MAKING SLIDE SHOWS IN ADOBE PREMIERE by Deeanne Edwards 04/26/03

This is not meant to teach you how to use Premiere. It is simply a collection of notes I have found to be important in making slide shows. Also, I use a Mac and Premiere 6.5. PC users made need to vary some things.

SCANNING

Images displayed on a digital projector have an aspect ratio of 4:3 like a computer monitor set to 1024x768 pixels. Slides have an aspect ratio of 1.5 in to 1 in or 3:2 and must be converted or cropped. This can be done one of two ways:

SCANNING

            Images displayed on a digital projector have an aspect ratio of 4:3 like a computer monitor set to 1024x768 pixels. Slides have an aspect ratio of 1.5 in to 1 in or 3:2 and must be converted or cropped. This can be done one of two ways:

1.      If your scanner allows it, scan directly at the appropriate size. I scan everything at 1600x1200 (horizontal) or 900x1200 (vertical). DPI does not matter, just pixels. Open these in PhotoShop, and adjust as you normally would.

2.      Scan or have your images scanned at native ratio with a file size of about 6 mb. This is about 1800x1200 pixels. Larger is fine as well as you will make them smaller anyway. In Photoshop, select the crop tool and set the size at the top to 1600px by 1200px or 900px by 1200px and crop how you like it to look. Adjust the image accordingly i.e. levels, curves, unsharp mask etc.

Vertical images- Because digital projection is a fixed size, say 1600 by 1200, vertical images cannot be taller than 1200. It is not the same is rotating a slide on end and making the vertical taller than the horizontal. To maintain the proper image size and proper aspect ratio, you must add black sides to make it 1600 wide rather than 900 wide. One way to do this in PhotoShop is to open your 900 by 1200 vertical image (or whatever size). Go to Image-canvas size and change it to 1600 pixels wide. You will now have two sides that are dark blue. Use the magic wand tool to click on one blue side and shift click on the other to select both. Make sure your foreground color square is black. Go to Edit-Fill. Fill with the foreground color at 100%. Now the sides are black and the image size should be 1600x1200. Save it.

Hint- If you have several of these images to change, make an action of the above steps, including saving it to that folder. This will save tones of time.

Image size- This is still sort of up in the air. The projector we will be using is 1024x768 but the final output will probably determine the size of images we use. Premiere can easily downsize but cannot upsize. I am using 1024x768 tif images in my show. I have not seen a difference in using tif, psd or jpeg.

File Management- What I do.

            I save my raw scans in one folder, as I scan them. As I crop and adjust an image in PhotoShop, I save it in a folder called "finished" or "1600x1200". I then resize the image to 1024x768 and resave it in another folder. You can make an action to resize and save as well. You can even do a Save for Web and save at that stage and keep those small files in an additional folder. It can be helpful to use those smaller files when doing your editing to save time with rendering etc. You will have to replace them later however.

IMPORTANT- In Premiere, it is crucial to keep everything involved in a project in the same folder. Items can be arranged in folders within that folder i.e. titles, images, music etc. Your Premiere project does not actually contain your files, it simply contains the reference for those files and it must know where to go find them every time you open your project. Whenever you copy your files to a disk or CD to put them on another computer, all your files, including preview files, must be included. Also, you cannot run a Premiere project from a CD. It must be put onto a hard drive first (or desk top on a Mac) and run from there.

PREMIERE

Editing Mode- Choose Single Track Editing rather than A/B. Choose this in the menu on the timeline window (arrow at far right, top). Within the timeline window, to the right of video 1 is a symbol of two squares. If you click that you get video track 1 A and B so it appears and works like A/B mode. In single Track, when you drag in your transition, the two images automatically adjust to overlap and make a smooth transition.

Audio- It is best to import AIFF or WAV files. MP3 files are compressed and lower quality.

Preferences- Under General/Still Image, there are a few things to set before you import anything. The Default Duration sets how long each slide will be up for. This is a matter of taste and may depend on your music if you are syncing slides. If you have worked with your music and know about how long the duration of your slides will be, use it here. If not, 4 secs is a good choice. 3o frames/sec times 4 secs is 120. When editing later, the duration of each slide can be changed. Deselect Lock Aspect.

