Several suggestions based on my last 2 projects......

[Jimcamel]

I’ve recently finished two fairly large AV Studio projects and I wanted to share my suggestions to improve the experience.  I apologize for the length (and aggregation) – but I want to be as clear as possible and I am covering multiple suggestions in this note.

 My “slide show style’ is probably different than a lot of you …. I usually include many images (hundreds) in a video (target 6-10 mins in length), carefully sync’d to one or more music tracks and with fairly rapid slide times.  Times are often in the range of 1.5 - 2.5 seconds in order to catch the rhythm – so they are fast paced.  While many of the slides will be of the same duration, lead-in and other key slides and titles will have a different length – and this often sets up the point after which many, many more can run at the same length and stay ‘in beat’.  Sometimes there is one image per slide and other times I mix it up using the multiple images – for example a related group of slides that would benefit from a reveal, etc.  While I mostly incorporate stills – I do like the seamless capability to incorporate short videos and appreciate that slides and videos are really the ‘same thing’ within AV Studio.

 So, that’s my basis.

On a Mac, MacOs Ventura 13.5.1; Mac Studio Ultra 64gb/2TB

 

Anniversary                 122 slides (almost all compound), no video

                                    3 audio tracks

                                    10:36 mins

 Commemoration        353 slides (many compound), incl 3 video clips; 

                                     6 tracks including music and some sound effects; 

                                     14 mins

 

Here are some of the issues I experienced during the recent work.

1. There is a lot of jumpiness when you switch from Slides to Timeline view…..if you are looking at the screen and switch modes, your point of view/reference often shifts and you have to hunt for where the point-of-focus has moved to.  Being more specific, if the red playback line is in the centre of the screen on a slide, I would like it to remain positioned there when switch modes.

 

You can switch modes with F6 – that requires holding the ‘fn’ key plus F6 on my keyboard.  It would be better if this was a single keypress, like ‘m’.

 

Within the timeline, if you drag a slide back and forth to adjust the time of the slide prior to it, then touch the next slide, the timeline jumps and shifts – very disconcerting since you have to hunt for your work point again.

 

2. When I calculate the slide duration for a group of slides to match the music, I take the amount of time remaining in the track and divide by the number of slides – for example 2:42 (=162 secs) divide by 60 = 2.7.  I think I have learned to not use full slide duration anywhere…so I would like to be able to turn this off globally and make sure it is off – and then I can set a slide duration of 2.7 and the transition will always need to be less-so maybe .5 or 1.0 seconds.  Trying to calculate per slide times with full duration is really complicated – and not helpful for me.

 

Then if I have to adjust a time, I do not want the slide times of adjacent slides altered at all – it’s not helpful.  If I am having to micro-adjust a slide time it’s probably to get it to align with sometime in the music track and I would want all the remain slides to keep their times/transition times.  If I need to change multiple slides, then I will select them cmd-click or shift-click and make the adjustment – but similarly I do not want the timing or transition time of adjacent slides to change.  If that is going to cause a problem, report it in red so it can be recognized and fixed.

 

This is more like the ‘magnetic timeline’ of Apple’s FCPX or LumaFusion.

 

I can’t nail exactly the conditions when this is happening in the software – it may be when I have a slide or two still marked show full duration – but the behavior is not consistent.

 

This comes up particularly if you adjust the timing from the timeline mode.  Grabbing the | between the slides seems to re-aportion the time between the two slides; and dragging from within a slide changes the duration of the preceding slide.  During this operation, it would be helpful to have a display showing the length of the adjustment.

 

If I am doing this ‘all wrong’ and the mechanism exists within the program to do what I want – I’d appreciate some pointers.  In addition, perhaps a good technical article could be written to more precisely explain how the timing and transition numbers work – but most important, how you intend people to use the features. I’ve read the OnLine help file about this and I still find it really confusing.

 

3. If I select a group of, say, 5 slides and apply a style – the style comes with a built-in (suggested) duration – I’d prefer it that it would aggregate the total time of the slides selected (even if they are different), use THAT for the new style’s time and then scale the keyframes automatically.  If the originally selected slides had individually different times, then they would be aggregated but changed based on the keyframes in the style.  What I am getting to here is that if these 5 slides match a certain point in the music track, applying the style retains the exact duration – and just aggregates the slides and keyframes them.  The transition time would be taken from the first slide.

