Newbie question about transitions and slide motion

[pilaar39]

I just got PSG, and put together my first slideshow.
( http://www.photodex.com/sharing/viewshow.html?fl=2861437&alb=0 )

It am quite impressed with the simplicity of putting together a slide show, but have a question concerning the transitions and slide motion effects.

In my show, I have motion in each slide.. usually going from small to large or vice versa. I also have a fade in/fade out transition between slides. My concern is that the fade transition kicks in to quickly for my liking.. In my show, I never get to see the complete photo in the slide - the fade starts before the motion ends. I would like to have a tiny pause before transitioning to the next slide, so that the viewer has a chance to see the complete slide. Is this possible, and if so, how? If I increase the slide time, it just makes the motion effect longer. I guess what I want is the ability to pause for a few seconds before the fade out and the fade in of a new slide.

I also have a question about photo size: what is the optimum photo size that should be used in PSG? I am currently using photos about 1024 x 680 px. Yet, when the show is created for Photodex, it is much smaller. If I create a Flash show, it is even smaller. Are the full size images used for these small shows? If so, I would imagine it is quite a waste of resource. On the other hand, if I choose to use a zoom motion in a photo, I imagine I would need a large original image so as to not degrade the quality of the shot when it is zoomed in. I also want to ensure I can get a good quality DVD show, if I want to output to DVD. I would appreciate your comments on photo sizes... or if this has already been discussed, a link to where I can read about it.

Thanks!

[lostdutchman]

pilaar39,

1) Welcome to the ProShow forum. You'll find out the best
way to learn is to do exactly what you did -- post shows and
welcome comments.

2) I'm new to ProShow, too, just two weeks. Caution: it can
get addicting.

3) You are right about not holding a shot before it transitions
to the next one. I have experimented with two methods to
accomplish what you are after. The first is to place a duplicate
slide following the one with the motion--with a transition time of
0.0 seconds. You can hold this slide for as long as you want to
establish the shot. Must make sure your duplicate is exactly in the
same position as your ending position of the pan and zoom.

The second way (I think you can do this in PSG) is to use keyframes.
On the motion edit screen, in the upper right and corner, is a
timeline representation of the slide, including beginning and
ending transitions. There will be two little "home plate" markers
with a "1" and a "2" to mark the beginning and ending. You can
right click in the space just above the timeline to add a new keyframe,
which would be a "3". Your two position would be the end of the zoom, and
then you would hold until the third position, then end.

Keyframe can be challenging, but I'd encourage you to play with them
and see what they do. They allow precise control over your show.

4) One thing about your show: Consider that not every slide needs to move.
Put a little thought into what it is on each slide that you want to emphasize.
In some (many) cases the whole slide should be presented and then the
viewer can examine it from his/her own perspective. Too much motion
can make one seasick (as I assume no one did on the schooner).

5) I echo your question about optimum photo size. I'm sure it has been
asked and answered in times past, but I'd love to hear some the
experts expound on this again.

Ken

[gpsmikey Profile Private message]

Welcome !! First, nice pictures and you did well to stay (in general) with
1 main transition (many first timers take it as a challenge to see if they
can use all available transitions in one show -- people's eyes tend to fall
out !). As Ken says, if you will look at many of the other shows people
have done, the ones that work tend to have a fairly small percentage of
the pictures where they are zooming and/or panning. The best way to
think about transitions is as the tutorial at Digital Juice said -- think of
them as punctuation to your story -- they should help the flow, provide
some hints as appropriate, but should not be the focus (in general) of
the show. People should not be watching for the transitions/effects - they
should be watching the story of the show.

As far as your questions on the transitions, I don't think Gold has keyframes
(Producer does, but I don't think Gold does). The way you get a slide to do
what you are asking is basically take 3 slides -- say you want it to hold the
initial position for 1 second, zoom for 2 seconds and hold the end for 4 seconds.
What you do is set the time on the first slide at 1 second at whatever zoom
factor you want (same begin and end). Second slide starts at same zoom as
first one, then zooms to the final zoom/pan value. Third slide starts/ends with
the ending zoom/pan values from the second slide. Use a "0" time transition
between the 3 slides. What you end up with is a "slide" whose motion is
defined by 3 "segments". You can actually add additional "segments" and
make it do a series of things if you want.

