musicvid......

I was not aware of the stretch limit and that was my current learning hurdle.

Thank you very much for chiming in and educating me.

Have a good weekend.

I've stretched a "picture" for an entire movie as a backgound for a 4:3 video in the 16:9 frame when I don't want to lose the full 4:3 video. I'm currently stretching a jpg for a entire 20 minute video. But a "movie" file does have a stretch limit.

Hey meksmk.....

Thanks for the info.
I'm still in a steep learning curve given the depth of the program.
I'm only using Movie Studio Platinum Pro 9.0 so Vegas Pro would probably take me the rest of my life to grasp.

Thanks again...
we

There's a difference between "stretch" and "time stretch". To stretch, one simply drags out the end of an event as long as one wishes. The event will play at normal speed (which doesn't matter for a still image), then repeat over and over again to fill up the time (which also doesn't matter for a still image). There is no limit to this amount of stretching.

Time stretch, which is holding down the Ctrl key while dragging out the end, does alter the playback speed and will not repeat the event. This is limited to 4x (for some unknown reason) for stretching, or 1/4x for "squishing" (speeding up the event).

Sadly, in order to stretch out multiple pictures simultaneously and in proportion, they must be grouped and time stretched. The normal stretch will only affect the last picture.

This means that when you import the pictures you need to have some sort of idea how long you'll want the whole group to be so that you can pick an appropriate starting length for the images. For example, if you have 44 pictures that you want to last between 3 and 6 minutes, you could start with 5.5 seconds each. This will add up to about 4 minutes. You can then time-stretch the lot from anywhere between 1 minute to 16 minutes, which easily covers the desired range. If you had imported them all as 1 second long then the longest time stretch would still be a few seconds short of 3 minutes.

Chienworks......

Thanks for that explanation.....I needed it.
I'm learning all this a bit slower than I would like.

Thanks to all for help as I continue on this current project.
I'm sure I'll be back to inquire with all of you luminaries.

we

Just a philosophical note -- don't expect to learn everything about the program right off. Be patient with yourself, and tackle the one function that you need at the time, then on to the next one.

Like Chienworks, I've been around for a long time, and I'm still discovering useful functions and techniques that I've overlooked, but could have used in the past. It's not necessary to learn every little trick in order to be an effective editor.

TIMTOWTDI
(Google it if you don't know what it says)