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.
- My method is to select a suitable piece of music, considering the time that i have been allotted or chosen.
- 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.
- I set up a model slide, with the background usually black, and the size according the the device being used to present.
- 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.
- 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.
- I duplicate that slide for each image and copy and paste images into the slides as I go.
- I finish with on slide that will fade to black.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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