As far as the best "image size" to work with, that is somewhat shrouded in
mystery. There are a number of factors that do come into play -- you want
to have a high enough resolution to be able to retain the image quality on
those images you are zooming in on. There have been a number of comments
to the effect that when working with larger shows, the size of the raw images
starts to become a significant factor in how much RAM is being used (which
would make sense, but I have not actually seen any emperical data on that).
In general, for my typical shows I have been working on recently (100-200
slides), I have just been using the images straight from my camera (2-3 megs
each) and have not seen any issues.

Hope that helps (once you wade through it )

mikey

[nannybear Profile Private messageWebsite]

Well, I just knew you guys would come to the rescue. You are so much more precise than quick little hint comments I put in. I love that you take the time to explain things so well!! Two beers each! hugs Jan

[gpsmikey Profile Private message]

On the other hand, we may scare the poor guy/gal to death

Hope not !!

mikey -- speaking of beers, a friend brought us a nice bottle of
wine this afternoon for my help fixing her computer (the DVD burner
died). Time to go check out the new bottle -- it has a cork and everything !!

Hey Jan -- how would you like this view from your hot tub ??
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070814.html

[nannybear Profile Private messageWebsite]

Wow, I get a pretty nice view but nothing like that!!! It's gorgeous........cheers Jan

[pilaar39]

Thanks for the replies..
I don't think the keyframe suggestion works with PSG, at least, not that I can see.

I will look into the other suggestion of putting an intermediate photo between fade-in/fade-out.. thanks.

However, this makes me wonder about inflating the size of the show, if I have to add additional (similar) photos. And it also comes back to me question about the size of photos. Has anyone tried creating a show with a few slides from photos, one using really large images, and another using compressed, smaller photos? Would be interesting to see how it affects the final size of the show. Or maybe PSG does this compression/reduction as part of the build process?

[gpsmikey Profile Private message]

As far as the show "size" goes, there is an important part of your
question missing -- what is the output format ? If it is a DVD that
you are making, if you are in NTSC land, the frame size is 720 * 480
(TV size) and all pictures end up resized to that in the output. I don't
believe you would see much of any change between using big pictures
or small ones as far as the show size goes. If you are creating an exe,
then it may make more of a difference depending on what output
resolution you select and other factors. I have not played with that
side much (I have made a number of .exe's, just never tried with
different resolutions of the same pictures).

mikey

[pilaar39]

Ok, I made another show:

http://www.photodex.com/sharing/viewsho ... 9587&alb=0

adjusted the transitions to 1 sec, and the photo display to about sec.
Cut down on the number of motions inserted into the show, and then added a copy of the image after any image that involves motion.. then changed the transition time to 0 and the display time of the copy to 3 sec. This gives nice smooth motion and then allows the viewer to see the photo at its full size before the slide transitions to the next.

(suggestion to photodex: this would be a good function to add, instead of me having to do this work-around with a copy of the slide!)

What I think I would like it to have the slides fade to black, then begin the next slide, instead of the end of one slide fading into the next; is this possible, or do I need to insert black frames between each photo?

This show was made with an old set of photos taken a few years ago.. so, all photos have a copyright on the bottom. Yeah, I know it sticks out like a sore thumb in the slideshow and should not be there.. no comments on this are necessary, thanks.

I am still not happy with the image quality, especially when zooming in.. lots of degration. All these shots were at 1024 x 681; does that mean that if I zoom in to say 200%, that my photos should be at least 2048 x 1362? or do they need to be higher resolution? Or is this a function of the compression ratio that the JPG files were saved at?

and lastly, I found a soundtrack that seems to match the haunting story the slide show tells, but I think I still need to play around with sound, as I am not sure exactly how to control it with levels, fades, merges, cuts, overlaps, etc.. if indeed such controls are available.

comments and suggestions are very welcome.. thanks!

