JPGs movie slideshow

George Kaufman wrote on 1/23/2007, 4:26 PM
Hello,

I have to create a slide show of JPG stills that will have a sound track. To me it looked like the best way to do this would be to make a movie of the stills. So I made a test sequence of 10 stills and dragged them onto the timeline just like movie clips. Each still lined up on the time line butted to the next one with each having a 5 second duration. Five seconds works pretty good for me actually. But the project is not for me and will have 250 or more stills. What if they have to be 7 seconds, or a block of 20 need to be shorter. Is there command or function to increase or decrease the length of a group or all of these clips? If not in Studio is there a way in big Vegas? Or am i relegated to a lot of dragging. Also is there a preference somewhere that specifies the 5 second length that these stills occupy when dragged into the project? Finally, is this the best way to make a slideshow with sound track. This slideshow is going on a DVD with an hour or so of video.

Thanks for your help.

Regards,
George

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 1/23/2007, 5:56 PM
To adjust a bunch of stills all together, select them all and press G to group them. You can then Ctrl-drag the end of the last one to shorten them all at once or to the right to lengthen.

In older versions of Vegas Studio there was an internal preference that could be delicately tweaked to set a default length for still images. I haven't looked at it since version 3, but in the newer versions there may be an setting under Options / Preferences / Editing for New Still Image Length. Check there first. If you don't see it then come on back here and we'll tell you how to change the internal setting.
George Kaufman wrote on 1/24/2007, 3:14 PM
Hello Chienworks,

Thanks for the quick reply. Grouping and Ctrl-drag was all I needed. And I did find the edit preference for still image length (don't know how I didn't stumble over that).

There are some vagaries to the group-ctrl-drag function. Post-edit ripple doesn't work. If I ctrl-drag the end of a group so it overlaps the next group the next group moves a little, but not the proper amount. I end up with a confused cross-fade. That's not a biggie for this project, if I have to make changes I'll just move the downstream video over before stretching. Perhaps you can shed some light on this behavior.

Thanks again,
George