And a day mucking around with video editing
I found some of the fade throughs too slow, almost painfully slow.
I was watching some stuff on making this sort of thing and one chap, a musician, actual aligned the transitions with the music. Like the vide was just another instruments... With your experience, you'd probably be quite good at that.
2¢
Thanks for the comments. It took me about 2 hours to make the video, but probably a further 3 hours to edit the photos first in Lightroom. The cathedral ones also had to go through Topaz Denoise as they were hand held shots at ISO 6400.
This is what is known as an Audio-visual Sequence, usually abbreviated to AV. I use dedicated software to create the sequence - it's a bit like PowerPoint only a lot more flexible. You can bring up the audio track and put in timings etc to align the transitions to the music track. The software then generates the MP4 when you hit the 'publish' button.
Transition timing is a tricky subject. There is an error with some of the transitions which I need to investigate. There is a 'global' default transition in place, which is overridden on a lot of slides as I've applied a bespoke animation to them. For some odd reason to be investigated, the bespoke transition is on top of the global making it excessive. I was preparing it to present last night, so I didn't have the time to go in and work out why. I'll re-edit it and sort that out.
There are several competing factors when working out transitions and it's quite a task to get them all in balance. The first constraint is the length of the piece of music if that's what you're using for audio - obviously you might have a spoken track. How many images have you got and how do you fit them into the time? If the transitions are too fast, you can feel like you're being hit and it gets very tiring. You also don't get to appreciate what might be a complex image. Too slow is also an issue.
In this case, I needed a piece of music that was around 5 to 7 minutes long. I opted for the Respighi which is a quiet piece, so machine-gun style transitions wouldn't be appropriate. It's 6m55s - although the ending is so quiet you don't really hear anything after about 6m40s.
I did start off with about 10 more slides than ended up in the AV. That meant fewer slides for the time. I ended up discarding them as I felt they were either duplicative, or didn't work in some way. For example, colour balance in the cathedral was a real issue as it has mixed colour temperatures: the natural light through the glass is very blue and the high pressure sodium lighting is distinctly pinkish. If you set the white balance point for one or the other, it leads to odd colour casts. I need to re-edit some of those and work on that, which will be a few hours in Photoshop as it'll need some of the capability in PS to sort it out.
I'll load another example up to Google Drive and post a link to get a comparison.
I'm a novice at creating AVs - I hadn't done any until earlier this year...
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