Animating Slides

Take a gander at this discussion located in the link below. While it's for ProShow Producer/Gold, the concepts are EXACTLY the same (I haven't updated the content to mention Photopia). One small differentiation though is the concept of position. In ProShow, pan and position were used interchangeably. In Photopia, POSITION is the layer position but with a value that can change how a layer responds to a tilt angle (it's a kind of visual perspective difference). Then, there's the Horizontal and Vertical Pan values. Technically they're the same thing as position ... sort of; except that in Photopia, the Horizontal / Vertical Pan values aren't affected by the perspective change experienced with "position." (a topic for another day).

https://fpvp.wordpress.com/proshow-discussions/pan-zoom-rotate-center-width-and-height-relationships/

The position of the layer is reported by reference of where the layer's physical center is located relative to screen center. If the layer and slide aspects are both 16:9, there's a 1:1 relationship between the two. Therefore, 50% of the layer is on each side of the center of the screen. Therefore, a Pan value 0f -100 moves the layer such that the right side of the layer is located at the left edge of the screen. If you have keyframe 1 with a position of 0 and a keyframe 2 with a position of -100, you've translated the layer's position across the screen between those 2 keyframes as just described.

-Dale

@im42n8

Thank you for your speedy response!

@sharon-stein

Hi Sharon, you might check out the tutorials that Jennifer from Choice Slides has posted at Choiceslides.com . 

This one may help but there are many, https://choiceslides.com/blogs/photopia-tutorials/what-is-a-keyframe  

and https://choiceslides.com/blogs/photopia-tutorials/q-a-motion-path-bezier-handles-smoothness-oh-my  

Bob

@robert-mcmurray

Thank you so much - that was very helpful.

@sharon-stein

Jennifer has some great tutorials, doesn’t make up for no user guide but really helps. 

Bob

@robert-mcmurray

Don’t count out tutorials and other information that has a legacy from ProShow (Producer or Gold). The fact of the matter is that the original code for ProShow is legacy for Photopia. That also means that many features between the two are the same. Horizontal / Vertical Pan is the same as Pan in ProShow (Horizontal / Vertical Position is virtually the same). Rotate, Rotate Center values, outline, shadow, color adjustments ... they’re all basically the same (some are enhanced over what was provided by ProShow. The crop feature has changed (improved overall) ... but I think it has some room for improvement. What is nice is that most of the image aspects we are exposed to with our various camera’s are now selectable (3:2, 4:3, 16:9, 2:3...) instead of having to do the math to figure out what the pixel dimensions should be to get the desired aspect (Some camera’s images are not exactly 3:2 or 4:3...) ... or you may only want a segment of an image at the desired aspect. Too, if a crop aspect is selected in Photopia, one can maintain that aspect easily while resizing the cropped region (impossible to do in ProShow). ProShow allows a custom method based on a percent of the left/right/top/bottom of the image ... odd.

Almost all features related to keyframes are the same in Photopia as they are in ProShow. For all practical purposes, most people won’t know the difference. Color stops for gradients are almost the same too. For all practical purposes the feature set for editing gradients is exactly the same as for ProShow.

If you want to get up to speed quicker with making video slideshows, those ProShow-related tutorials can be invaluable resources. You should be able to find many of them (ProShow was around for a long time) on the internet. Jennifer is not the only source of tutorials. With respect to Photopia specific tutorials, she’s the best resource however. Too, she’s been doing tutorials of this sort for some time now (for Photodex and Photopia). Don’t count out those other sources for creating slideshows though. Plenty of information on how to create slideshows for ProSh0w is still relevant to creating slideshows within Photopia. It’s a different user interface, to be sure, but the relevant features for most slideshows are the same. If you want to make the most of Director / Creator, a possible resource is to look at what came before. Photopia is still  ... new.

The Photopia folks do hope to have a manual someday ... but won’t commit to a date. The learning curve for Photopia (Director/Creator) is a bit steeper than for ProShow. However, once you get the hang of the interface, it’s not all that bad. You can be productive almost as fast in Photopia as with ProShow. It’s the added feature set provided in Photopia (Director/Creator) that takes some time to get used to before you can get productive with them.

ProShow never did document how to use Rotate Center beyond values of plus/minus 50 (layer corners/sides). As such, almost nobody knows how to use it to effect (including most long time users of ProShow). It’s possible to share rotation  points on the screen between many layers or slices that have different scales, aspects, locations, and size... and you won’t ever find that information from anyone working for Photopia anytime soon. However, on a side note, effects that were possible only with coordinated rotation points are now easily created using a Group. But using rotate center values beyond a layer’s boundary can be useful for any number of useful effects...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInewWcP0qM&t=3s

-Dale

I have used ProShow Producer since its inception . . . I am just about to throw my computer out the window.  This program is NOT an easy progression from ProShow.  Sorry!  UGH!