, but for home use for displaying on the monitor of a fast pc I usually bump it up to 8 or 10. As Barry says, if the images are good to start with they will look great projected using a good projector.

Good luck with your show!

[JRR]

Re Paulnewsom's comment re quality 6 vs 10 looking the same...

I agree with that for picures that have a lot of detail, texture, full density etc, BUT if you are dealing with pictures that have areas with little detail then you'll need higher quality as jpg compression on those images "gets carried away".

For example I have a shots of a:

- a rainbow against white overcast

- many night shots with coloured smoke/haze (fireworks, light cloud cover reflecting city lights)

All this shots fall apart when used in a FADE transitions. (espicially when projected)

I have started forgetting about the quality factor and concentrating on compressing the images to obtain a file size of 200-300kb.

It really amounts to the same thing, but I just watch the file size, not the compression factor.

[Jaz]

Thanks to all that have responded. I will try your suggestions and report back the results. Once again, thanks for your help.

Jaz