Adjusting show time or making the slides as long as the music

My music is longer than the photos I have for the show and even if I expand the slide duration it seems to make no effect … What can I do to expand the slides to meet the music?

Grab the right edge of the song, and shrink it to match the slides. Now right click the song and select “Match to audio”. Done

Will this cut off the end of my music … Its the most beautiful part

I see what that did was change all my timing to 11.2 sec… Is it possible to have some of the slides a little longer than others … Thank you for your help

Frank, you can certainly select a slide and open the “Options Panel” on the right to change the duration of each slide manually.

This is an amazingly frustrating program. I bought this to do one thing. I have a selection of audio, I have a certain number of slides. My audio is one file. I want my slides and audio to end at the same time! I do not want your program cutting my audio or jumping back to a random point and adding to it. All I want you to do is take the audio time, divide it by the number of slides and apply this to the slides. Your website said you can do this but I have spent two days trying to get this to work! I have read the discussion group and nothing seems to make a difference. Amazingly, when I manually go in and change times the program still does not respond in a predictable way.

@mandel2: Sorry, that you are frustrated by this feature. Whats are the steps you are doing to try to get the slides duration to match the audio?

Yes I actually have the same issue I want my slides and music to be the same and for the life of me I can not work it out as well… Surely if you ask the program to match the audio to the slides it should just work ? Assuming that there are enough slides for the music and music for the slides ??

@CkMetroPhotos: If the music shows a longer bar in the story board than your slides then just grab the right end of the music bar and drag it back to the last slide of your show, so that the music bar spans all your slides you want to go with the music. Now right lcick on the music bar and select “Match to Audio”. This should give each slide a new duration so that they in total match the duration of the music.

Except for this problem, I find FotoMagico to be a superb app. But I’m getting to the point where this syncing issue is becoming a show-stopper for me.

I find that matching (syncing) audio with slides to be EXTREMELY frustrating also. There’s no predictable way to do this that I have been able to discover - yes, I know there’s a “locking” feature … but it doesn’t appear to actually “lock” anything I can tell.

Specifically, when I edit/play the slideshow from the beginning, the slides at the end of the show arrive at a different time than when I start playing/editing towards the end of the project. In other words, FotoMagico does NOT credibly pick up the audio where it left off. It is consistently OUT of sync.

With a 5+ minute show, I cannot realistically START over from the beginning in order to edit each and every slide - especially towards the end.

As a result, I have a number of slideshows where my music selection is completely inconsistent with what I wanted. And trying to get them to sync up is maddening impossible. I have yet to have a single slideshow where my music falls where I wanted it to go - and since I coordinate the images and audio carefully, this is extremely frustrating.

Unless there’s a workaround to fix this problem, I’m afraid you’re going to lose users - including me.

@ejm: Thank you for your comment.

Why is this audio syncing a problem? Well, FotoMagico was designed to create high quality live presentations, therefore the a main goal was not to interrupt the show in any form. Sometimes (especially with huge image files) it take some time to upload the image from the hard drive to the graphics card. But we won’t the slideshow to stop and wait until the image has been uploaded. So we postpone the next slide while still animating the previous one. This causes to shift the syncing with the audio because this current slide also has to be shown for e.g. 6 seconds. While editing the show we don’t have to wait until all images has been loaded so we estimate the start of the audio with the current edited slide.

In FotoMagico 3 there is another workflow to synch your music with your slides I don’t know if you aware of: You can place markers in your audio and select the option “Continue at audio marker” in your slides. This will then trigger the next slide by an audio event and therefor is much more reliable. Anyways, if an image takes to long to upload to catch the next audio marker it will wait for the audio marker after that.

This is subject to change in FotoMagico 4.

So if I understand correctly, with 150-200 slides in a 5-6 minute show, one would need to place 150-200 audio markers, and link each slide change with each marker? Seriously, there HAS to be a better way to solve this issue.

I do appreciate that FotoMagico started out for liveplay and therefore has some legacy limitations. I empathize with how a product can start out with one customer base and morph into use by another - it’s likely that this is the kind of success Boinx would hope for! So, here’s the problem …

… for those of us who are trying to use it for the purpose that FotoMagico is currently being marketed - including the purpose of creating (static) video, youtube, and other web presentations (not live) - you are leaving many users highly frustrated by our being unable to sync audio and slides. After we hit “play” we discover that the slides and audio swim around and we can’t control the timing. The “audio marker” solution is a non-solution in practical terms. How can we be expected to explicitly link each and every slide to a unique moment in the audio stream? Isn’t that exactly what the program is SUPPOSED to do for the user - not the other way around?

