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Aperture 3.4.5 misbehaving

Avatar Eric Jervis
I produced a slideshow with Aperture on Monday which was perfect; however,I've been struggling since Tuesday to produce another. I've produced a few of them over the years and all to the same pattern; e.g.18 slides with each one displayed for varying times so as to match the soundtrack. When I watch it in Aperture it plays perfectly but after I've rendered it to .mov it does not. What happens is that each slide remains visible for progressively shorter periods as the show progresses. i.e. slide 4 will be half a second too short and slide 16 is 35 seconds short, so you are hearing 16 whilst watching 18. Something has made Aperture unstable and I wasted a whole day yesterday testing various theories to no avail.
GRRR...
I just did it again to check every last detail, shortening Slide 4's duration by half a second, waited 45 minutes for it to render to the desktop, and it is now perfect GRRR... Has anyone else had this problem?

Re: Aperture 3.4.5 misbehaving

Avatar Eric Jervis
Cracked it! The program is unstable, and you have to be very careful; each show lasts about 8 minutes, but if you alter for instance slide 8 you do not want to sit through 4 minutes watching before you find out if you've altered it enough, so I'd been hovering the cursor towards the end of the slide and hitting the spacebar to restart it. This does appear to work,
except that there seems to be a considerable difference between where you think you've placed the cursor, and restarted the slide from, and where it actually starts from.

Re: Aperture 3.4.5 misbehaving

Avatar Eric Jervis
I'm sick to death of this poxy program, one day it works and the next day it doesn't. Has anyone had recent experience of an alternative? I must be able to adjust the length of each slide's duration individually.

Re: Aperture 3.4.5 misbehaving

Avatar Tony Still
I have used iMovie for this in the past.

If you haven't used it before, there is a fair bit to learn. The principle is to import each of your photos, add them to the timeline and then adjust their duration. You drag in your music and position it from the start of the "movie" and you're nearly there. You can drag transitions to the "joins" between pictures to get fades or whatever.

The power of using iMovie is that you then get a lot of control over durations and audio synching as well as how you export the movie that is your slideshow.

Re: Aperture 3.4.5 misbehaving

Avatar Eric Jervis
Thanks Tony, I've been considering iMovie although I think I've tried it before. I'll have a go at it in the morning.

Re: Aperture 3.4.5 misbehaving

Avatar Eric Jervis
I've finally succeeded after two days in producing a decent one in imovie 9. However, it will only play in the timeline and not in the viewer. I'm on 10.11.6 El Capitan, and I can't find any way of getting an image into the viewer. I've tried exporting it, which takes an hour, but the result is a black screen with soundtrack. Any ideas will be appreciated...

Re: Aperture 3.4.5 misbehaving

Avatar Eric Jervis
I got fed up and went back to Aperture. I finally got a good one at midnight, and rendered it this morning. What finally worked was to adjust slide 1, return to the start and test it; if OK adjust slide 2, return to the start and test them, and so ad infinitum. It takes forever and you get sick and tired of listening to the same soundtrack repeatedly, but it does work. Hallelujah.

Re: Aperture 3.4.5 misbehaving

Avatar Tony Still
With your iMovie version, I presume you mean the viewer in iMovie won't show it. If that's the case, I think anything you see in the timeline is an illusion. You do need to drag the current position (vertical line) on the timeline to somewhere other than the end of the movie before clicking the play button to show in the viewer. The space bar then pauses/restarts the playback.

Each photo will need a duration in iMovie to make it into a (non-moving) movie clip; from memory, this defaults to 5s but make sure you have the values you want and that the overall duration on the timeline is what you expected.

You could also try some different export formats but it rather sounds like your problem is in iMovie so that probably wouldn't work.

Anyway, pleased to hear that it's now working in Aperture.

Re: Aperture 3.4.5 misbehaving

Avatar Eric Jervis
Hi Tony, it is a realistic illusion; everything works just as you say, but invisibly, all that plays is the soundtrack. I'm wondering if this has anything to to with the 'event library'. All that's in there is an Ed Sheeran concert from 2017, filmed by my daughter, and which I'm reluctant to delete because I don't really know what I'm doing!

Re: Aperture 3.4.5 misbehaving

Avatar Tony Still
Just to confirm what you've done with your photos:
You need to import the photos to the iMovie library, then drag them on to the time line. They will line up in order, parallel to the audio track that is clearly working.

Each photo must have a duration associated with it or it won't show (it appears for no seconds, which is not very useful). You should then see a string of photos, the ones with longer duration may appear more than once to "fill in" their duration relative to the audio track.

Re: Aperture 3.4.5 misbehaving

Avatar Eric Jervis
Gulp! I've been dragging them from the desktop to the timeline. I need to start again don't I?

Re: Aperture 3.4.5 misbehaving

Avatar Eric Jervis
On the other hand I seem to have solved the Aperture problem, or rather to have reconciled Aperture with GarageBand. Firstly, do not attempt to playback Aperture in the timeline, it only plays back accurately in fullscreen, and the Ken Burns effect makes it difficult to see when the slide should end. Secondly, GB divides each second into 25 parts; make certain to place the page turn dead on a second or half second as the slide duration in Aperture is only adjustable in half second increments. Thirdly, with a pencil and paper make an accurate record of the number of seconds between each page turn, which is the required duration of that particular slide. Once it has played back perfectly in full screen mode, click on 'Export' and relax for about an hour. I thought I'd write it all down so that next month when I've forgotten it all I can come back here to refresh my memory. Thank you for your attention Gentlemen.
 
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