alan v Posted January 22, 2003 Share Posted January 22, 2003 Does anyone know of a windows program that can play all sorts of different files (music, stills and movies) in one play list? Ideally, I would like to play a movie (it's 20 mins long, on the hard drive) at specific times, and in between showings have slides with various music tracks (wma, mp3 etc) playing at the same time. I would like to tell the computer that while the slide show is playing, it has to play a random selection of tracks from a playlist. It would be nice to crossfade the slides too! The movie has it's own sound, so the slides and the music would have to stop at the same time. For a moment, it looked like microsoft movie maker would do the trick (although the music wouldn't be random), but the full screen resolution is far to low - not even 800 x 600... I'm going to search the web now, but if anyone has any experience of this sort of thing... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryson Posted January 22, 2003 Share Posted January 22, 2003 On a mac - I'd say that Final Cut Pro (or even iMovie) could do most of that (not the random music, though...and you'd have to output video via firewire to a monitor) But anyway...I think movie editing software is a way to go. Adobe Premiere is available for PC - never used it myself - but I guess it has comparable features to FCP, so should be able to do the business for you. You could probably also fudge it in Powerpoint (again, not sure about the random music) with a bit of work. :blink: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peter Posted January 22, 2003 Share Posted January 22, 2003 You could probably also fudge it in Powerpoint (again, not sure about the random music) with a bit of work. :blink:Providing you can do the sound another way (?cd on random?) try Resolume (Click here) - you can speed up / slow down tracks, although it has to be done manually (press 1 to activate a certain clip/still, 2 to activate the next, etc) - takes a bit of getting used to, but could potentially be quite good (still in Beta stage) Or you could just fudge it in powerpoint - thats what im doing with a similar project. Or of course you could hire a vision mixer? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alan v Posted January 23, 2003 Author Share Posted January 23, 2003 Thanks guys, useful stuff. For tonight the video is working on powerpoint, and a human being (v1.2) is stopping the music. It's for a month long media screening thing, so I can't have that happen every night! I've downloaded Premiere, and it is a great program, very intuitive (it uses seconds rather than FPS for a start!). My only problem with it so far is that the output seems very blocky, I need the final image to be at least 800 x 600 - but I'm sure that's me being stupid - digital editing is a whole new world: as I told my boss, if I could do it, I wouldn't be working in an arts centre! The random music is, as far as I can tell, bloody difficult to achieve. I shall let you know how it goes... alan. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
richard Posted January 23, 2003 Share Posted January 23, 2003 I use premiere, but through a third party product for all encoding/playback, I think that premiere is really designed for use sith other peoples products, so its built in encoding is rather basic sadly. The DV500 card is very good though I would say, quite expensive but very quick, and gives real time full quality composite/s-video outputs! Richard Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alan v Posted January 24, 2003 Author Share Posted January 24, 2003 Well, I finally achieved a kind of solution, using a combination of powerpoint, powerpoint viewer, mediaplayer and the Windows task scheduler. I've added a little switch on the command line for media player that forces it to open and play a playlist set to shuffle. Media player is triggered by the scheduler, which then does a follow on cue (I wish!) of triggering power viewer which launches the slide show (which isn't random, but almost was powerpoint has no random button). The scheduler starts a second powerpoint presentation and stops the mediaplayer and slide show. This is then repeated at different times throughout the evening. Scheduler is ok, but it has issues - I could start mediaplayer on startup or logon, but couldn't specify a time of day to stop - I could only say "after x hours", which isn't great if you can't gaurantee that the PC will be turned on at the right time each day. It's an ok solution, but is very messy, and I'm not confident it'll last the month. Apparently Macromedia's Director is worth a look... alan. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Posted January 31, 2003 Share Posted January 31, 2003 I use a program called wavecart. It is mainly used in radio stations, but I find it very useful for theatre playback. You can play up to 10 playback carts at the same time, or in sequence or in a random play list, Any cart can be triggered by a middy command. Go to http://www.broadcast.co.uk/catalogue/. Its not cheep, but it is good. They also have a cheaper product called mixxotipa, but I am up on all its functions. If you want to go into the big boys league, Try SFX from Stage Research. That will do all you want and shed loads more. Hope it helps David Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Posted January 31, 2003 Share Posted January 31, 2003 Oh, and you can have 100's of audio files in a cart. David Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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