shrinking pics in overlay

[cyberbiker]

I'm trying to add slide shows mixed in with video in a vacation video. I take an image, use the overlay to blow it to full-screen, then render this and save as a 9 sec mpg2. I then take this clip, put it into the overlay three times, shrinking the first & third to 3 sec each and adding fade in to the first and fade out to the last, and render this entire project, now a 15 sec clip with a short fade in & fade out and no jumpiness, as a mgeg2.
I do this with several pics, until I'm ready to build the slide show. What I'm trying to get is a pic that fades into the upper left quadrant of the screen followed by one in the upper right quadrant, followed by one in the lower right quadrant, followed by one in the lower left quadrant, each starting its fade in at three sec intervals. Then, because of the fade out that each one has, I would start the fifth pic back into the upper left quadrant, and it should crossfade over the first.
I know that this all sounds tedious (and it is) but I just want to show some background on what I'm trying to do.
After I have all of the fullscreen clips made, I take the first, put it into the overlay, go to effects, and move it to its quadrant & resize. I render this, then load the rendered file into the edit stage, add the second clip to the overlay three seconds later than the first, move it to its quadrant, resize it, then render this file. This continues until I have all files established.
Now, finally, here's the problem I'm having; Every time I overlay a new file, the original clips shrink in width. by the time I have all four of the original clips loaded, the first one in the upper left quadrant is no longer 4:3, but more like 3:4, with the outside edge cropped. This progresses each time I add an overlay, to each clip that was already there. Any ideas of a fix, or what I'm doing wrong?
HELP!!! *L*

[rwindeyer]

That sounds like a serious amount of work. I did something vaguely similar in a recent project; 4 images appearing sequentially in each corner of the screen. A 25 second clip was rendered 5 times in total.
The images (actually in my case they were video clips) kept their size and proportion; the only thing I did differently was the use of avi format instead of mpeg. May make a difference.
Good luck.

[Trevor Andrew]

I'm trying to add slide shows mixed in with video in a vacation video. I take an image, use the overlay to blow it to full-screen, then render this and save as a 9 sec mpg2. HELP!!! *L*

Hi

If your images are not the same ratio as the project frame size,
Then your images will be stretched out of proportion to fit the overlay window.