Can we change duration of multiple events (photos)

dogwalker wrote on 9/29/2008, 7:21 AM

I'm at work, or I'd look around in Vegas to see if I can find a way to do this, but this just occurred to me.

First, though, I have a different question - in my current slideshows, I get a lot of shimmer where I'm panning/zooming and there are lots of trees in the photos. I know I can change the properties of photos to reduce interlace flicker, but that seems to also blur the photos a great deal - is that true, or is that related to my mixing MemoriesOnTV (see below) and Vegas?

I'm creating several slideshows for our Scouts troop, and I've been using another application, MemoriesOnTV. MoTV is great at what it does, and a few advantages it has is that one can easily change the duration of multiple slides, as well as changing the transitions if one wants (e.g. I could select several, or even all, and change the slide duration to 3 seconds, and the transitions to fade and 1 second each). MoTV also has the helpful feature of randomly assigning initial pan, zoom, and/or rotation to all the slides.

However, I find the dvd authoring in MoTV lacking, and I'd like to at least try Vegas.

I'd like to be able to do these:
(1) change the event duration on any number of photos (already on the timeline) to a new duration. Granted, I'll finetune individual photos, but this is a great start;
(2) work with photos non-overlapped, so I can view the start and end keyframes, but then select a group of photos and somehow "overlap/transition all the photos/events in this group"

It might be nice to also set initial pan/zoom for all photos.

I remember there being a product from vasst which doesn't cost much ($30 or so, I believe?), and I'll check that when I get home.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 9/29/2008, 7:28 AM

Select a range of pictures, press G to group them. You can now Ctrl-drag the end of the last one to change the duration of all of them together.

There's an icon in the track header that looks kinda like an "x" named "Expose track layers" or something like that. Click it and the track splits into two parts, A & B, with alternate photos switching back and forth between the two parts. The overlap is still there chronologically, but you see the pictures independently on the timeline.

Grazie wrote on 9/29/2008, 8:18 AM

"Select a range of pictures, press G to group them. You can now Ctrl-drag the end of the last one to change the duration of all of them together.

I think, I STILL think this is one of the most valuable tools in the Vegas box. You take "stills" group 'em and squeeze them to appear with shorter screen duration. Any other NLE's allow you to do it so easily?

Marvellous!

Grazie

jetdv wrote on 9/29/2008, 8:30 AM

There are multiple products that will do this for you. You are correct that VASST has StillMotion which is a subset of Ultimate S. Excalibur also has a Video Scrapbook tool and can resize/overlap events easily as well. If you do some searching, you may even find some free tools that will resize/overlap as well.

dogwalker wrote on 9/29/2008, 9:19 AM

Thanks, everyone! I'm already looking forward to getting home to check these out.

Now if I can just get rid of the shimmering. That may go away if I load the photos individually and set the "reduce interlace flicker" option. When I load a slideshow from MoTV, setting this option gets rid of (or almost) the shimmering, but very badly softens the movie. However, that's a movie. Perhaps if I load photos into Vegas with this feature, and create the slideshow there, I can lose the shimmering.

Again, thanks much, everyone!

jimmyz wrote on 9/29/2008, 10:02 AM

With photos when rendering use the best instead of the good setting
and I don't see blurring with reduce interlace flicker.

dogwalker wrote on 9/29/2008, 11:54 AM

jetdv, is this the page for excalibur?
http://www.jetdv.com/excalibur/new6.php

jimmy, the blur I'm seeing is when I turn on "reduce interlace flicker" on the avi file which I created from MoTV, not from loading individual photos (I haven't tried that yet). I created the slideshow in MemoriesOnTV, then created an avi file, which I then load into Vegas. Without "reduce interlace flicker" I get lots of shimmering in the trees, but with it turned on, the video is blurred. I'm guessing that won't happen when I just skip MoTV and build the slideshow in Vegas.

This late in this particular project (I'm showing the slideshows at our Court of Honor), I'm going to use the movie I created from MoTV, but when I create other shows for December, I hope to be able to use Vegas instead.

The shimmering won't be an issue this week, because we're showing it on a projector from a PC, so I won't have interlace.

Anyway, I'm rambling now. :-) I appreciate all the tips!

AlanC wrote on 9/29/2008, 12:08 PM

Nobody mentioned that you don't need to set "reduce interlace flicker" on each individual image. After you've placed all your images on the timeline, choose "select events to end" then run the reduce interlace flicker script.

jetdv wrote on 9/29/2008, 1:33 PM

The base page for Excalibur is at http://www.jetdv.com/excalibur