Change duration of many clips in timeline at once?

[Mike Velte]

Premiere’s still handling is very clunky, your duration concern, lack of random transitions and motion controls. I use ProShow Producer to do stills to DVD…much more elegant.
You have 2 options;
1. Start over with a new default still duration (preferences).
2. Nest your still sequence in a new sequence and change the duration of that.

[Boblafleur]

Thanks Mike.

I guess I was uninformed about Proshow Producer. I just looked at their website, and it looks pretty capable. How does it fare feature-wise for sound editing capabilities? One of the reasons I used Premiere is I wanted total control over everything, and I need multiple sound layers. I have some voice clips I need to synchronize with specific slides, and in many cases I don’t even want the whole clip I’ve been provided with, but need to trim it, or use multiple sections from within the same clip. I need to have background music track as well, but lower the volume during the voice clips. This si all do-able with Premiere, although it’s time consuming, fussy, work (unfortunately, I’m a perfectionist with this type of thing). I’m not sure that ProShow has the audio capabilities I need.

How is ProShow’s render times? The current project I’m working on has 450 or so slides, with subtitles on many of them, and mutliple audio tracks. Render times in Premiere Pro 2.0 are starting to get quite long.

For your #2, I’m not sure that I understand how this would work. If I have 3 stills in my timeline, each 5 seconds, and I make a subsequence of those, it will be 15 seconds. Then if I change the duration of the subsequence to 18 seconds (6 x 3) how will it change the duration of each slide? It will just make the last one 3 seconds longer.

Thanks for your help.

– Bob

[Mike Velte]

ProShow only allows for 1 audio track, although you can import video clips and lay an additional audio track under that. You can trim audio and adjust levels.
What I have done though is to export a Mpeg 2 for DVD, demux that into elementary streams, import the finished video only file into Premiere and then create the audio.
Proshow shines in that it gives you complete control over durations…just select multiple stills and change their duration. You can drag a multiple selection so it ends at the end of song.
It also makes motion very easy, including random motion and random transitions.
Special text effects are very easy.
Render times on Dual core 1.8 are just shy of 2X real time.
Try a demo!

2. changing the duration of a nested sequence will result in 6 seconds each, although transition duration will also increase a bit.

[Boblafleur]

Ahh…. I see for the nested sequence thing. That’s a clever trick. It wouldn’t be TOO hard to go through and change the duration of all of my transitions before making the nested sequence. The biggest problem is I’ll lose all of the individual clips which I use as reference for working with the audio (obviously, I’d want to created the nested sequence to alter the durations before laying down the audio clips)

– Bob

[Mike Velte]

[BobLafleur] “reference for working with the audio”

Change the timeline track’s display mode to “Frames” so you can “see” the individual pics.