Hi otown -

Do you mean like the Postcards templates found in Magic Style & Theme Designer? I kinda like the way the Postcards template uses a muted/washed out background image drawn from the source videos/photos...

You cannot apply a video background directly using those templates, but there's something I made years ago that may be of some help.

In the Slideshow templates, there's one called Camera. Its background scrolls throgh an image while photos are dropped on top - a little like the Postcards template.

What made were some subtitute files for the Camera template to allow the background to be replaced by a video. This is just an example - https://youtu.be/qHj3Bhr0HNo The same idea can be applied to the 3D slideshow template - https://youtu.be/EQrc7-W5MmI

All the stuff you need to do that (including instructions) is available if you're a PDtoots subscriber.

Cheers - Tony

P.S. Twice (so far) this post vanished into the ether and had to be re-formatted. Grrr!
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Hi Tony, I am a PDTools subscriber. Where do I look in PDTools. Your examples are what I'm looking for.



thx

PM sent (private message)
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Tony's solution is based on Chromakey. Are there any other ways of doing this?



thx

Hi ottown -

You're right. The slideshows are made on green backgrounds instead of using other images. That way the green can be chroma keyed out & your video background will show through.



If there are different ways to trick PDR into using the slideshow templates to display over a video background, I've never seen or heard of them.

Of course, you could build the slideshow manually in tracks 2+ - set motion for each image in PiP Designer - and have your background video in track 1. That gets away from your original idea of using the templates.

The green screen method takes a little fiddling & pre-production, but it works...



(photos & videos from a recent day trek from the sea to the mountain)

Cheers - Tony
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Hi, I finally got around to using thr Chromokey technique and it works really well....thx

A related question, for the Frozen Space slideshow template, what controls the duration of the show....can it be speeded up?



thx

Quote Hi, I finally got around to using thr Chromokey technique and it works really well....thx

A related question, for the Frozen Space slideshow template, what controls the duration of the show....can it be speeded up?

thx

So I have read how to produce a video from the slideshow and then slow it down...easy enough. What I would really like to do is change the parameters of the Frozen Space style so that the moving around of the pictures is sped up while the display of each picture stays the same....this would speed up the duration. Theres lots of description on changing the background of this style by going into the directory, but not on changing the durations. Has anyone hacked any of the other files in this directory?



thx

Hi otown -

There are some predictable things about the Frozen Space slideshow template, & others that are quite variable.

Essentially what you get is a 5-7sec transition sequence, where a group of 8 photos move out/in, followed by a 50-53sec display sequence, where each photo in the group is highlighted. That timing is what it is & there's no way to modify that in the slideshow module. Maybe it could be done by editing the appropriate .XML file, but I couldn't help much with that (nor would I recommend it).

So - the most predictable thing is that there's a transition sequence each minute.

The simplest way to do what you want (i.e. speed up the transition sequence) is to:

1. Build the slideshow without music


2. Produce it to video format


3. Use the produced video to split & apply speed changes to those sequences


4. Produce the modified slideshow again.

► Step 3a. above might be to remove the repeated image sequence at the end which, for whatever reason, the Frozen Space template has the urge to include.

► Using PDR14+, the speed change step can look pretty smooth by using Ease In/Out. Previous versions take a bit more fiddling.

By the way - to change the background just click on Customize > Replace Background. Easy.

Cheers - Tony
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Thanks Tony, the final video is too long to split and deal with...unfortunately. Perhaps someone else might have a solution or has hacked the xml files in the directory.