Transitions- In the transitions pallet, you can select a transition then use the menu arrow to choose "Set selected as default". Cross dissolve is the most common dissolve transition. In the dialog box, you can set the default duration at 30 frames for a 1 second dissolve. Your setting will depend on your music and preference. I stick with 1 second as default.

Settings- The settings used for editing can be changed at any time. When you first start Premiere so open a new project, you may get the dialog box for "load settings". It doesn't matter what you choose. You will change them anyway. When your project is open, go to Project- Project Settings-General.

General- Choose time base of 30, time display is 30 fps N0n Drop-frame time code.

Video- Compressor is Sorenson Video 3, depth is millions, frame size can be 640x480 for editing. Frame rate is 15, pixel aspect ratio is Square pixels 1.0, quality is high and limit data rate to 2500K/sec

Audio- Choose 48000 Hz, 16bit stereo, uncompressed, interleave at 1 second, enhanced rate conversion at best.

Keyframe and rendering- Check box for optimize still, fields should be "no fields", keyframe every 15 frames.

Capture- ignore

You can change your settings at any time, but you sill usually need to render the show after the changes are made.

Timeline

After you have imported your images and music into your project, there are several ways to get them onto the timeline. To organize your images, you can make a storyboard, which is just like a light box. Go to File-New-Storyboard and import your folder of images. You can move them around and sort all you like, possibly while you listen to your music. You can do some or all of them. You can also import your folder of images into your project. With the project window selected go to file-Import-folder and choose your folder. You can also import your music. Put your music into the timeline simply by selecting it in the project window and dragging it to the audio 1 track. You can also drag images to the video tracks one at a time, again, possibly while listening to your music. That is the hardest and most time consuming method. Here are two short cuts.

1.      If you are not syncing your slides to your music and your images will all be similar in duration with the same transition, go to menu arrow off the storyboard and choose "automate to timeline" Select either whole or part of the bin. Place sequentially, at the beginning and click on "use default transition". Click OK. Your images will now miraculously appear in the timeline, in order and with a transition (dissolve) between every slide. You can tweak each image or swap transitions at will.

2. If you are syncing to music, drag your music to the timeline and edit if you need to. Listen to the music (push play in the monitor window) and add a marker each time you think a new slide should come up. The keystroke is Shift-Option (Alt)= (all three at the same time). You an keep holding down shift and Option (or Alt) and just push = each time you want a marker to appear. Now go to the storyboard and do automate to timeline. This time, choose Placement at unnumbered markers and leave gap for insufficient material. You cannot add transitions. Push OK and each image goes in at the appropriate place and for the appropriate length of time to fit the music. Again, you can go back and add transitions, and tweak the images to land right on the beat etc.

 3. A combination, and what I usually end up doing is to use your markers to determine where the images should go, but add them manually as you put together your show.

Save often.

OUTPUT TO FINAL SHOW

If you want to see what your show looks like full screen, after it has been rendered, make sure your work area (yellow line) covers your entire project. Go to file-export timeline-print to video. Your show sill automatically play at 720x480 with the NTSC codec which is standard for video. But it's a good way just to view your show full screen..

Another option is to make a Quicktime movie. File-Export timeline-Movie. The method to do this depends on the computer you are using.

For Mac using Premiere 6.5, try the following:

Under General, choose Quicktime File Exporter-advanced settings-options. Settings- choose same settings I've already given you. For size, try 880x660. Sound as above for audio. OK, OK. Then "next" to video. Audio, keyframes etc are as above. Name it and ssve it. It will take a while to make a movie. Open it in Quicktime Player. If you have Quicktime Pro, you can view it full screen. Large images look the best, but only a very fast computer can play the movie. My Mac G4 plays 880x660 and maintains very smooth motion. At 1024x768, the motion becomes choppy.

NOTE-

Using the club's PC, which is very fast with a fast video card, 1024x768 was no problem, using the settings as above.

Another option is to create several, shorter sections of movies i.e 30 seconds each, and stitch them together in Quicktime. You can even add audio separately. This sometimes works better for larger, complex movies.