Creating Slide Shows to Music with PowerPoint

[Tronhard]

One of the most popular activities at the Victoria Camera Club in BC, Canada, was members' night. There people are given a time slot and present their photos on whatever subject they so choose, without being judged on quality of their images. I think this form is tremendously important: there is a decent constituency who want to share their joy of photography without criticism, so have both options available is a very inclusive feature. I wish NZ camera clubs would embrace that. In Victoria it was, by far, the most popular monthly event.

One of the skills people developed in these sessions was to be able to create a show where the images were synchronized to music. Now, there are specific apps (which I forget) to do this sort of thing: but for myself, I chose to use PowerPoint because I already have it and am familiar with the package. Furthermore some organizations where you may want to show may not want outside applications installed on their systems or let you use your own computer, but most of them are likely to support PowerPoint. If not, it is possible to use a packaged version of the show, use the PowerPoint viewer program or convert it to a video.

1. My method is to select a suitable piece of music, considering the time that i have been allotted or chosen.
2. From there, I break the music down into its phrases, giving me the number of them and that is the number of images that I shall show to sync the images with the music.
3. I set up a model slide, with the background usually black, and the size according the the device being used to present.
4. By dividing the total time for the music by the number of phrases I get a rough time for each slide, so I set that in the transition settings, and i use the same transition throughout. There is a trap here to have multiple kinds of transitions, but I have found that this can just be a distraction. Personally, I just use the fade feature.
5. I set any other characteristics of the default slide, such as size and style of any text to be displayed. That has now set up my slide template.
6. I duplicate that slide for each image and copy and paste images into the slides as I go.
7. I finish with on slide that will fade to black.
8. I insert my music, trimming it if necessary and setting up any characteristics so that it plays across slides and may fade out on the final slide if the music it too long. Preferably, the music will naturally end with the last slide. I make sure the music track is in the same folder as the show.
9. Then the fun part begins. One thing I have noticed is that music that is not computer-generated has tiny variations in the length of each phrase, either by design or just the variations in playing. So I have to go through each slide adjusting the transitions so that the images change on the end of each phrase. This can take a considerable time and is not a complete solution - read speeds of different drives can cause the music to get out of sync, so you need to test the show on the device you want to play on.
10. Once everything is running smoothly, I create a PowerPoint Show file that will encompass both the video and the music. It is here that the benefit of having the music in the same folder works because one can then copy the PPS file to any computer and it will not depend on finding a specific folder for the music.

If one wants to change pictures, as often happens, back in the PPT file, I usually right click on the image and select to Change picture and find the image I want. That means that the sizing is likely to be a simple fit. When done, I re-save as a PPS file.

To give you an idea, I was asked to create a show for my partner's memorial, held by the University of Auckland. It had time limits,so a reasonably short piece of music was deemed appropriate and I had to use software that was already on their computers which included PowerPoint. For the link below to work properly, you will need to download the file from my Microsoft OneDrive and play it on your own computer, otherwise the music is likely to not sync properly. Even so, it may vary a little between runs: if it does, just stop is and restart - it usually comes right then. The first run is usually good.

To DOWNLOAD THE FILE
When it appears on the Onedrive screen, go to File in the OneDrive screen and select SAVE A COPY. Once it is downloaded to your hard disc, run it from there.

THE DESIGN:
I used a monochrome image with some text at the side, then it faded into a colour image to 'bring her alive', and the music faded in with the colour. I made every effort to match the image to the words of the music, so I had to find quite a wide range of images. Most of these were mine - the old ones and some rather crappy ones were not! At the end, I faded the image to monochrome and then out completely as I let her go.

I hope you find the technique interesting and possibly useful if you do not want to invest in a custom package.
https://1drv.ms/p/s!AlaHQ-SSh94RjEcm...1dD6N?e=Peqm2J

cheers: Trevor

[davidedric]

Thanks for sharing that, Trev. I can see the sense of basing it around PowerPoint given so many of us have it.

