Lightroom and slideshows w/music...

ElginetPhotos

After spending hours on tutorials and spending a load of money on this program I finally produced a slideshow, with music! I was impressed. It was all cued right and everything. Then it came time to export it.

Lightroom apparently won't export the music WITH the slideshow. I was like......"what good does this do me if I can't put this on a disc"???

Everywhere I looked (in the Adobe site) says it can't be done. I find that totally misleading from what they advertise about this program.

In my searches of solutions someone suggested a Microsoft Freeware program called Photo Story 3. I've downloaded it but haven't played with it yet. Looks pretty basic though.

My question to you Smugheads out here is what have you used to do this?
I have a slideshow that's 211 (hi-res) images long and runs about 13 minutes.
I have the music set for it (on Lightroom anyway) and it's set perfect BUT I apparently can't use it.

Any suggestions??? I'm under the gun here and need to get this done by next week.

Thanks kids!! Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!!

Pittspilot

ElginetPhotos wrote:

After spending hours on tutorials and spending a load of money on this program I finally produced a slideshow, with music! I was impressed. It was all cued right and everything. Then it came time to export it.

Lightroom apparently won't export the music WITH the slideshow. I was like......"what good does this do me if I can't put this on a disc"???

Everywhere I looked (in the Adobe site) says it can't be done. I find that totally misleading from what they advertise about this program.

In my searches of solutions someone suggested a Microsoft Freeware program called Photo Story 3. I've downloaded it but haven't played with it yet. Looks pretty basic though.

My question to you Smugheads out here is what have you used to do this?
I have a slideshow that's 211 (hi-res) images long and runs about 13 minutes.
I have the music set for it (on Lightroom anyway) and it's set perfect BUT I apparently can't use it.

Any suggestions??? I'm under the gun here and need to get this done by next week.

Thanks kids!! Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!!

You are right, LR won't let you do that. As I understand it, it's a licensing issue - you have no way of demonstrating that you have a license to distribute the music (you do have a license, don't you :-)).

Thinking of the shows I see, most people seem to use iDVD or a more specialist program.

Sweeper

Pittspilot wrote:

You are right, LR won't let you do that. As I understand it, it's a licensing issue - you have no way of demonstrating that you have a license to distribute the music (you do have a license, don't you :-)).

Thinking of the shows I see, most people seem to use iDVD or a more specialits program.

You might want to give Photodex a whirl. They have the Gold version and the Producer levels. Photodex has its own audio system built into the program and although I have only made one significant slide show with it, it was burned to DVD as well as uploaded to their own customer use website. I have not tried it yet but, my understanding is that a slide show made with Photodex is uploadable to your SmugMug site. Can't hurt to try it. www.photodex.com
I believe they have trial versions available. But keep in mind that music is an issue with every site if you are not using "royalty free" music. Legalities are expensive these days !!

...Steve

KED

ElginetPhotos wrote:

After spending hours on tutorials and spending a load of money on this program I finally produced a slideshow, with music! I was impressed. It was all cued right and everything. Then it came time to export it.

Lightroom apparently won't export the music WITH the slideshow. I was like......"what good does this do me if I can't put this on a disc"???

I went through this exact frustration myself trying to do and end-of-season football slideshow. I was disappointed to learn that LR's Slideshow Module's utility only shows up inside LR, i.e. for displaying the slideshow on a LR-equipped laptop, which means it has no utility for me whatsoever.

I should have checked your profile before commencing this reply, but if you're on a Mac, the way to go is to export your slideshow images from LR into iPhoto, and then go make an iMovie using those iPhoto images as your content. Then, you can create your soundtrack by importing out of your iTunes library. It took me quite a while to get up the learning curve on iMovie, but I got there. I'm specifically referring to iMovie '08; maybe it can be done in iMovie '06 but I could NOT get it to work in iMovie HD.

If you're on a PC, I can't help you with particulars except to say that in my desperate search for a solution, I came across several seemingly impressive slideshow programs that I would happily have purchased just to get my thing done, but they were all PC-only. Google, or the other posts here, should guide you to one that will suit your purposes.

Good luck!

digismile

I ran into the very same problem not long ago. What a let down! I don't think it has anything to do with licensing, as Photoshop Elements does a pretty good job of putting together a slideshow with music.

In my case, two members of my family have Elements. Kind of makes you made that the cheap consumer product has a better slideshow function than LR or Photoshop!

[Deleted User]

I have used MS Photo Story and while it does give you a few options on how the pictures are displayed (panning in, panning out etc.) it very limited when it comes to adding music.

I have also used MS Movie Maker (which comes std. on XP and Vista). Unfortunately displaying the pictures is limited but you have more room to work with music.

I have tried with Adobe Premier Elements, but I struggled to get it how I wanted although it can be done.

Could you not making the slide show in Lightroom and then export it and use MS movie maker to add the sound track??

Tim

Pittspilot

KED wrote:

I went through this exact frustration myself trying to do and end-of-season football slideshow. I was disappointed to learn that LR's Slideshow Module's utility only shows up inside LR, i.e. for displaying the slideshow on a LR-equipped laptop, which means it has no utility for me whatsoever.