There are numerous such programs that function like what we are requesting on the Windows platform so it’s clear this is a solvable issue.

Again, I’m a big fan of FotoMagico> But this flaw makes the program unusable for those of us who want to control the timing of our slides vis-a-vis our music. You’ve got such a GREAT Mac-based slideshow editing/producing platform. To leave this basic need unresolved is not a good development choice - either for customer satisfaction or long term product line viability.

So trying to use the suggested workaround until this gets fixed, is it the case that the only way to sync up the timing of a series of slides with a single piece of background music is to select each and every slide, figure out where against the audio file each slide is supposed to appear (not sure how to possibly do that in advance?), then create an individual audio marker at each of those specific points, then link up each and every slide with its specific associated audio marker, and then produce the show?

Ok, but after the hours it would take to do that, then what happens if you want to change, say a single slide in the middle of the show? Do you then need to go in and re-edit each of the remaining, perhaps 100 slides’ markers, that occur anytime AFTER that single edit in the timeline? And readjust the entire remaining set of the audio marker associations?

I must be misunderstanding how this workaround is supposed to work if this is the suggestion. Please help clarify if I’m misunderstanding.

Thanks!!

(ps - I’ll gladly serve as a diligent Beta tester for any pre-release version that fixes this problem!)

@ejm: The workflow with audio markers was intended like this: Once you selected your audio track of choice and placed it in your slideshow you can playback the audio in the “Audio Options” panel. Hitting the “M” button next to the playback box while playing back sets up a new audio marker at that time. With this you are able to feel when a new slide should appear and press the “M” button. When finished with setting all the markers you can select all slides at once in the story board and set up the “Continue” option to be “At Audio Marker”. Now your slides should run synched with the audio. However, if an image can’t get loaded into the graphicscard fast enough to catch the next audio marker, this marker will be skipped. In order to prevent this you have to pre-downscale your images to a dimension that fits your needed output resolution, thats helps to load the images faster.

Another way to create the audio markers is with Narration recording (available in FotoMagico Pro): Set all your slides to “continue at Audio Marker”, record a new (silent) narration with the Workflow “Define new timing”, also uncheck “Mute Other Audio” in the “Record Narration” Window. While recording your silent narration you can hit the “Set Audiomarker & Continue” button to create a new audio marker in the narration audio track. With this technique you can see the slides while setting the audio markers. In the end select the new created narration track and set the Volume to zero, also uncheck the Ducking option in the Audio Options panel.

Please be patient, FotoMagico 4 is comming! :slight_smile:

Thank you - I appreciate your reply. As a “Pro” customer who fully supports Boinx, I’m really trying to make this work.

So in looking at your 2nd workflow above (available for Pro users), what happens if I look at the resulting slideshow and, somewhere in the middle, decide to shorten or lengthen a few slides? Will everything after that point work itself out properly … or do you have to start all over again?

I guess I’m struggling to understand how either of these two workflow suggestions would allow a user to edit the timing of individual slides without having to go in and redo the entire presentation each time any change is made.

I’ll spend some time with your suggestions and see if I’m missing something obvious. If so, I’ll report back for the benefit of others with this same problem.

[Any hint as to when version 4 is coming? Weeks? Months?]

@ejm: You are right, with this workflow there isn’t an easy way to fix a certain slide duration. The problem is to find out the specific marker that is responsible for this slide. Since the slides aren’t connected to a certain audio marker you have to find the specific marker yourself. So this is how I recommend to do this: Play back your slideshow in the editor. You will see the timecode of your show running in the lower left corner. Note the time when the transition happens you want to change. Stop the play back. Select the narration track in the storyboard and open the Audio-Options panel on the right. You will find a “Markers”-disclosure view, click on the triangle to open it. A list of all your markers for the narration track will appear. Scroll through the list to find the certain marker with that timecode you want to change. Please note that the markers are relative to the beginning of the audio, which means that you have to add seconds if your audio isn’t starting from the beginning of your show. Double click the time code in the list to make changes to this marker. All other markers will remain their time codes.

FotoMagico 4: We don’t have a release date yet.