Create Slideshow pg 59 Guide to PE 9

[Jordanmphoto]

I'm following the Muvipix Guide to PE9 and have gotten lost somehow. I planned to create a slideshow out of a bunch of stills I have in the media panel. I'm going to be inserting clips, audio and effects to it, but for now I just want to put the stills in there at 2-3 sec intervals with no music and preferably will have a pan and zoom effect.

The problem is, when I right click I am not offered a menu choice for "Create Slideshow". Nor can I find it anywhere in the menus. I know there has surely got to be a way to do this, but I seem to be missing something. Do I have a bad installation?

I also tried "Instant Movie" after finding an option for pan and zoom slideshow. When I do this I get only one slide, despite having selected a group of them. I set the duration for 2 seconds, but it ignores this. I think it is defaulting to an instant movie theme, but I'm not sure what I should be able to change or not from the theme. I want something simpler than this, like the Create Slideshow option described in the Guide.

Can anybody offer some advice on this?

[Jordanmphoto]

Oh dear, I already have another question.

I went to the Elements Organizer and found a way to make a slide show from there. I have 303 slides and sorted them by Date Oldest First, but it is sorting them according to the date when last edited rather than the original date when each pic was shot. How do you set the sort order so that it is by the original date rather than the edited date?

If I can't sort by original date, it's gonna take a long, long time to rearrange these in the album. So I have to ask: if I go to all that trouble will the album order stay as it is or will it be lost as soon as I exit the program?

[Chuck Engels]

Hi Jordan,
Welcome to Muvipix

Take a look at this topic
viewtopic.php?p=76671#p76671

Be sure to read the last post.

I'm sure Steve will be along to lend a hand shortly

[Chuck Engels]

Might want to check this out also
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/premiereele ... AE891.html

[Steve Grisetti]

Which question should we start with, Jordan? Do you want to create your slideshow in Premiere Elements or in the Organizer?

If you're in Premiere Elements, first ensure that you're in the Project panel. NOT in the Media panel. The Project panel includes just the media clips that are in your project. The Media panel is connected to your Organizer and will show you every media clip on your computer.

Select several stills in the Project panel. THEN when you right-click you'll see the option to Create Slideshow.

As for the Organizer -- yes, it will list your stills according to the date they were saved to your computer rather than the date you actually took the photos. That's just the way the Organizer works, unfortunately.

And, hey, thanks for supporting the book! I hope it's helping you out.

[Jordanmphoto]

Thanks for the welcome, Steve. I've been here before, but it was a few months ago.

Well, let's see. I'd prefer to create the slideshow in PE, but went to the Organizer because I couldn't create one in PE. Now I realize that I misunderstood pg. 59 because it said to use the "Project media panel" and I didn't quite get it that it meant I should use the "Project" panel instead of "Media" panel. Yes, I now see the "Create Slideshow" option in the Project panel. Now I know! So where do you get the most options and flexibility for slideshows: in the Organizer or in PE?

I was able to limit the files visible in Organizer by creating an album out of the media I had in the project. I may be wrong about this, but I believe that the albums can only be ordered from within the Organizer. Is this right? I'm really surprised that there is no way to sort the files by metadata in a program this sophisticated. I have a program called ACDSee Pro, which organizes and fixes photos, and it easily sorts files by any of the metadata in the files. In that program I can generate a view which shows me the slides in order of creation date/time, but so far I can't translate it to PE. I can only go back and forth between the two programs. I look at the order in ACDSee Pro and manually drag each file to the correct position in PE, which is time consuming and I'm already taking so long to produce this video that I couldn't possibly make enough money per hour to keep myself alive. I'm wondering how others are shortening up this process when they have a big slide show. Ideas?

Another question: Once you've created an album, can you add more files to the album? I've been scratching my head because I wanted to add 3 files and could not discover a way to do it. In Windows one usually finds some kind of place to add files and a button to go browse for them, but I don't see this anywhere. I could only add files by deleting the album, adding the media in the project and then recreating the album. But of course, this would be a bad idea if I'd just spent hours setting up the album order. I'd lose all that work just to add some files. Ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

I have a program called ACDSee Pro....... In that program I can generate a view which shows me the slides in order of creation date/time........ I can only go back and forth between the two programs. I look at the order in ACDSee Pro and manually drag each file to the correct position in PE, which is time consuming........ Ideas?

I cannot help with your specific question, I'm afarid, as I am neither a PrEl pr PSE user; but one way to work around this toing and froing between applications, and probably not the solution that you were seeking for the situation you describe, is to use a two monitor set. ACDSee open on one, Premiere open on the other.

[George Tyndall]

I went to the Elements Organizer and found a way to make a slide show from there. I have 303 slides and sorted them by Date Oldest First, but it is sorting them according to the date when last edited rather than the original date when each pic was shot. How do you set the sort order so that it is by the original date rather than the edited date?

