How To's

How to Synchronize Music in Your Slide Show

Overview

This document is meant to shed light on how the different synchronization methods work and what they do to your show. Synchronizing makes the pictures match the length of the audio, allowing ProShow to do all the math for you. There are 5 ways to synchronize your pictures to match your music and they are explained below.

Sync Show To Audio
This feature is best used when you have made a quick show that contains only images, because all slides in your show will have their timing averaged out to meet the duration of the entire soundtrack, meaning all audio tracks in your show.
When using this feature, keep in mind that your total images need to be somewhere in the range of the soundtrack length, otherwise you will have 20 slides that are 30 seconds long in order to fill your 10-minute show.

When you click Sync Show to Audio on the Audio dropdown menu, it displays a message telling you how long each slide will be. You can always select Edit > Undo if you do not like the resulting slide-length, so try it to see if you need to add or remove a soundtrack.

NOTE: Look above the top right corner of the preview window. Displayed here are the totals of slide time versus audio tracks. If we synched this show to the 1 minute and 17 seconds of audio, our 50 slides would be reduced to about 1 second each. That might be too fast, so we might have to add another track or take away some pictures.

Sync Selected Slides
This feature is best used when you have a show that contains images and title or credits caption slides, because only the highlighted slides in your show will have their timing averaged out to meet the duration of the entire soundtrack, meaning all audio tracks in your show.
When using this feature, be sure that you select a considerable number of slides because only the marked slides will be adjusted to make your entire show match the end of all music. This allows you to omit your first few title-slides from the selection, so that their timing won't be adjusted.

Therefore, synchronizing the selected slides is something you might do a couple of times as your build your show song by song, especially if you like to separate slides with captions.

NOTE: To highlight multiple slides in the slide list:

Left-click the first slide you want to select
Use the scroll-bar to find the last slide you want to highlight
Hold down the Shift key on the keyboard
Left-click the last slide you want to select
Let go of the Shift key.

Sync Selected Slides to Audio Track
This feature is perfect for people who like to drop in all pictures and all music first, before customizing the show. Sync Selected Slides to Track opens a dialog asking you what audio track you want to sync to.
The time needed to match the length of that track will be added to or removed from the highlighted slides and averaged out over the existing slide times. Before you synchronize, make sure your images are grouped according to the right audio tracks.

For example, you have dropped in all your holiday pictures from one year and you have added 1 Halloween song and 1 Christmas song. If you have your Halloween pictures first, simply highlight all of the Halloween slides and choose Sync Selected Slides to Track on the Audio dropdown menu. Then you will be able to choose your Halloween song, and it will make all the Halloween pictures exactly as long as that song.

Record Slide Timing
If you want to match the slides to the beat of the music, this feature is for you. It allows you to change the length and timing of the transitions.
Once you click Start, the audio track will begin to play. Then simply click on the beat when you want your picture to change. The transition time is determined by how long you hold down the key or mouse button.

Click to Enlarge
Click the image to the left to enlarge your view of the screenshot.
The blue marks in this screenshot indicate the transitions. We lengthened some of the transitions to make the fades last longer. The white gaps between the blue lines represent how long the slide will display. Remember that even if you apply the changes, you can always use the Edit > Undo command if you don't like the results.

TIP: Before recording, click on the transition buttons below the number keys. This allows you to preset the corresponding number key as a 'hot-key' for that transition. Use the keyboard numbers just as you would your mouse button, and create your entire show's transitions as you play the music!

Complete Control Using the Timeline View

This method is not a single-click synchronization; it is a way to gain total control over the slide times and their relation to the music. Press TAB on your keyboard from the main ProShow work area, and you will see the slide list change into Timeline mode. You can always switch back by pressing TAB again. In this view, you are seeing your slides displayed in time, and by dragging and dropping the borders of the images, or their transitions, you are actually changing the slide time.

Use this feature if you want complete control over the timing of your images. Most people who build shows in such detail will first import the audio then image after image, carefully matching each image to the green or blue waveform.

In the example above, the bass-drum hits four times before the song starts. After zooming into the audio waveform with the mouse-wheel positioned over the audio, we are able to make it seem like the drum was making these images appear on beat. Notice that we put blank images between the drum hits, so the images transition into black, before the next image cuts in right on the beat.

Tip: When you hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard, then start dragging one of the edges of the images, this changes the behavior of the dragging action. It determines what positions are included with the change, and what parts remain static. This requires a little practice to get adjusted to, but keep in mind that if something doesn't behave like you want it to, simply use the Edit > Undo feature, then try the same thing with Ctrl held down.

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