Soundtrack during transitions

by **rkligman** » Mon Feb 18, 2008 9:44 pm

As I try to make Producer do more and more "complex" stuff, it really seems to fall apart sometimes. My next show has a voice-over running through it. I recorded a clip (through Producer) for each slide. Here's the problem. The soundtrack will adhere to the "playing during sound" settings that you can set in various places UNTIL the transition comes in. Then it doesn't care because it feels that it's not in ANY slide, therefore it plays at it's default volume. I tried 18 different ways to get rid of the up/down of the soundtrack to no avail. So I gave in and removed the transitions. The show will probably look awful and maybe sound awful but I digress.

Is there anyway through Producer to have it treat the Transition as part of the Slide? Since hardly any shows have voice overs, nobody has probably much run into this.

So I ultimately played with the Default For Other Sound setting after removing the transitions and set the Fade out to 2 seconds to see what would happen. As expected, my voice overs faded out two seconds before the end of the slide. OK, not what I want. Well guess what. Now I can't get it to undo. I've deleted the PXC file, no go. I set it to 3 seconds, then back to 0 then to 0.1 and now they ALL fade out after 3 seconds. I'm probably going to have to reload the voice overs and and hope that works, otherwise I'll be even more upset than I am now!

by **BarbaraC** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 6:14 am

Rick, are you using transitions between slides or at beginning and ending keyframes? I don't have an answer for your problem, but I was just wondering if, by changing the location of the transition, you could eliminate the problem.

Barbara

by **rkligman** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 8:58 am

BarbaraC wrote:Rick, are you using transitions between slides or at beginning and ending keyframes? I don't have an answer for your problem, but I was just wondering if, by changing the location of the transition, you could eliminate the problem.

Barbara

Normal, between slide transitions. I have two (three?) more things to add to my dilemma.

1. When I adjusted the "Default Other Sounds" to have a FadeOut of 2 seconds, all my voice overs lost their last 2 seconds. Ultimately I ended up not only going to a backup copy but also hand tweaking the PSH file to get everything back to order. Very strange.

2. Did you know that during a transition, it actually fades out your voice over? Producer really treats teh transition area very different than the slide on multiple fronts.

3. I had a thought and wondered if it would work and it seems to so now I have a workaround at least. I put the music in Slide 1, told it to play after the slide ends, and the Soundtrack contains each individual voice over OGG file manipulated to start at the beginning of each slide. Now the music plays at a constant level and the voice overs are where they belong.

Am I building excitement yet about this show?

by **BarbaraC** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 9:16 am

Not sure about the excitement due to perplexity. I would have thrown up my hands long before you did and just created the whole blessed sound thing outside of Producer--but then, that's what I always do anyway.

Barbara

by **gpsmikey** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 2:07 pm

Well, here is one possible solution (actually more of an end run) that may
work for short ones (1 or 2 slides for example). Put them both on the
same slide as layers and use keyframes to show the first then the second -
you can still have transitions on each layer, but it is now one slide.
I know, not a "best" answer, but a possible fix for short sequences.

mikey

by **rkligman** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 3:20 pm

gpsmikey wrote:Well, here is one possible solution (actually more of an end run) that may
work for short ones (1 or 2 slides for example). Put them both on the
same slide as layers and use keyframes to show the first then the second -
you can still have transitions on each layer, but it is now one slide.
I know, not a "best" answer, but a possible fix for short sequences.

mikey

My sequence is about 20 slides. I'm narrating the show so it won't work in this instance.

by **hardsoftware** » Wed Feb 20, 2008 8:41 am

Which transition are you using? Does it do it with any transition? If by chance it is the A/B fade transition try the OTHER A/B fade transition. Of course if you have tried this already then ignore this.

Just a thought,
Ben

Opps! Never mind, I see you have already worked around the problem.

by **rkligman** » Wed Feb 20, 2008 2:17 pm

I didn't try any other transition but it was one of the A/B's. Wouldn't that be strange if different transitions did different things? Who knows. I'll try and come back to the show (which is now done) and see if that makes a difference.

by **rkligman** » Wed Feb 20, 2008 9:40 pm

I think I narrowed at least one aspect down. How does that song go, "Don't let you kids grow up to be Cowboys?". I'm starting to say, don't let your voice overs be recorded by Producer. Either that or don't let Producer edit the timing on your voice overs. Haven't quite figured out which is true (or both).

The problem that I've identified is the voice over fading out at slides end. This is NOT the same problem as my show has because it works for 90% of people who play it. This problem goes back to the original development I was doing where I could hear the 2 second fade while I was making the show. It's not the transitions. That's the good news. The problem is simplier than that.

I have a 13.68 second OGG file that Producer recorded. It has leading and trailing silence. So I used the Trim button to take out this dead sound. That cuts the file to about 12.5 seconds. My slide is set to run a total of 13 seconds (including any transition I might have). THAT's the problem. My total slide time is LESS than the total UNCUT sound clip time. It doesn't matter than I trimmed it and it doesn't matter if I click Play into the next slide. If my total slide time is 13 seconds (.68 less than slide clip time), I get fade out. Change the slide time to 14 seconds, it plays perfect.

Ultimately I'll need to record a sound outside Producer and see if it has the same effect. So beware of this.

by **gpsmikey** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 10:22 am

Hmmm - something that strikes me as sort of related - someone noticed
a while back that when you trimmed a clip in producer, when you played
it on presenter, it still downloaded the entire clip -- it is not actually "trimmed"
as much as it is following the instructions on what to do with it when it plays
it. If you have an intro that only uses the last 10 seconds of a 3 minute
audio track and have trimmed it that way in producer, it still has to download
and "process" the 3 minute track. It may not be related, but it has that
smell about it ... (more reason to put things together in an external
editor I guess).

mikey

by **rkligman** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 12:28 pm

"eeeeuuuwww that smell...can't you smell that smell?"

Definitely food for thought and now at least there is something in writing that we can lean back on. Photodex confirmed they got my 3 slide show that shows off this behavior. Now we'll wait to see what they have to say about it.

Soundtrack during transitions

Soundtrack during transitions

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