Tad

Please post exactly what you want for the slide shows. I played around yesterday and created one with 45 shots that played in 3 minutes, had music, and saved as a *.mp4.

I have to admit I absolutely could not get the slides and the music to finish together, even when I changed songs adding or subtracting 5 or 10 secs at a time. I finally gave up.

Now that i think about it as I write this, maybe it was because I told Lightroom to sync the music and photos but have a title slide and ending slide, also. THERE ARE 2 EXTRA SLIDES that are not photos. I will retry manually setting the times.

I will probably cut down the number of slides, but would think that for people standing and watching, their attention span on any one picture (since 99% of them will not be photographers) will be really short. My guess is that some where around 3-3.5 seconds would be optimal.

But whatever you want is fine with me. I can cut those 45 shots of my cat down to the best 30 or 35.

I haven't used Lightroom for this but can you fade the music at the tail end rather than have it fit all the sides in to the length of the music track?

I took the best 28 photos of my cat and added the header and footer slides for a total of 30. 3 minutes is 180 seconds is 6 sec/each (i.e., total of viewing time + transition). When I attached music that was 3:00 min long, it matched perfectly.

That was Lightroom. I have not found a free program that will let me do a 3 minute slide show. Do you know of one? I really would like to have at least one other option.

I really like Faststone Image Viewer's slideshow, but they are only saved as exe files, so I need something else. I am not quite ready to pay for one.

I use a copy of Pro Show Producer for PC (not Mac). It's not free online but you can get it cheap at Pantip Plaza. It's takes more work than Lightroom but gives you total control over images, music, transitions and final output.

Wyndham also uses this program. If we have a meeting this Wednesday I can bring you a copy of it if you wish. Just let me know and bring a USB flash drive. It's not the latest version but really does the job. And again, it's for PC.

PC flash drive and I will be there.

I can't wait to build my slide show with these photos (instead of just 28 photos of my cat I will include a couple of the stray cat I feed also).

Great Peter,

Though I must admit we're partial to cats as well, having two adopted California beach cats plus one adopted Thai dog.

I got tired of waiting and downloaded Pro Show Producer. Played around with it and managed to build a show. I still have to work out transitions and how each photo is shown (so many options and I do not like what I have gotten so far).

I did figure out to make the output an AVI file. But because of the number of pictures I used and the large file for each one, it came out to be 5GB.

So the question now is, what size file do you want?

Last year Wyndham told us about FastStone Photo Resizer which works like a champ. I have that, so I can quickly and easily resize my photos to put the 3 minutes in the whatever file size desired.

If anyone wants that program, it is free (as I remember it), just google it.

Since I got only 1 approval, I will not use the cats' pictures, even though I know both of them will be sorely disappointed.

Let me play with file sizes and formats and look on my home TV to see how far down we can go without losing too much in quality. Straight AVI is probably too large to work with as we'll be joining many shows together. So, in the interim, just work through the ins and outs of Pro Show, build and save your silde show and I'll figure out the best format and size as Pro Show handles just about all of them.

Tad

PS Do tell the cats I was pulling for them!

I currently have a Pro account on Animoto that I bought in order to do a tribute for a friend's memorial service. (I will have it for another week or two and then I will cancel.) You can see the finished product here. If you'd like, you could send me the files you want included in a slideshow and I would be happy to make the show.

Thanks for the offer, Mike, just too kind of you.

But that would take all the fun out of it for me. The show you built looks quite a bit like what ProShow has done for me so far so. Since I have the program, I will take the time to learn how to use it, how to make it do what I want.

Since it looks like only Tad and I are bothering to even read this so you may have no takers.

You could still send the files to me (or better, put them up on Minus.Com and provide me the link) and I could make a slideshow too. That way you could still make your own and have two slideshows to use / choose.

I created a temporary slide show with 40 images plus a front and back title screen and music. My original images were 240DPI and 2000 on the long side. Total slide show length was 2:50.

Like you encountered, ProShow made an AVI file of 5 GB. I tried it in Lightroom as well and also got 5 GB. So, the I ran this AVi file through an old video converter program I have (Ultra Video Converter). I set for AVI output at 'superb' level and audio as 'good" The output file was only 42 MB! Quality seemed to be fine. Where you get a little loss is in the transitions whcih is not a big deal. So it seems Lightroom and proshow bloat the outputs.


One suggestion - create the proshow file with an aspect ration of 4:3 which is standard and not widescreen for TV. As we saw on the monitor Airport Greenery the widescreen format distorted the images. A black frame around the images is far better than distortion to fill the screen.