If I can't sort by original date, it's gonna take a long, long time to rearrange these in the album. So I have to ask: if I go to all that trouble will the album order stay as it is or will it be lost as soon as I exit the program?

With both my PSE7 and PSE9 Organizers, all my stills are organized by the date and time shot, despite the fact that each and every one has been edited. Note, however, that when I edit my JPEGs, I also Save (not Save As) them as JPEGs, not PSDs. Are you doing the same? (In the past, I would keep the original JPEGs and then Save As PSDs before creating the show, but I don't do that any more. Now, I simply replace the original JPEGs with the edited versions, which leaves the date and time of the shot unchanged. I create PSDs only in the very rare instance when I intend to make a paper print that must be highly-edited--that makes use of Layers, etc.)

[George Tyndall]

I may be wrong about this, but I believe that the albums can only be ordered from within the Organizer. Is this right?

Yes, as far as I know.

I'm really surprised that there is no way to sort the files by metadata in a program this sophisticated.

See my earlier reply regarding the format you use to save.

Another question: Once you've created an album, can you add more files to the album?

Yes. Just drag the icon for that album onto the slide in the Organizer

[George Tyndall]

So where do you get the most options and flexibility for slideshows: in the Organizer or in PE?

My work consists almost exclsively of slide shows, and after much trial and error I am convinced that the optimal method is to begin the slide show in the Organizer and then Send it to Elements, where there are, by far, more options and flexibility.

The chief reason for beginning in the Organizer is that the slide show editor has this "magical" button called Fit Slides to Audio.

Fit Slides to Audio.JPG

Click that button and, in an instant, all your slides are timed so that you show begins, and ends, precisely where your audio track begins and ends.

Another reason for beginning with the Organizer is that it automatically adds pan and zoom to each slide--thereby obviating the needs to keyframe each and every slide in Premiere!

Slide Show Prefs.JPG

Suggestion: Always choose Fade as the transition as it will become Cross Dissolve in Premiere. Later, on the Premiere Timeline, you can change any and all Cross Dissolve transitions by dragging your alternative choices to the Timeline

After saving the slide show to the Organizer, send it to Premiere Elements, which is where you get to really show your skills. There are a multitude of features and tools in Premiere that do not exist in the Organizer's slide show editor. That is where you can alter all those 5-second slides and 1-second Cross Dissolve transitions as your audio track dictates, once you've right-clicked the show on the Premiere Timeline and clicked Break Apart Slide Show.

Here's one more important reason to start the show in the Organizer and save it there: If a client likes the first show, she may ask whether the same slides can be used for a different favorite track of hers. In such as case, all you need to do is to open the saved show in the editor, do a Save As, delete the old track and add the new one, click Fit Slides to Audio, etc, and send it to Premiere for yet another chance to show your skills, as the change in audio will cause you to make the slides "dance" differently.

Fact: I've churned out as many as 30 different slide shows--each with a different track--from the same set of slides, and depending on the length and complexity of the audio, I can sometimes do it in a matter of minutes.

P.S. If you wish to change the order of the slides for each different audio track, doing so is a "snap" in the Organizer's editor: Just use the button labeled Quick Reorder in the above image to drag the slides into whatever new order you prefer before sending the show to Premiere.

P.P.S. Here is why I also save all my PREL files: If the client requests that I create a new version of a show but using the same slides and tracks, it's a simple matter to peform a Save As of the file and then use different tools, effects and transitions to create an entirely different version of the show.

[Steve Grisetti]

I agree with George. If you want an easy, powerful tool for creating slideshows, use the one in the Organizer. It gives you a number of options for creating your slideshow automatically or for adding flourishes manually. When you select the Output option, you can select Send to Premiere Elements, and it will drop this finished slideshow right onto your project timeline! (You can right-click on it and break it apart for further editing if you'd like.)

We've even got a couple of nice articles and tutorials on creating slideshows on our product page. Just do a search on the word "slideshow." "Slideshow Creation (Pre7)" (a subscriber's only product) will even show you all four ways to create a slideshow in Premiere Elements!

It's easy to add more media files to an Album. The easiest way to do it is to just drag the Album from the Album panel onto the clip or clips you have selected in the Media Browser/Photo Browser area. Voila!

Once you've created an Album, you can then filter views in Premiere Elements Organize/Media panel to display only those clips in that Album by selecting it from the drop-down menu at the top of the panel.

Does that help?

[Jordanmphoto]

With both my PSE7 and PSE9 Organizers, all my stills are organized by the date and time shot, despite the fact that each and every one has been edited. Note, however, that when I edit my JPEGs, I also Save (not Save As) them as JPEGs, not PSDs. Are you doing the same? (In the past, I would keep the original JPEGs and then Save As PSDs before creating the show, but I don't do that any more. Now, I simply replace the original JPEGs with the edited versions, which leaves the date and time of the shot unchanged.

