Synchronise Slides to Sound

  • Thread starter Thread starter Michael Scheck
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M

Michael Scheck

Synchronising slides to music in Powerpoint is not possible, sound and
slides almost always drift apart over time. Is this still true for
Powerpoint 2003?

Michael.
 
[CRITICAL UPDATE - Anyone using Office 2003 should install the critical
update as soon as possible. From PowerPoint, choose "Help -> Check for
Updates".]

Hello,

PowerPoint 2003 doesn't support the kind of timing/synchronization that you
are looking for. For media we can only synchronize the beginning of the
sound to another event. We can't control the beginning of other events
based on how many seconds of a media file has been played. The feature for
this degree of timing control is just not built into the product. This is
mostly because two completely different architectures are used. For
multimedia playback we use system API calls (PowerPoint has very little
control over what happens after the media has begun to play) while
animations and transitions are controlled using PowerPoint's built in
procedures.

So, for example, if you want to sychronize animations and transitions with
something other than just the beginning of media playback (on same slide or
over multiple slides), you will get inconsistent results from system to
system or even on the same system (depending on what data is still cached
in virtual memory).

If some kind of more deterministic, system independent, multimedia
synchronization with animations and transitions is important to you (or
anyone else reading this message) for Microsoft to consider for some future
version of PowerPoint (or if it's not possible, perhaps features within
PowerPoint to help you avoid trying to sychronize something that we can't
guarantee will always be synchronized), so you don't have to resort to
exporting to other formats (movies, shockwave flash, etc.), which would
result is some loss of formatting and/or fidelity, don't forget to send
your feedback (in YOUR OWN WORDS, please) to Microsoft at:

http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/suggestion.asp

As with all product suggestions, it's important that you not just state
your wish but also WHY it is important to you that your product suggestion
be implemented by Microsoft. Microsoft receives thousands of product
suggestions every day and we read each one but, in any given product
development cycle, there are only sufficient resources to address the ones
that are most important to our customers so take the extra time to state
your case as clearly and completely as possible.

IMPORTANT: Each submission should be a single suggestion (not a list of
suggestions).

John Langhans
Microsoft Corporation
Supportability Program Manager
Microsoft Office PowerPoint for Windows
Microsoft Office Picture Manager for Windows

For FAQ's, highlights and top issues, visit the Microsoft PowerPoint
support center at: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=ppt
Search the Microsoft Knowledge Base at:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=kbhowto

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An idea just came to me, what do you think of it:

Producer has the ability to sync to sound, so why not use it to bypass
the lack of syncing in Powerpoint? I would however need a special
template, one that shows the slides in full-screen without any windows
and nothing else. I don´t know if this is possible. Maybe somebody has
experiences with this?

Taking this idea further, maybe this could this work:
- In the slideshow Powerpoint opens a Windows-Media audio-file with
embedded scripting in the background and runs it
- The script from the audio-file triggers the slides. Voilá!

This would probably be something for the VB-gurus out there....

I´d like to hear what you think of these ideas, if it is feasable at
all.
Michael.
 
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