Good luck!

You can export a slideshow to a non-LR machine, just save it as a PDF slideshow, runs on all platforms (the recipient does need Acrobat Reader, of course). It works well, but the file size tends to be quite large.

Cheers

PS don't do this if you want to sell prints to clients, I have had customers not buy after seeing the pdf slideshow. I learned an expensive lesson there........

KED

Pittspilot wrote:

You can export a slideshow to a non-LR machine, just save it as a PDF slideshow, runs on all platforms (the recipient does need Acrobat Reader, of course). It works well, but the file size tends to be quite large.

Cheers

PS don't do this if you want to sell prints to clients, I have had customers not buy after seeing the pdf slideshow. I learned an expensive lesson there........

There is also the JPEG export option in LR, but neither that nor PDF includes the soundtrack, which was the main thrust of this thread. And now you're telling us that the quality of the PDF export isn't even very good!

I really only care about the first two modules in LR, and they rock, but it's disappointing to learn about the rather extreme lameness of the slideshow module anyway.

Pittspilot

KED wrote:

There is also the JPEG export option in LR, but neither that nor PDF includes the soundtrack, which was the main thrust of this thread. And now you're telling us that the quality of the PDF export isn't even very good!

I really only care about the first two modules in LR, and they rock, but it's disappointing to learn about the rather extreme lameness of the slideshow module anyway.

I agree, I was commenting on the post that implied a dependency for the host machine to have LR to play back a slideshow......

KED

Pittspilot wrote:

I agree, I was commenting on the post that implied a dependency for the host machine to have LR to play back a slideshow......

I'm pretty sure we're on the same page, but realistically, LR DOES depend on the host machine having LR, otherwise it's not your soundtracked slideshow, just a sequence of silent images (with limited (PDF) or no (JPEG) transisitions) . . . pretty big difference to anyone who's gone to the trouble to add a soundtrack in the first place. Again, we are not in disagreement here.

Peace and happy holidays.

bobrandklev

Photoshop Elements is an easy and quick way to create a slideshow with music and export to many formats.

Photoshop Premiere Elements is the "video" version and I've just completed a mix of video and photos with background music etc.. There is a learning curve but it's very powerful.

Heck download a 30 day trial of Elements to create a slideshow with music and save to mpg as a test demo to get through this project!

Bob

KED

bobrandklev wrote:

Photoshop Elements is an easy and quick way to create a slideshow with music and export to many formats.

Photoshop Premiere Elements is the "video" version and I've just completed a mix of video and photos with background music etc.. There is a learning curve but it's very powerful.

Heck download a 30 day trial of Elements to create a slideshow with music and save to mpg as a test demo to get through this project!

Bob

Harkening back to my original reply on this post, incredibly, Elements is not available for Mac! That's why I asked the OP what his OS was. This is easy if you're on a PC (although I wouldn't trade my Mac for the world).

jfriend

KED wrote:

Harkening back to my original reply on this post, incredibly, Elements is not available for Mac! That's why I asked the OP what his OS was. This is easy if you're on a PC (although I wouldn't trade my Mac for the world).

You have me confused:

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac, released Jan 16, 2008.

KED

jfriend wrote:

You have me confused:

Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac, released Jan 16, 2008.

Sorry to have stated historic facts as current truth. When I wanted to get Photoshop in '07 (without a clue how to use it and still with very limited abilities) my only option for Mac was CS3 @ $699 (and Adobe told me that there were no plans to make Elements available for Mac, which maybe explains my original glibness). The good news is that that led me out of Aperture and into Lightroom, and I have never looked back from that decision.

jfriend

KED wrote:

Sorry to have stated historic facts as current truth. When I wanted to get Photoshop in '07 (without a clue how to use it and still with very limited abilities) my only option for Mac was CS3 @ $699 (and Adobe told me that there were no plans to make Elements available for Mac, which maybe explains my original glibness). The good news is that that led me out of Aperture and into Lightroom, and I have never looked back from that decision.

Glad you found Lightroom.

For future reference, Elements has been available for the Mac for a long time so you apparently got some bum info from Adobe. It isn't exactly the same product as on the PC (because of competition from iPhoto) as it has the full pixel editor, but not the organizer. Mac versions typically lag the PC versions so maybe that's what somebody was confused by.

KED

jfriend wrote:

Glad you found Lightroom.

For future reference, Elements has been available for the Mac for a long time so you apparently got some bum info from Adobe. It isn't exactly the same product as on the PC (because of competition from iPhoto) as it has the full pixel editor, but not the organizer. Mac versions typically lag the PC versions so maybe that's what somebody was confused by.

Now you're jogging my memory -- Elements was available for G4 Macs but not for Intel Macs (that would be me), so maybe it still isn't??? No matter, I'm good and with the convergence of CS4 and LR UIs, I feel confident that I will get my moneys' worth out of CS4 and it s progeny over time.