G'day Mark!! -

First time I've taken a good look at Slideshow Designer in PDR18, but I spent ridiculous amounts of time on it in easrlier versions.

I can say that the features & performance of SS Designer in PDR18 is not the same as PDR13! e.g. In PDR13, selecting "Fit photos to music" would usually result in photos being repeated or left out, where in PDR18 timings are adjusted to match music duration.

In my test just now, for whatever reason, PDR18 ignored the 2nd piece of music I selected when trying to replicate your scenario.

Are you aware that in PDR18 (not 13!) in SS Designer, if you click Customize in Motion SS, you can adjust the timings of every photo manually?



Cheers - Tony
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Thanks for your reply. I appreciate you taking some time on my question. "Ignoring" a second piece of music has also happened a couple of times.

Am I wrong believing that the slideshow function would spread all of the photos out evenly to match the audio length? I just want my 57 photos to play evenly though my 2 songs at about 6 minutes. It seems counterproductive to what the function supposedly does automatically to go through and change the timing for every single image. I'm rather disappointed that something seemingly so simple has captured many hours of my time.

If this slideshow function won't do this, I guess I will have to just have each image on the timeline with no motion, just clicking through each photo and match that up to the length of the audio. Not nearly as visually appealing but a lot less frustrating.

Quote G'day Mark!! -

First time I've taken a good look at Slideshow Designer in PDR18, but I spent ridiculous amounts of time on it in easrlier versions.

I can say that the features & performance of SS Designer in PDR18 is not the same as PDR13! e.g. In PDR13, selecting "Fit photos to music" would usually result in photos being repeated or left out, where in PDR18 timings are adjusted to match music duration.

In my test just now, for whatever reason, PDR18 ignored the 2nd piece of music I selected when trying to replicate your scenario.

Are you aware that in PDR18 (not 13!) in SS Designer, if you click Customize in Motion SS, you can adjust the timings of every photo manually?



Cheers - Tony

Hi Mark!! & anyone else who cares -

I've been using PowerDirector since PD7, and I've only just come to realise this.

PowerDirector has NO ABILITY to "Match photos to Music" in the way most users would interpret that option.

Most users, including me, would take that to mean something like ajusting image durations so that:
► Each image is shown once, with no repeats & no photos missed,
so that the:
► Total duration of the slideshow matches the total duration of the background music.

During a recent time-wasting activity, I mistakenly clicked on the info button beside "Background Music" in Slideshow Designer. EEK! It's taken me 10 years to work out what PDR means by "Match Photos to Music".



Before that, I wasted a lot of time trying to work out what PDR was doing in Slideshow Designer. I started with 60 photos and applied different pieces of background music, ranging from 3 - 7 minutes.



So, the only way to match a group of photos to the duration of the music is to build the thing manually. In fact, for Motion slideshow, that's more efficient than trying to wrestle with individual timings of photos. It's made much easier by:
selecting multiple photos and applying the same motion via Tools > Pan & Zoom, and
copying & pasting keyframe attributes.

So Mark!! In answer to your question:

Am I wrong believing that the slideshow function would spread all of the photos out evenly to match the audio length?

Yes, you are wrong to believe that... & so was I.

Cheers - Tony
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