auto-adjustment of duration when setting audio-markers

It would be nice that when setting an audio marker also the duration of the slide is set that duration.
Otherwise you must always change the transition back to »after duration« adjust the length to the audio marker and change the transition back to »audio marker«.

Please can you explain your workflow in more details and at which points it don’t work like you expected, because in my opinion it works just like you did describe it, without setting the slide transition to “after duration”. Thanks!

My current workflow is to arrange the slides in the order I want them. Next I set the duration of my slides approximately to how long I want to show them. After that I set every slide to dissolve with transition-time 0s. Then I listen to the audio track and press m to set audio markers according to the audio. Next I set the duration of every transition according to image and audio. My last step is to animate the slides. Here I get problems because the duration of the slides are always the one they got when I inserted them. The most are too long and so the animation is too slow or has a false timing due to the durations don’t match.

Your workflow sounds quite reasonable to me. Your last step (the animation part): How could it be that the duration of a slide don’t match if you have already synched it to the music by audio markers? From your description my believe is that you have some slides showing for 5 seconds and other for 10 seconds and you expect that the 5 seconds slides moves as fast as the 10 seconds slides (meaning pixel distance per seconds on the screen) if you setup the start and finish position the same for all the slides. But this isn’t true: The start and finish position defines the position of the slide at “zero” time and after the duration (5 or 10 seconds) and with this they also defining the moving speed on screen: One slides needs 5 seconds to cross the screen the other need 10 seconds to move for the same distance. My suggestion is that you position the slides for the 10 seconds slides more far apart than for the 5 seconds slide to make them to mave a longer distance to get the same moving speed as the 5 seconds slides. Does this makes sense to you?

I don’t know if I understand you exactly but it’s clear to me that the speed of an animation is it’s position over time, and the two animation keyframes I can set in FM are before the start-transition and after the end-transiton (as long as I didn’t change this points on the animation-graph).

I found out that if a slide-duration is shorter before I set an audio marker then the slide-duration is automatically changed to the duration time of the audio marker span. If a slide-duration is longer then it’s not changed.

My problem 1 was that I wanted to zoom in by 1% over time on a set of slides, the durations were 6s or 276s each, but the actual durations with audio markers were only about 4s. So the 6s slides moved OK but on the 276s slides there were no changes visible. So I had to shorten the duration-setting on each slide to their actual duration.

My second problem was that I wanted to change the look of my images during end-transition. Therefore I added my changed images on top of the original and changed the visibility graph to fade in at the beginning of the end-transition. But when the duration-setting doesn’t match the actual transition time it always fades on a wrong timing.

Problem 3 was that when I change the direction of my animations I like to fade out the speed of the animation during the end-transition. Like problem 2 a mismatch of the duration and the duration-setting doesn’t get me what I want.

The workaround I can see now is to try to set the initial slide-durations as short as possible, so that the duration-setting is automatically adjusted.

EDIT:
I just found out that the duration-setting is only adjusted when you change the continue-mode to audio marker and the duration is shorter than the marker span. So when I adjust an audio marker afterwards I must change the slide to »after duration« enter a small duration time and switch back to »audio marker« to auto-adjust the duration. But this only works when you select one slide at a time.

Now I see your point: The animation timing and speed is controlled by the “Slide Duration” independently from the next audio maker for the transition. This leads to unwanted effects if you forget to set the slide duration to a proper value to match the audio marker the slideshow will hit. Therefore you suggest to adjust the slide duration automatically to the duration of the locked audio marker. This sounds reasonable to me and I am going to discuss it with the development team. Thanks!