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Photo to Movie Blog

Graphic Objects in Photo to Movie 4.6

Posted July 14th, 2010 by Chris

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Photo to Movie 4.6 introduces graphic objects to the Photo to Movie timeline. A graphic can be used to add a logo to your slide show, add more complex text than what Photo to Movie’s built-in text system supports, or add other types of adornments to your slide show.

Adding a Graphic

Much in the same way that you can add titles to your slide show, you can now add graphics. A graphic would typically be a company logo, a photo, or even an SVG file.

To add a graphic, choose the menu item Title > Add Graphic… and choose your PNG, GIF, TIFF, JPG, or SVG file. As with titles, if you have a photo selected when you add the graphic, the new graphic object will be linked to the start/end times of the photo.

Once the graphic is added to the timeline, you can edit the scaling (anywhere from 0.2X to 4.0X). And as with titles, you can edit the in- and out- effects when the graphic enters or exits.

Graphic Resolution and Scaling

Since Photo to Movie can render your slide show to a variety of video sizes, Photo to Movie will inevitably end up scaling the graphic. So the size of the graphic cannot be directly mapped onto the size of the movie.

Instead, a graphic with a height of 480px is considered to be full height for the movie. This means that if your logo is 240px tall, it will appear as 50% the height of your movie. You can make it larger or smaller by scaling it using the graphic inspector.

If you want to have a logo which is full resolution for 1080p video and you want it to take 25% of the height of the video, the logo image must be at least 1080 x 25% = 270px tall. Then you would scale it to fit to 25% of the height of the video.

The nice thing about this technique is that if you decide to render to the movie to 720p, the graphic will still appear as the same relative size in the output video.

Using SVG files

You can also use an SVG file as a graphic.

When using SVG, the SVG width and height must be set in the base svg element. As with image files, 480px will represent the full height of the movie.

An advantage of using SVG files is that you do not have to worry about resolution issues since they are resolution independent.

A limitation of SVG files in Photo to Movie 4.6 is that they cannot load external resources such as images.

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