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Problem #1: Getting the slideshow assistant to do what I wanted.
I was finally able to get this working, thanks to the reply from user myguggi.
Basically, if you want to transition from one piece of music to the next at a certain point in the slideshow, you need to do some math and some guessing. Here's what I did.
First of all, the content. These are pictures from my wedding. There are really four sets of pictures - getting ready (before), the wedding (including procession), the recession (including family pics), and then all the pictures of my wife and I outside the church. The goal was to get a certain piece of music to play for each set of pictures.
The restrictions were somewhat rigid. We knew exactly what two pieces of music we wanted for the second and third set, and ideally the fourth. The first was flexible.
The second piece of music was exactly 5 minutes long, and we had 78 pictures to show. That works out to about 3.85 seconds a picture.
The third piece of music was exactly 5:06 long. Using 3.85 seconds a picture, that means we have room for 79 pictures. There were originally 94, so I had to cut out 15 pics to make it fit.
The first set of pictures has 49 pics ... at 3.85 a pic, that music had to be about 3:08 in length.
For the fourth set, we decided on a piece of music that was 4:49 in length, which meant 75 pics. We had 85, so we had to cut out 10.
The end result is 281 pictures with music totalling 18:04 in length. Doing the math works out to 3.86 seconds per slide .. close enough for it to work.
That was most of the math. Now for a little more math, and some guessing.
Apparently the option in the slideshow assistant for setting the length of each slide to "automatic based on music length" is broken. When I picked that (if it was enabled ...), it made the slideshow 14:49 in length, which didn't work at all. User myguggi pointed out that if I manually set the length to 3.86 seconds, it wouldn't work because the transition from slide to slide actually cut out time. Apparently the "auto' setting doesn't account for that either.
To solve this problem, I subtracted 14:49 (what it made) from 18:04 (what it should have been) and got 195 seconds. That apparently is how much time is cut out from the transitions from slide to slide. Since there are 281 slides, that's 1.44 additional seconds per slide.
Adding 3.86 to 1.44 gives 5.30 seconds per slide. Plug that in the time per slide, and it suddenly became 20 some minutes long - way too long. From there, I slowly worked the length down until I found "the sweet spot", where the preview shows the length of the slideshow to be as close to 18:04 as possible. In this case, 4.55 seconds per slide ends up ends up being a total length of 18:03. 4.56 seconds per slide made it around 18:10 in length.
The end result is a slideshow that is exactly what we wanted, with the music transitions happening exactly where we want them. Now if only it didn't take almost a week of working on it at night after work to figure it out.
Problem #2: Getting PC data on a DVD that plays in a DVD player.
On this same DVD of our wedding, we also wanted to include pictures from our wedding and a power point presentation of how we met (I'm from Pgh, PA, she's an Australian citizen, we met in Montana 2.5 years ago).
MyDVD provides an option for saving your pictures from your movies to DVD. (Which, BTW, doesn't seem to stay off once you use it once ... I've since turned it off, but it still creates them.) I didn't want that option because the pictures I wanted available for printing weren't the same pics as from the slideshow. Also, that doesn't help any with the power point presentation.
One option we I explored was exporting from Microsoft Powerpoint to a format the MyDVD could read. PNG seems to be an option, but it didn't work correctly. Some of the slides had our captions on them, some of them didn't (a powerpoint bug, I'm surmising).
Users sinecure99 and james_hardin provided the clues I needed to get this to work. What I did was:
1) Make a folder somewhere on my PC.
2) Put the data content that I wanted, as I wanted, in that folder. In this case, one was 'Wedding Pictures' and the other is 'Powerpoint Presentation'.
3) Use MyDVD to export the movies to the same folder. That creates a 'VIDEO_TS' and a 'ROXIOPLASMA' folder as well.
4) Use the "Data Disc" option under "Data" from the "home" application in EMC 8 to make an ISO image.
5) Use the "Burn Image" option under "Copy" from the "home" application in EMC 8 to burn that ISO image to a DVD.
The end result is a DVD that plays perfectly in my Sony DVD player, and has the data on it that any DVD ROM drive should be able to read. (I assume ... haven't tested it yet on a plain DVD ROM drive.)
Like all movies, I recommend burning it to a DVD-RW first to make sure it works the way you want, else you end up with a nice DVD coaster.
Thanks everyone for your help.
Charles.
