Audio & Slide sync - perhaps this is the issue?

FotoMagico
1

Been trying to get the slides and audio to properly sync and thinking a lot about this issue. The workarounds provided (markers) are definitely not practical for a real world workflow. So then it just hit me…

The audio IS in fact playing back at the proper speed from start to finish - i.e., it’s not warbled or sputtering. Since the exact time of the audio track is fixed (and its sample/bit rate and resolution are fixed) this strongly suggests that any sync “slippage” between the audio and the slides must be coming from the slide side of the equation. But users provide FotoMagico with explicit slide durations.

This, in turn, suggests that the times that are being entered for a slide’s duration (e.g., 2 seconds) is not NECESSARILY being honored by FotoMagico. In other words, that slide MAY play for 2 seconds, or perhaps longer or perhaps shorter.

If you’ve got a 60 second audio file, and 30 slides of 2 second duration each, then the only way the sync could get out of whack would be if FotoMagico is not respecting the 2 second duration data provided by the user.

QUESTION: Wouldn’t it best to simply fix FotoMagico so that when a specific duration is entered (again, e.g., 2 seconds) that this exact time is what is actually used by the program … rather than making some adjustments to the slide duration that is different than what the user specified? Whatever is forcing that adjustment is NOT what the user wanted - so why not let a different variable take up the slack (e.g., the transition duration - which is less critical to overall project duration)?

Asked differently: If the program is not honoring a duration value provided by the user, then what exactly does the duration value mean to the program?

Perhaps I’m oversimplifying but it would seem the simple fix would be to ensure that FotoMagico is indeed including in its video output stream each slide for the exact duration provided by the user. Transitions and effects should be processed WITHIN those explicit duration lengths provided - not separately. Then the sync issue would take care of itself, no?

Is this line of thinking at all useful in resolving the sync issue?

2

FotoMagico is honoring the value. It might though be that when the time code is hit, loading the media takes too long for some reason, then FotoMagico just cant hold that time exactly. It will never fire too early but displaying media might be delayed fo a few frames. Normally it isn’t. If images are overly large, this might happen more often, but there will be something to help at this point very soon.

3

Ok, thanks. But I’m using a fairly recent Macbook Pro with ample memory and only still images, so it’s hard to imagine that the timing is getting messed up due to overly-demanding resource/image loading. What’s more, since this whole sync’ing issue is happening with off-line output “share” file processing, there’s no reason to worry about presenting the audio and images in real-time. Perfect alignment should be possible if the processing has to wait until the image fully loads to proceed to the next frame - since this should all be internal process and no one is watching this show while it is being constructed and converted into a video file.

I do appreciate that your team is working on a version 4 that will address this. Are we talking about a few weeks or months? year-end?

4

We are talking about weeks (if everything goes as planned).

5

Any updates on expectations for a release? {heavy breathing} :wink:

6

So if my computer can not be upgraded to Mountain Lion as it seems
I then cannot use FotoMagico 4 and will have audio sync problems
forever? Then do I have to go back to FotoMagico pre 3 to get proper sound sync?