Making Videos and Slide Shows

The information in this article applies to:

• MediaWorks
• Cakewalk^® PYRO^® Plus

Video - In a slide show, videos play until their conclusion.

Still Photos - Each still photo appears for as many seconds as you select.

Music - You can also add one or more music files to your video or slide show, and set how long each one plays, and at what volume. If the videos have their own soundtracks, and you want to add additional music, you can adjust the volumes of both audio sources independently. When you've finished creating your video or slide show, you can burn it to DVD or Video CD and play it on a home DVD player.

Steps for creating a Video or Slide Show
1. Click the PhotoVideo tab.
2. Use the Folders and Files panes to select the videos and/or photos you want to use, and add them to your project (drag them to the Photos and Video list that's in the bottom pane, or select them and click the Add to Project button).
3. You can change the order of the files in the project by selecting one at a time, and then clicking the up or down arrows on the Edit:Move button, or the Remove button if you want to remove selected files from the project.
4. You can rotate photos (not videos) by selecting them, and then clicking the right or left arrows on the Rotate button.
5. Adjust the display time of any still photos in your project by selecting one file at a time and double-clicking the Length field. You can set the display times of all the photos to the same value if you want.
6. If any videos in your project have soundtracks, you can adjust their volumes by double-clicking the Photos and Video list's Vol column, and typing in a value.
7. If you want to add music files to your project, use the Folders and Files panes to select the files you want to use, and add them to your project (drag them to the Music list that's in the bottom pane, or select them and click the Add to Project button).
8. Adjust the volumes and lengths of your music files by double-clicking the Music list's Volume and Length columns, respectively.
9. If you want any of the photos (not videos) to change to the next photo at a certain place in the music, start playing the music, and when you reach the time when you want the photo to change, click the Match Beat button. MediaWorks adjusts the length of the photo so that it changes at the desired time.
10. Insert a blank disc into your burner, click the Burn Disc button, and select either Burn DVD or Burn Video CD from the popup menu. The first time you burn a DVD (or use the Tools-Activate Video DVD Burning command), MediaWorks displays a link to a website to get an activation code for video DVD burning. Follow the directions to activate video DVD burning.

Note: If you use a rewritable disc to burn with, MediaWorks erases any data on the disc before burning.

11. Select burning options in the dialog that appears, and click OK to start burning.
MediaWorks starts burning your disc, and displays a progress bar.

Note: Burning a video DVD can take a significant amount of time (this is normal in all DVD authoring software). Burning is basically a three-step process that includes encoding your project into an MPEG file (this can take as long as the finished video takes to play), authoring the file structure (this is usually a short procedure), and burning, which goes as fast as your DVD burner can handle the amount of data you're working with. Since DVD videos require at least one gigabyte of data to play properly, it takes just as long to burn a one minute video as it does a twenty minute video, since your burner has to use at least one gigabyte of space on the disc anyway.

When you're through burning your disc, you can play it in a home DVD player, or on your computer, using the included DVD-player software.

You can't overlap or fade-out music files in the PhotoVideo tab, but if you want to do that, you can overlap files in the Make Audio CD tab, and save the files as one new file that you can add to the bottom pane of the PhotoVideo tab.

Keywords: techkb, CWMW, CWPP, TechTip, Video, slideshow, album