Sync slides to music

[Chumba]

Hello everybody! I am new to the forum - what a revelation! much good info to be had here. So maybe you can help with a prob I am having.....

I am a composer, and I was asked to write some music to accompany a pte project. The pte project uses many fast slides to fake animation etc. The problem I have is that if I compose a piece on my setup, timed to perfection to hit certain slides, when this is played on other sytems there can be a difference of up to 5 secs, behind or in front!

I have optimised picture sizes - 682x512, jpegs well squashed!, and this lessens the problem, but it is by no means perfect. Is there a way around this? Or am I demanding too much of this program? I want to be able to use the menu sytems and navigation bar aswell.

HELP!!

Look forward to the replies

Mark

[alrobin]

Hi, Mark,

Welcome to the Forum!

You didn't say whether you are synchronizing the show to the music using the timeline in Project Options / Custom Synchronization. If you use this to synchronize the show, it should keep it's timing pretty closely in other systems, except maybe some of the older, slower ones where you will probably have other problems as well (flickering images, glitches in the sound playback, etc.)

In order to achieve fast sequences, you will find that "quick fades" or "cuts" will work better than longer dissolves.

If you synchronize, you won't be able to use the nav bar, but Admin are working on this for future PTE versions.

[Chumba]

thanks for the reply! Have just found the timeline - does this work differently to setting up individual times for slides? I assumed the program would "count" the same way whether using individual timings or the timeline? Does the timeline fix the slide in time, whereas the other way the timings are relative to the previous slide eg first one opens late, all following slides will be at least that late in opening?

Any views on this would be helpful - I dont want to waste time restructuring the slideshow to find it does exactly the same thing again!

Thanks

Mark

[alrobin]

Hi, Mark,

No, the other ways do not sync to the actual music timing, but use an independent "computer" timing, which can produce different results in different-speed computers. The discrepancies are cumulative, so the longer the music, the more out of sync you will be at the end of the show.

You can reduce the perceived timing discrepancies some by breaking the music into several different files, and then keying each to a particular slide in "Customize slide", provided the breaks in the music are such that you can accept this. This will allow the music/slide synch to be reset for each selection. Here, too, though, things get a little risky, particularly if you don't leave enough time before the next slide to allow the music selection to complete (if not, you get a hard cutoff, which is not too sophisticated).

[Guest guru]

(Alrobin)

You can reduce the perceived timing discrepancies some by breaking the music into several different files... [...]

Here, too, though, things get a little risky...

Yes, Mark, Al is absolutely right. Please, synchronize music and pictures! You can do it with an extreme precision (theoretically, 1 msec.!).

Only this way you can be sure your show will run perfectly on (almost) all machine, except - as Al said - the prehistorical ones (let's say with a Pentium or AMD processor under 200-300 MHz).

Good luck! You'll see it's very easy...

[bharkins]

I too am interested in how to make use of the sych feature. Is there a better tutorial on this somewhere? I cannot change any slide timing except from the project option screen. If I click on synch, the display each slide is grayed out, the the original second and ms numbers are there. Should this be zeros if synch is used? Please advise.

[alrobin]

Hi, Bill,

Welcome to the Forum!

What do you mean by "better"? Are you referring to my PTE 101 tutorial?

If not, then I suggest you download it (available on Beechbrook), and have a look through it. It covers the timeline in a fair bit of depth.

By the way, in order to use the timeline, you first have to add one or more music files as "background music" in "Project Options / Music". Good luck!