 

I can’t think of many reasons to NOT always scale the keyframes to the new time – so I would like to lock this down for the whole project and not have to worry about it each time I work on a style group.

 

4. Add more information to the info line at the bottom of the screen.  Slide duration, transition time, full duration – and make it a little larger font for reading on a 4K monitor.

 

5. I had real difficulty trying to trim video – just clipping off the lead and end parts.  Could you add a video trimmer – and then when the trim is done set the slide’s time to THAT.  Additionally, if you could add a speed up or slow down by a factor or a new target time (re-timing option) that would be REALLY helpful.  

 

In one case I had a 32 second clip and I needed to trim it.  Whenever I tried to adjust it on screen, the playhead was shifting position as I tried to drag the end point.  For example, I would skim the playhead to the point I wanted the video to end, then within the timeline click on the slide to the immediate right and drag it left – but the whole thing would drift and I couldn’t precisely see where I was ending.  The Preview Panel did not show the adjustment – so I was doing it by trial and error.

 

6. The program’s cmd-Z (ctlr-Z) for UnDo works great.  Saved me several times.  What would be awesome would be an optional history sub-panel you could display that would list the changes – you’d have to generate the ‘description’ add slide 337; delete slide 444, etc.  But at least it would give you a clue when stepping back how many cmd-z’s to do…..each time you did an operation, it would be logged; pressing cmd-z would remove the top entry from the list (it’s a stack); clicking 5 items down in the stack in the sub-panel would roll back to that point.  This is similar but not exactly with Lightroom Classic affords – and I truly wish FCPX and LumaFusion had a similar feature. Deleting an items from the ‘centre’ of the stack would not be supported – just likes plates in a cafeteria, you should not pull one from the middle and expect good things would happen……

 

Thanks for listening.....

jc

[jkb]

2 hours ago, Jimcamel said:

1. There is a lot of jumpiness

Agree with this, it would be very helpful if the Slide could stay in the same position when switching

2 hours ago, Jimcamel said:

When I calculate the slide duration for a group of slides to match the music

Full Slide Duration - Turn OFF in Settings/Preferences/Project
If you already have some slides with Full Duration on then you can turn them off in Slide Options/Main

I always Move/Add/Delete Slides in Slide View & use Timeline View for adjusting Transitions & Slide Duration by looking at the waveform and matching to that.
As you have found clicking on the dividing line between 2 slides just adjust the duration of that & the previous Slide.
Clicking on the centre of a Slide adjusts that Slide & all those to the Right of it

 

2 hours ago, Jimcamel said:

3. If I select a group of, say, 5 slides and apply a style

I never use Slide Styles for this very reason, also every combination of 2 Slides is Unique so I would never want the same thing twice.

2 hours ago, Jimcamel said:

4. Add more information to the info line at the bottom of the screen. 

Settings/Preferences/Toolbars - select & position exactly what you want to show & where

 

2 hours ago, Jimcamel said:

5. I had real difficulty trying to trim video

Hopefully video editing will be a lot easier in PTE 12
Place your Playhead where you want it & look at the Time under the mini preview window - make a note of it

Then drag the next Slide left & look at the Time displayed at the far left next to Time Points - set it to the same value

 

2 hours ago, Jimcamel said:

6. The program’s cmd-Z (ctlr-Z) for UnDo works great.

Agree this would be useful to have a list of the changes made

 

Jill

[Tonton Bruno]

19 hours ago, Jimcamel said:

3. If I select a group of, say, 5 slides and apply a style – the style comes with a built-in (suggested) duration – I’d prefer it that it would aggregate the total time of the slides selected (even if they are different), use THAT for the new style’s time and then scale the keyframes automatically.  If the originally selected slides had individually different times, then they would be aggregated but changed based on the keyframes in the style.  What I am getting to here is that if these 5 slides match a certain point in the music track, applying the style retains the exact duration – and just aggregates the slides and keyframes them.  The transition time would be taken from the first slide.

You need to use "quick style" in order to preserve individual slide duration and transition.

[aplman]

A very thoroughly expressed post.  I hope it draws the outcome you need.  I shall be interested to read more.

Ken T.