I thought PowerPoint was the way to do this and I thought it would be easy, but I’ve run into a surprising brick wall. Here’s what I want to do:
Take an audio track, say “Beatles - Hey Jude”, and a bunch of photos, and automatically transition from one picture to the next using the beat of the music to change from one picture/slide to the next.
Then build a stand alone executable that would play on anyone’s computer/laptop without having the root application (say Microsoft PowerPoint) installed on the playback computer.
I thought PowerPoint’s audio bookmarks would be the key to the solution, but it seems that bookmarks can be used to trigger effects and animations, but won’t trigger a slide advance.
Am I missing something essential about PowerPoint? Is there another Windows application that will do the job?
Honestly, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and hassle if you just use Windows Movie Maker. You’ll get a file format you can play on virtually any computer as well.
One downside is that you probably won’t be able to distribute it via email as an attachment. You’d need to host it somewhere and link (for example, youtube)
Yeah, exactly. Videos of static images compress well, but the Gmail limit is 25 MB for example. That’s very small for a 4 minute 1080p video. All depends on your email system and the recipients’ systems.
I’m sure there are many different ways to accomplish making slideshows with an audio track. This is the way I do it: See if you have a program already installed on your computer called Movie Maker. If you don’t, you can download it free by going to this website: http://www.windows-movie-maker.org/
With Windows Movie Maker you can create a slideshow with your photos and add any audio track you have in your files. This is it’s basic function. You can do much more with it. When you’re done, you can burn your project to a CD, or save it on your computer in a file. Later you can upload your slideshow to YouTube. Just be aware that YouTube may refuse to allow your slideshow to be viewed by the public, if they feel the music track violates copyright infringement.
Another vote for Movie Maker; I’ve used it a bunch in the past. Simple to learn the basics & not that difficult to master the more advanced features. Many options for picture &/or video clip transitions.
Some have less than Gmail’s 25mb limit so one person might get it but another won’t.
If you load it to one of the ‘searchable’ sites (YouTube, Vimeo), you’d need to have a rights-free version of the song. Even if you legitimately paid for the song, you may not have a rights-free version. I don’t believe the ‘private’ sites (like DropBox) have this limitation but then you’d need to send me a link to your video for me to be able to view it, I couldn’t search on whatever tags you added to find it.
Movie Maker give you a bunch of options on quaility/file size in the “Save Movie” menu. Depending on how long your slideshow is, you might be able to make something that would work as an attachment. If you have a google account I would think it would be really easy to upload the clip to youtube.
Oops, missed the edit window. What I wanted to add was about using copyrighted music…from my experience, it depends on the owner. I’ve uploaded a bunch of slideshows with background music and I’ve only had issues with two songs…All These Things That I’ve Done by The Killers and *The Last Of The Steam Powered Trains *by The Kinks. In each case it was no problem, I just deleted the video from Youtube and re-did the slideshow with a different song. Actually, youtube has a tool with a fairly large library of backing music that you can use as a soundtrack.
I’m pretty sure you can actually do this with PowerPoint (I’m not saying you should - just that I think you can) - there’s a function called ‘rehearse timings’ where you can click through the slides at the pace you desire, and it will replay the sequence/timings that you have recorded.
I’m not absolutely sure the music is guaranteed to sync perfectly every time, as there is often a variable delay between launching a piece of audio playback, and the time at which the sound actually starts playing.
There’s a whole artistic subculture doing this - they call it “AV”, and it grew out of still photography and camera clubs. Basically, people started taking their images and setting them to music, timing fades and cuts to the beat. There are competitions (I attended one as a guest), with “AVs” judged on technical and artistic merit. The key is that all the visuals are based on static photos, not video.
I can’t recommend that software particularly, as I’m not particularly into the AV scene, but I am aware that it’s the software these people use, and it’s designed to do exactly what you want to do.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Oh, just to add that the Pic2Exe software outputs - as the name suggests - an exe file. This is an article of faith in the AV community - your work should execute as a program rather than be a media file opened in some other application. I never really got to the bottom of why, and questions like “why don’t you just put it in YouTube” resulted in blank stares.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Yup. That’s exactly what I want to do, but golly that software is not cheap.
Since everyone was urging me to use movie making sw, I tried an older version of Sony Movie Studio Platinum that I had laying around, and managed to put together a small demo that convinced me that this was indeed the way to go.
To hell with PowerPoint (thanks anyway, Mangetout).
The resulting output is a .wmv file - not as large as I expected, and I can live with that.
Again, thanks for everyone’s help - You folks did help me get this project on the right track!
Wow, what a terrible idea. By creating a standalone EXE, you’re duplicating a lot of effort that could just reside in a single movie player, you’re shutting out any portion of your audience that uses a different operating system (which, with phones being such a big deal nowadays, is a lot of people), and you’re facilitating the spread of malware. All of this for the benefit of… well, there is no real benefit, unless your target audience somehow manages to have a computer with no movie player at all.
As I was thinking about this project, I realized that I would have difficulty sending an EXE to anybody via email. Most servers won’t allow that to pass, and most servers are smart enough to see through attempts to disguise the EXE by changing the extension to something more innocuous like DOC or TXT.