I have done a couple for the local camera club (though I left year or two back), as well as presentations to other groups. I'm a bit paranoid about things not working on the night, so I took advice and went with PicturesToExe (PTE). On one level I couldn't really justify the expense, but on the other hand the results have been rock solid.

PTE itself only runs on Windows (or it did last time I looked), but the output is an executable, which can be either in Windows or Mac format. It's really a tool for professionals, but the basic learning curve is pretty short

I'm only mentioning this in case anyone is interested, not in any way to denigrate the PowerPoint route!

[Tronhard]

Hi Dave

Thanks for your comment. Yes, absolutely i see this as a solution for those who don't want to get into doing this kind of thing on a significant scale. I like PowerPoint because I worked on the interface way back in the early 90's and have been using and teaching it until I retired, so I am comfortable with it. For most people, the fact that it is often included with their software suites and does a lot of other things as well means that it is an economical way of doing a show. It IS possible to create an executable file or a video format from PowerPoint, but I didn't bother for the purposes of what I was doing, and the university system had an aversion to strange EXE's being uploaded to their system, which is fair enough.

[Manfred M]

Years ago I did a video editing course at the local community college. The instructor was a one of the editors that worked on putting together a well-known comedy television show. The advice that was offered was to "edit to the soundtrack" and if that meant a music track, the cuts between scenes needed to occur on the beat.

A slide show is nothing more than a video where the scenes are made up of a series of still images, so the advice still holds. It takes a bit more time than simply merging a sound track and a set of still images, but the results are definitely going to be noticed.

I happen to use Adobe Premiere Pro for my work and it displays both the audio and video timelines, so it is fairly easy to see where the cuts between scenes need to go; the peaks of the soundtrack.

A very thoughtful memorial show you put together, Tevor. It is definitely part of your healing process.

[Tronhard]

Hi Manfred:

Thank you on multiple counts. I hope the sound sync behaved itself for you. I agree about the sound track - sticking images up on PowerPoint or any other equivalent is easy, but getting the timing to match the phrases in the music is a lot trickier than it initially would appear. The music that I chose for my presentation "She" is most commonly associated with Charles Aznavour, but he is all over the place in terms of keeping to the beat and phrases so I had to use a version by Elvis Costello, and even then there were variations.

[lunarbo]

Trev -

I skipped over the technical stuff and have just looked at your PP presentation.
Thank you for sharing that with us. I have a real sense of Hilary's spirit and how her life was meaningful to so many people.
Un beso.

[Tronhard]

Trev -

I skipped over the technical stuff and have just looked at your PP presentation.
Thank you for sharing that with us. I have a real sense of Hilary's spirit and how her life was meaningful to so many people.
Un beso.

Hi Barbara:
Thank you so much for your kind thoughts and words. Yep, she was a hard act to follow - Cambridge grad, spoke 9 languages, brilliant academic and a better bike mechanic than me. Kind, gentle, brave - a real fighter.

I still miss her every day, but then I pick up a camera and go out and find some wonder in the world to make my eyes smile...

[digiadsiran]

very usefull thanks

[billtils]

Enjoyed your post Trev, very well done and an excellent tribute.

I've been fairly successful in my club's AV competions and much of what you say resonated. My early attempts, including a first place, were made using Apple's Final Cut Pro for the simple reason that the AV unit where I worked used it and I just happened to have a copy even after I retired. it had more than enough functionality and since I was reasonably familiar with it was easy enough to use - for a bit. A few years passed and I was looking at a costly update or use something else - and "use something else" won for the simple reason that as a Mac user I had an up-to-date and free copy of Keynote so I switched to that. Wish I had done so earlier - it was a breeze to use and won me the silverware last year.

There are loads of programs out there, but bottom line - I completely agree with Trev, if you have a copy of Keynote or PP available they can work very well as is clearly demonstrated by his linked video. One issue with the "loads of programs" is platform compatabilty and my local club gets round that by setting the condition that no matter what was used to create the video, the final AV must be able to run on Macs and on Windows.