Synchronize Photos to Music Track

[JoelGummeson1213]

It is quite obvious you can change the duration for any individual photo display time on the video track. I also see that you can stretch or compress the music track to fit time of the slides. However, this would distort the audio track to some extent. Is it possible to select some or all of the photos and automatically set an average time so the sequence will equal the play time of the audio (ideally one file, multiples, or complete audio track)? Also, Is there an upper limit on the number of photos that can be in the video track (obviously there would be an upper size limit for a given media that would be used)? What are some of the upper limits reported and have rendering issues resulted at some poin?

[DVDDoug]

Also, Is there an upper limit on the number of photos that can be in the video track (obviously there would be an upper size limit for a given media that would be used)? What are some of the upper limits reported and have rendering issues resulted at some point?

On a DVD? If you are making a DVD, then you are stringing the photos together and making a video. There are no hard-and-fast rules for the playing-time on a DVD, except the more video you compress onto the disc, the more your quality suffers. The good news is, it's the quality of the motion that suffers. So, the basic images should not degrade too much, but if you've got transitions betwen images, that's where you'll start to see the quality degrade.

You can fit 90 minutes of good quality video (with Dolby audio) on a single-layer DVD.* So, I would guess that 3 hours of stills would be fine.

Is it possible to select some or all of the photos and automatically set an average time so the sequence will equal the play time of the audio (ideally one file, multiples, or complete audio track)?

I can't help you with that one. I did something like that once, and I used a calculator (and some trial-and-error).

I also see that you can stretch or compress the music track to fit time of the slides. However, this would distort the audio track to some extent.

Right. The audio needs to be "smooth". You can get-away with things in video (like hard-cuts & hard-splices) that you can't get-away with in the audio. I think we've gotten used to sudden scene/camera changes and we don't even notice. But, if you suddenly change songs in the middle of a song, or chop-off the music without a fade-out, it sounds very amateur.



* That's not a hard-and-fast rule... That's a rule-of-thumb!