I must be missing something. Why can’t I just drag all the slides into my timeline, drop all my music into my timeline, and then just have all the slides durations automatically adjusted to fit the music? No matter what I do I end up with a bunch of blank slides because the music is too long for the default slide time, or the music is either clipped or looped to fit. I’ve tried every thing I can see, and the only way I could get anywhere close to what I needed was to figure out how long the slides would need to be display with a calculator, force that to the duration, then drop in the music clips.
I’m sure it’s something stupidly simple I’m missing because this seems like it should be the default action.
just go in there and shorten the music track in the timeline/storyboard. Now right click it and select “Match slide duration to music”.
In FotoMagico 5 we’ll have a new assistant that will help you with that to make it even easier.
OK, I’m still not real clear. What I need seems pretty simple. I have 5 songs. I have 250 slides. I drop the slides in, I drop the music in. I want the slides to fit to the length of the 5 songs. In most slide programs it’s one click.
I tried everything I can think of. I get blank slides, or it loops music, or it adds gap between music, or matches some of the slides but then has extras after the music. I have to be missing something … it seems the menu choice “match slide duration to audio” should do exactly what it says … take the length of the time of the selected audio track (regardless of how many songs are there),divide in the number of slides that have been selected(not counting “blanks” it has arbitrarily added in) and set the duration for all of those slides to the result.
Is there no easy way to do this? I’m trying to find a tool to make several slide shows a week for clients so I have more flexibility and creativity than what I get with Lightroom, but with Lightroom this is a one click deal, here I can’t find a way to do it at all.
My usual procedure that I’ve used for years is to first figure out about how long (in general) I want a slide to show on screen (5 seconds, 6 seconds, 10 seconds, whatever). I want the timing to be somewhat consistent overall (the difference between 6 seconds and 6.7 seconds is unnoticeable to almost everyone). I do a quick calculation to figure out how many slides I need to fit an audio track of a certain length, then select that many slides and select the audio, and then do a “Match slide duration to music” – the result is pretty close to what I want (for a quick example, say 20 slides to fit an audio track of 2 minutes will give me 20 slides showing for 6 seconds each). I then figure out rough number of slides needed to the next audio track and do the same thing. If the slide timing is not exact, I tweak where appropriate. Sometimes I want to extend transitions or do some tricks with images, so I make adjustments for that as well.
sure. I can think of several work arounds, but doing this several times a week, using a different set of music tracks and varying number of slides, having to work around it just isn’t worth while. I’ll have to stick with Lightroom because what I want to do there takes 1 click.
to me the music track should be able to lock into timing of a set number of slides, but the music track should be independent of the audio files … so the track may consist of one file/song or several. additionally once you lock in a set of images to the music track or a portion of it, that should interlock the two so any timing changes to any slides are compensated through the other slides in the set.
Certainly for an advanced show where one is willing to invest the time fotomagico can build a fantastic presentation, but perhaps its overlooking the fact that doing lots of simple shows is also a worthwhile endeavor and perhaps there are ways to make a more efficient workflow for that.