Hmmm. Not sure why there's a difference between your PSE9 Organizer and mine. The way yours works is how I would expect it to work, because we so often want to organize slides chronologically. But mine doesn't work this way: When I set it to order the files by date, it quite definitely uses the last saved date rather than date and time shot. I always use JPEG's so using different file format is not the problem. I do a SAVE AS when I crop or edit the shot because I like to retain the original shot under the original name. I guess what you're saying is that making changes to the original file instead of saving it as a copy will result in the original date being kept. However, I don't think that's happening here. If I look at the dates on the thumbnails in the Organizer it has August 2011 dates for all the slides, even unedited ones, and they were all originally shot in May and June of this year. If I view the metadata in the properties window, I can see that the "Date Time Original" data is correctly shown as May or June 2011, but the "Date Created" data has the latest date that it was saved, eg. August 23, 2011. If your program is reading the "Date Time Original" and mine is reading "Date Created" could this be something I have set wrong in the program settings?

Steve, yes all this info was quite helpful and I am just getting ready to try it. So far I seem to be doing okay sorting the out of order slides by using albums in the Organizer. I found I could set up the desired order of my final slide show pretty easily in an album and that's probably way easier than trying to reorder them in the Timeline. After writing this, I will create the slide show using the Organizer. The arguments for doing it first in the Organizer seem convincing because I do like the pan and zoom effect, but I didn't want to have to keyframe each of them. Good ideas!

[Jordanmphoto]

Uh oh. This didn't work quite as we thought. Here's what happened:

1)I made a slide show in the Organizer. It was quite nice. Just what I wanted. 3 seconds for the slide and 1 second for the transition and a pan & zoom effect. The only way I saw to send it to PE was "Output" and the program said it would send the slideshow to PE "for editing". Okay, it sent the slideshow to PE, but it sent a video clip rather than a set of stills with transitions. So how do you edit that? I plan to overlay some video clips with the stills as well as add music, so I want to be able to fiddle with the individual slides, that is, lengthen the duration, make them less opaque, etc. But you can't edit a video clip except to slice the whole thing, as far as I know.

2)I decided to try making the slide show from PE. I selected the album in the media panel and then went to the Project panel, which is the only place from which I have the choice "Create Slideshow". But the Project panel does not show the album order that is in the media panel filter box. In fact it is organized alphabetically, which won't work at all.

3)I tried again to create an Instant Movie slideshow from the Media Panel. I didn't mention this before, but every attempt I've made for an Instant Movie has brought over only one photo, even though I selected the whole bunch. I would love to know how to get a group of slides into an Instant Movie, but for now it doesn't seem to work.

4)Finally, I hit upon the only thing that is workable: From the media panel (filtered with my album) I selected all the slides and dragged them into the Sceneline. You get a choice of dragging them in as individual stills or a grouped show. I chose the grouped show because you can apply transitions to it (but not pan & zoom). At first it looked like there was only one slide in the Sceneline, but upon closer inspection I spotted a small arrow on the right side of that one slide. This arrow expanded the Sceneline to a series of scenes with transitions, as normal. For anyone who does this, the Sceneline will be very slow to load a large number of slides and will "stall" or refuse to show more than part of the slides. If you go to the Timeline and come back again, it will eventually load them all, but sloooowwww.

It looks like drag 'n drop is the way to go if you want to create an editable slide show. For some reason, the show in PE runs a lot faster than the Organizer slide show, given that you are using same duration numbers. I got a nice comfortable speed in the Organizer by using 3 seconds duration with 1 second duration. To get roughly the same thing in PE I went to 6 seconds with 2 seconds transition (Actually, PE won't do a 1 second transition).

The only problem with the drag 'n drop is that there is no pan & zoom effect. Is there a way to apply this to all the slides at once or do you have to do a keyframe for each slide? (not doing that for 290 slides, I'm afraid).

[George Tyndall]

Uh oh. This didn't work quite as we thought. Here's what happened:

1)I made a slide show in the Organizer. It was quite nice. Just what I wanted. 3 seconds for the slide and 1 second for the transition and a pan & zoom effect. The only way I saw to send it to PE was "Output" and the program said it would send the slideshow to PE "for editing". Okay, it sent the slideshow to PE, but it sent a video clip rather than a set of stills with transitions. So how do you edit that?

Right-click on the clip, select Break Apart Slide Show and--voila!--you have individually-editable slides.

The only problem with the drag 'n drop is that there is no pan & zoom effect. Is there a way to apply this to all the slides at once or do you have to do a keyframe for each slide? (not doing that for 290 slides, I'm afraid).

Keyframe as desired the first of the 290 slides then click Copy. Loop the remaining 289 slides to select them all and then right-click to select Paste Attributes and--voila!--all have the same P&Z. However, I personally prefer the above method for all the reasons I stated previously.

[George Tyndall]

If your program is reading the "Date Time Original" and mine is reading "Date Created" could this be something I have set wrong in the program settings?

I'm not in front of my machine at the moment, but our difference may be due to differing settings in the Adobe Downloader. I'll get back to you later on this..