User Guide?

FotoMagico
1

Is there no user guide? I just purchased PhotoMagico and am finding the Help worthless. For example, searching for “audio” returns nothing.

I just want to be able to two things:

  1. Import audio and set the slideshow duration to match the audio. When I pull it in, it creates blank slides to the end of the audio which I then cannot delete. So when I choose to match audio to slide length, it includes all the undeleteable blank slides.

  2. Is there no way to change the speed of the animation. As is, it’s zooming way to fast. Selecting an individual slide, it looks like you can adjust, but that doesn’t seem to work and I see no way to adjust it for all slides.

Thanks

2

Not a very helpful forum, apparently.

3

Hi, mweb202_1 –

If you want to import audio and set the slide show duration to match the audio

  1. import your photos and import your audio (place the audio at the first slide where you want it to start):

  2. click on either the Storyboard or Timeline icons in the palette above the timeline. Click on the FIRST slide at the beginning of your audio track. Hold down the shift key and click on the LAST slide that you want to associate with the audio track (forget about the blank slides to the right that filled in when you imported the audio, if there are any). The audio track should also get selected.

  3. Now on the main menu select Slideshow > Match > Slide Durations to Audio.

FM will adjust the slide lengths equally to play over the duration of the audio.

To change the speed of the animation is another matter. It’s a combination of how long the slide is displayed AND how far you animate an image (or layer) over the working area. For example, if a slide lasts 5 seconds and you move an image all the way across the slide, it will take 5 seconds to move. If you want it to move FASTER over the same distance, you have to shorten the slide length from 5 seconds down to 1 second (for example). Or, if you want the slide to still last 5 seconds, you’ll have to SHORTEN the distance the image moves across the slide.

If it seems to be zooming way to fast, as you say, either lengthen the slide duration (leaving the zoom parameters the same), or leave the slide duration the same while reducing the zooming parameters (i.e., don’t zoom in or out so much – just adjust to a smaller zoom amount).

If you want to adjust a bunch of slides at the same time, again select them all, choose the Options palette, and in the Slide subsection you’ll see “Duration” – just adjust that number and all the slides will take on that adjustment.

If you’ve already set the slides to match the audio, as described above, then you’ll mess up the timing. But that can’t be helped – you can’t have it both ways.

After a while you start to get the hang of it…

Good luck