Hi, Tom,

In the 1970s (and I know we have discussed this previously on some list
about archiving these things), I made several slide-tape shows...the
fanciest I ever progressed two was still a single image and a same-rate
dissolve for the entire program. I had wanted a way of archiving these
in the digital domain.

About a year and a half ago, I was offered Magix PhotoStory for a good
price (it is made by the same people who make Samplitude/Sequoia, my DAW
of choice). I installed it and then went on to do other things. A family
member passed about a year ago and I was voluntold that I was to make a
10-minute video to play at the memorial service. The family scrounged up
several hundred photos and they suggested music.

So, I spent about 100 hours putting together first the soundtrack (how
do you fit ten songs into ten minutes) and they OK'd it at 12 minutes.

I then Photoshopped many of the 350 images and started dropping them
in--in somewhat chronological order at first and then later more to fit
the words of the song fragments, ending with a reprise of images.

Since then, I have started on my well-received show of The Cathedrals
and Abbeys of England, but have not had the patience to align all 350 or
so images with the soundtrack. While the images worked reasonably well
with a pair of Carousels, I now see that most could benefit from some
Photoshopping or Lightrooming (rapidly becoming my tool of choice when I
start out with good images and want to slightly improve them).

Anyway, when bought on sale, the pricing is good. They seem to run sales
fairly often.

http://www.magix.com/us/photostory-on-cd-dvd/

Anyway, I'm a happy user and I think I parted with $100 or so for my
copy which is certainly not free but it's not a kilobuck, either (like
iZotope and the high-end Samplitude, and don't even think about Sequoia
in that price range).

I see the workflow for what you're doing to be this:

(1) Create the soundtrack

(2) Turn the slides into a series of JPG files (maybe PNG would be a
better choice for business graphics, but I am not certain if PhotoStory
supports PNG, but worth checking. Name the files so that they sort in
order. Place those in a separate folder.

(3) Import the audio into PhotoStory.

(4) Point PhotoStory to the folder with the final set of images.
Now you see a "slide sorter" view in PhotoStory and as you drop each
slide into the timeline, there is a red marker on the image in the slide
sorter showing it has been used, but it does not stop you from reusing it.

(5) Add transitions if you wish (I generally ignore most of the
whoop-de-do ones).

(6) Depending on what version you get (left up to the purchaser to
determine) you can burn it into a DVD, or make HD Windows Media files or
other formats.

I had tried many other approaches, mostly involving video editors
(starting with Adobe Premiere waaay back before the PCs even came close
to being really powerful enough for this) and was totally underwhelmed.
This software met my needs for being relatively simple and relatively fast.

There is a multi-track, multi-media timeline, so you can overlay titles
over images and have the titles stay across multiple images or only part
of the time a particular image is up. Fades work the same for audio or
video.

Anyway, I'd give it a try. I am not certain if this one has a
downloadable demo, but many Magix products do.

Cheers,

Richard


On 2013-11-14 8:04 AM, Tom Fine wrote:
> I wish there were a program (maybe there is, but I bet it co$$$$ts)
> where one could take a recording of his audio and have his slides in an
> adjoining window and just go along and insert slide changes, so the
> audio ends up in the same movie or flash file as the slides. Best would
> be if one could just wear a lav mic and the computer both projects the
> slides and records into the audio its recording where the slide changes
> occur (look for the page down or arrow down key strikes). Then at the
> end of the presentation, the person just saves the file to a movie or
> flash or whatever and can upload it right away to YouTube or whatever.
> No silly grainy useless video, but words matched to slides. I've wanted
> to do this with my AES presentations, but all software I've investigated
> is way too much of a money-suck and/or a time-suck. The only way,
> realistically, that I'd ever have time for this would be if it could be
> recorded live as I do the presentations. I'm actually very surprised
> that Adobe or YouTube haven't developed free software to do this,
> because it would be a major selling point for their companies. If it
> were Adobe, it would become very common and popular (oh, I'm running
> Adobe whatever so the whole presentation will be online soon or, I'm
> running YouTube Recorder, so it'll go right online when I'm done). I
> can't imagine it's that hard, just a matter of capturing audio sync'd to
> the computer's presentation software output and recording the whole
> package into a digital video file.
-- Richard L. Hess email: [log in to unmask]
Aurora, Ontario, Canada 647 479 2800
http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm Quality tape transfers --
even from hard-to-play tapes.