[DickK Profile Private messageWebsite]

What I think I would like it to have the slides fade to black, then begin the next slide, instead of the end of one slide fading into the next; is this possible, or do I need to insert black frames between each photo?

There are a couple fade transitions and they work differently but I'm not sure any of them will really get what you want. Still, I'd experiment and see if any of the predefined transitions get closer. If you want it to go completely blank between images the only way I can think of would be to drop a black slide in between. Going that route gives you complete control over how the transitions work because you're essentially creating your own. The downside is that it's a lot more work of course.

This show was made with an old set of photos taken a few years ago.. so, all photos have a copyright on the bottom. Yeah, I know it sticks out like a sore thumb in the slideshow and should not be there.. no comments on this are necessary, thanks.

You could always edit it out but that may turn out to be more work than it is worth.

I am still not happy with the image quality, especially when zooming in.. lots of degration. All these shots were at 1024 x 681; does that mean that if I zoom in to say 200%, that my photos should be at least 2048 x 1362? or do they need to be higher resolution? Or is this a function of the compression ratio that the JPG files were saved at?

All the above. To start with the needed resolution is mainly a factor of two things -- what's the resolution of the output display and how much, if any, zooming are you going to do? Displaying the show on a TV via DVD standard def video generally needs less than if you're going to display it on a computer. In the latter case, the question is what resolution the screen is set for--you want to at least match that for a full-screen display. And yep, if you zoom, then the requirements go up by the zooming factor. The only solution to improving how the images look in your case is to not zoom as much. If the output is to DVD video, I'd limit the zoom on a 1024x768 input image to 150% or less. That's pushing it a bit but might be a good compromise--only some experimentation will tell you what works best and show you the tradeoffs you can make.

and lastly, I found a soundtrack that seems to match the haunting story the slide show tells, but I think I still need to play around with sound, as I am not sure exactly how to control it with levels, fades, merges, cuts, overlaps, etc.. if indeed such controls are available.

Sound is really crucial to the overall impact but I find that it's hard to get it right. But the basic controls you need are there within PSG. If you need more, I'll pass on the suggestion made to me for an audio editor, Audacity. It's free and it works well.

Good luck and enjoy!
Dick

[Bill McMahon]

I am trying to superimpose a "Polaroid" mask over an existing photo. I place my photo in layer 2 while my mask is in the top layer. The mask is set to rotate 90 degrees from vertical to horizontal. No matter how much time I assign to the slide, the rotation of my mask never becomes completely horizontal. Do I have to contiue this movement into another slide?

[briancbb Profile Private message]

Bill

What I think may be happening is; you have a fade transition at the end of the slide and the rotation is completed during this fade so you are not seeing it. I would suggest a 'cut' transition to the next slide and copy the final position of the rotated slide to this next slide. The fade transition can then follow. This should allow the rotation to complete.

Brian

[pilaar39]

Dick, thanks for the reply!

Bill, sounds like you have the same problem I had.. see my 'solution' above. Basically, I just inserted a copy of the photo following the one with the animation. Set the transition time between them to 0 secs.

[Wilko]

just my 2cents: A show I put together last week had 156 images (not counting duplicates for zooming and motion effects) all more or less full res (some cropping here and there) which means 10MP. This allows me to zoom in to 400% without any noticable degradation (but added dramatic effect).

Indeed, the size of the show is determined by the output format not the size of the input images. There is one other drawback however: processing time. My show takes about 22 minutes to watch and 2:30 hours (!) to generate (on a 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM PC).

[pilaar39]

WoW!

Although I usually take high-res photos, I most often scale them down to about 1024. This is because I do not print them, only show them on a PC or the net, and (unless you have a humungous monitor), most people have 1024 monitors so anything bigger in size means they never see the full image, and have to scroll to see it.

I will try my next show with larger source files and see what happens.

My last show was about 100 slides and did not take anywhere near that long to generate.. so, it must be a function of image size. (I'm guessing)

Thanks for the reply!