Arrange All Points & Slides w/ Customized Lengths.

[goddi]

Greetings,

I have been adjusting an old show that had worked out perfectly. However, I wanted to trim out some slides so that the slideshow was shorter. In the original slideshow, I had all the slides evenly spread over the length of the several music MP3 files, except that one of the slides has a map with an automated route, which needs to be 16 seconds in length. Somehow, I was able to get the slides and the music to end together.

In reworking the slideshow, I removed the excess slides and one MP3 music file. Then, I had a problem getting the remaining images re-spread over the new music’s length, AND keeping the 16 seconds length for the map’s slide.

As expected, when I clicked the Timeline/Timed Points/Arrange All Points, the 16 seconds that I had set as the Customized Length for the map slide, reverted back to about 3 seconds (as all the slides did). When I reset the map’s slide to 16 seconds in length, the slides went beyond the length of the music.

So, there seems to be no way to lock in the Customize Lengths, and let the Timeline/Timed Points/Arrange All Points re-adjust all of the slides so that all of the slides are arranged to the length of the music (factoring in the Customized Lengths). This would be a very helpful feature that I have asked for a long time ago in Ideas and Suggestions, but not addressed, yet.

However, since I think I found a workaround, I wonder if this can be incorporated into the Arrange All Points function. What I mean is that if you have Customized a slide’s length, the Arrange All Points function would not affect slides with Customized lengths, but take them into account in spreading out the rest of the slides to end with music’s length.

My workaround is as follows:

The music length is 11:25, with 200 slides.

The map slide’s length needs to be 16 seconds.

I removed the excess slides and one MP3 file from the original slideshow.

I re-spread the slides to the new music’s length using the Arrange All Points function.

In the Slide View, I added 4 dummy slides to the slideshow.

In the Timeline View, I ran the Arrange All Points, re-spreading them.

I then re-customized the length of the map slide to 16 seconds.

Then, in the Slide View, I removed the 4 dummy slides.

Now, in the Timeline View, the slides and the music ended together, while retaining the 16 seconds for the map slide.

(I hope I got these steps right, but I hope you get the idea).

If I can get this to work in this ‘workaround’, why can’t it be incorporated into PTE so that Customized lengths of slides are not discarded when Arrange All Points is used??? Or is there a way to get this done that I don’t know of?

Thanks… Gary

[Lin Evans]

Hi Gary,

It's essentially just a relatively simple math thing. When you "spread" the time evenly among all the slides, you include the one slide you want to have 16 seconds. What happens, as I sure you already know, is that the number of slides are divided by the number of seconds in your music then that quotient is represented as the number of seconds per slide.

Now you want to increase the length of time for a single slide so the additional time over whatever the individual slide times are, must be subtracted equally from all the other slides. Let's use an easy example so we don't need a calculator.

Let's say you have a song which lasts exactly 120 seconds or two minutes. Let's say you have 10 slides. So each slide gets 12 seconds. Now you want to have one of these slides play for 22 seconds. This then leaves 10 seconds which must be subtracted from the other nine slides. The other none slides total (12x9 = 108 seconds) 108 seconds. Subtract 10 seconds from 108 and you have 98 seconds to be divided among 9 slides. (98/9 = 10.88 seconds). So if you set the timing for all slides to 10.88 seconds, then set the one slide to 22 seconds, the music and image display should end simultaneously.

In order to program this, relatively simple math would be used and the program would have to total all the "non - standard" times represented by individual custom settings and follow the logic above to determine what the settings should be for the remaining slides. It doesn't "appear" to be an insoluble issue, but I'm not privy to the inner working of PTE so perhaps there are variable I'm not aware of which make it more difficult.

Best regards,

Lin

[goddi]

Hi Gary,

It's essentially just a relatively simple math thing. When you "spread" the time evenly among all the slides, you include the one slide you want to have 16 seconds. What happens, as I sure you already know, is that the number of slides are divided by the number of seconds in your music then that quotient is represented as the number of seconds per slide....

Best regards,

Lin

========================

Lin,

Yes, I understand the math needed to spread the slides as you have clearly explained. I was hoping there was a more direct way. Since this really is a pretty simple computation and we are using a computer, I would think that this would be an obvious and simple improvement for PTE. Why put the user to have to do all the calculations each time the slideshow gets adjusted? PTE does the math for Arranging All Points without taking into account any Custom Lengths. I don't see why it shouldn't (or couldn't) be able to make the leap to account for any slides with Custom Lengths. What an improvement it would be for the Arrange All Points function. Well, I hope Igor will take note of this idea. Thanks for your response. And since you don't have any alternative except for actually doing the math each time, there must not be any other 'trick' to do it. I'm sure you would be the one to know! I'll be sure to have my hand calculator next to my computer next time I need to do this...

Thanks... Gary

[davegee]

If you have a majority of slides which are of equal duration and a small number which deviate from that duration you can temporarily move the non-standard slides to the end of the show in the "Full Screen View of Slide List". You can then select and arrange the non-standard slides in the timeline so that they line up with the end of the music. You can then select all of the standard length slides in the timeline and "Arrange Selected Points".

Now move the non-standard slides back to their original positions in the "Full Screen View of Slide List".

No need for mathematics.

DG

[goddi]

If you have a majority of slides which are of equal duration and a small number which deviate from that duration you can temporarily move the non-standard slides to the end of the show in the "Full Screen View of Slide List". You can then select and arrange the non-standard slides in the timeline so that they line up with the end of the music. You can then select all of the standard length slides in the timeline and "Arrange Selected Points".

Now move the non-standard slides back to their original positions in the "Full Screen View of Slide List".

No need for mathematics.

DG

==================

DG,

Yes, I tried it and it worked. The 'trick' seems to be that you have to move and replace the 'non-standard' images in the "Full Screen View of Slide List". And, using Arrange Selected Points. If the moving is done in "Full Screen...", its customized time moves with it. If the moving is done in the Timeline, it only moves the slide, not its associated customized time. This can get a bit messy if you have lots of slides with customized times. Lots of note taking so you get them back to where you want them. Thanks for the tip. But I would hope that Igor can work this out so none of this extra work is necessary and the Arrange All Points would take the customized times into effect automatically, so no math or note taking is necessary.

Thanks...

Gary