Fades can they really be adjusted In AND Out?

[Peter S]

Have I been missing something simple?

Although PTE shows the transition as being Fade In/Out I have always thought of it as being only a fade IN. Is it possible to change the fade out? It has never really bothered me because it is easy enough to get the effect I want by using the fade IN of the following slide. The almost universal use of the term Fade In/Out just made me wonder if I have always thought of this incorrectly?

Kind Regards

Peter

[Ken Cox]

Peter

i et the following

project options

effects

effect duration

4000

seems to be fine for me

ken

[Ed Overstreet]

Not sure if this is what you had in mind, but let me give a different spin to the subject of fading in and fading out.

Any effect that you access through the Effects tab under Customize Slide, including fade, seems to work as follows. As soon as the slide on the screen begins to fade (or whatever else it does) off the screen, the next one starts to come up. One comes down, the next comes up, the first one starts at 100% opacity and (for example) fades to 0% after 4000ms while the second starts at 0% opacity at the same time and is up to 100% opacity at the end of 4000ms. In this case, at 2000ms both slides are on the screen at the same time at 50% opacity.

The exciting thing about the new Objects and Animations window in Version 5, for me, is the Opacity slider. With that control, and judicious use of keypoints, you can change the overlap of the fading in/out of the two slides so they are no longer lock-stepped. For example, you can start the fade out of the first slide 1000ms before starting the fade up of the second, and depending on where you position the "final" keypoints of the two slides you can have the first slide off the screen (0% opacity) before the second slide is up to 100% opacity. If you do this, you have much more sophisticated control over how much "overlap" there is of the two slides on the screen at any time point.

In the old analog days (in my club we used Clearlight two-projector programmers) we called this effect "fade to black," which it isn't really, but by using the Access A/B button on the programmer we could uncouple the standard linking of the two projectors, where B normally began to fade up exactly as A began to fade down -- but the Access button temporarily de-coupled the two projectors and let you start the operation of the second projector independently of the operation of the first one. Used properly, this effect makes for a much smoother-looking transition between landscape-format and portrait-format slides than you'll generally get with a standard fade. The trick also helps sometimes when fading between two slides of the same aspect ratio, where the slide contents are such as to make for a messy-looking transition if you use a standard fade.

You don't need to touch the Pan, Zoom and Rotate controls in the O&A window during any of this, in fact it's arguably better if you don't -- you can just use O&A's Opacity control alone for this effect. Such use of the Opacity control is the exact "digital analog" (sorry for the oxymoron) to the use of the Access button on the old Clearlight programmer.

This point hit me as I was reading the final pages of Lin Evans' superb PDF draft tutorial on O&A (see his post elsewhere on this forum for the link, if you don't already have the document). That realization made my day -- this trick is the one and only trick from my old Clearlight days that I've been sorely missing, no other software until now (that I've been aware of, anyway) could do this. That alone is worth the price of admission to version 5, in my book!

Try it, I think you'll like it.

[Limey]

Hello Peter,

You are quite correct in your original thoughts on this. All "Effects" accessed from the Effects Tab start at the beginning of a slide. There is no 'fade-out' effect possible in the Effects Tab, so this transition is mis-labeled. Imagine a show with a single slide, the only way to get to get it to fade out is to add another slide (blank) with fade-in.

However, as Ed pointed out, if you are using version 5 O&A, then anything is possible.

Regards,

Limey