Tips and Tricks

(Windows Tips, MAC OS coming later)

Folders

The first thing to remember is make sure you use a proper folder structure. On your drive, the first folder can be named anything you like. Folders below that folder can be considered any kind of category system you want. For example, the root folder could be called "SomeFolder" and sub folders in that could be categories of your images, ducks, cats, people, what ever.

The root folder you use is not visible to SSB, only the first sub folder it finds and below. So, if you have an image set, and you want to select all the images in that set, you would have a folder for example "C:\SomeEvent\Images." The images folder would hold your category folders in SSB. You would want to create sub folders there for each category. If you wanted to select all the images in that set,, you just select the "Images" folder. If you wanted to select just Cats, well, of course you would be really selecting the folder named "C:\SomeEvent\Images\Cats."

When you select a folder node in SSB, that is considered to be an image set.

Audio

SSB supports MP3, FLAC, and WAV audio files. In order of least to best for audio playback, is, MP3 (worst), WAV (Very good), and FLAC (Best). WAV being the most popular.

Your audio folders should be set up similar to the image folders, but, having a root folder, then subfolders for the Artist, in that folder, the album and in that folder the songs for that album. Artist can have many albums, and albums can be multi disk, so each disk would be a folder.

Generating Timelines

There are four ways of generating timelines. Each having a unique work flow and usage. When you select an image folder node in SSB, that is an image set.

You decide on the duration of the video in one of three ways. The duration of the video can be determined by the total audio duration used, or by image count, or by manually choosing the video duration.

Manual generation, is were you manually select each individual audio and image sets and do each step of creating a slide show of images, moving the images and audio to an export folder and then generating the XML and EDL files. You click separate buttons to perform this process. You click "Use Audio" on the audio tab. On the Image Management Tab you click "Create Slide Show", then "Move to Exports", then "Generate XML".
Random generation is actually semi random. You first select a genre of the audio, then select the image set, then by clicking the Generate Random Slide show, it will create the timeline in one step, after you set the timeline name. This generation will perform each step automatically. Think of it like this, if you set your video duration to one hour, then clicked this six times, you just created six hours of music and video.
Single Audio Random You first select the genre of music, then select your image set, then after clicking the generate button, it will randomly pick an audio item and generate a slide show just for that audio file.
Single Audio Batch This is more specific in that you can select the individual audio you want from the Audio Tab and populate the selected Audio List Box and SSB will batch process each song. You start the process by first selecting your audio, then the first image set, then click the generate button and after the first timeline is generated, you will be prompted to either continue the batch with a new image set (Yes), continue using the selected image set (No) , or, you can cancel (Cancel). By selecting Yes at the prompt you can then select a new image set and continue the song generation, and do this for each song till all your selected songs are used. If you choose "No", it will continue the batch with the last selected Image Set. You will have separate time lines for each song. You will, or can have, a different image set for each song.

When you have a lot of timelines, for example in DaVinci Resolve, you can render each one as is, or create a new time line with all the generated time lines together. Similar to a Play All button on a commercial DVD.