## Imagination DVD Slide Show Creator

### Giuseppe Torelli

### Tadej Borovšak

This manual describes version 2.0 of Imagination.

Copyright © 2009 Giuseppe Torelli

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. The complete license text is available from the Free Software Foundation.

September 2009

## Introduction to Imagination

Imagination is a lightweight DVD slide show creator developed in C with the GTK+2 toolkit and Cairo. Imagination is designed to be be fast and easy-to-use. Its user interface is clean and intuitive, and does not include any confusing or useless options by default. It requires the ffmpeg encoder to produce the movie file and libsox to import the audio files. Yes you don't need any other third-party software!

## New Slideshow Project Format

Starting from this release, 2.0, Imagination's slideshow project format has changed. The old format will be recognized and slideshows saved with this format will be correctly loaded, but from the next release support for old slideshow project files (saved with Imagination's release prior to 2.0) will be DROPPED. Please ensure to load ALL your old slideshow projects with Imagination 2.0 and save them again.

## Imagination's window

This section describes the area of Imagination's window: the toolbar, the image area, the working area, the thumbnail area and the status bar.

Figure 1. Imagination Window

### Toolbar

- New

- Open

- Save

- Import Pictures As

- Import Music

- Delete

- Rotate Clockwise

- Rotate Counter-Clockwise

- Zoom In

- Zoom Out

- Zoom Normal Size

- Preview

- Goto First Slide

- Goto Previously Selected Slide

- Slide Entry

- Goto Next Selected Slide

- Goto Last Slide

- Quit

For a detailed explanation please look at the section called “Slideshow Menu” and the section called “Slide Menu” since these options are the same.

### Working Area

Starting from 2.0 release video and audio parts were split in two separate tabs named "Video" and "Audio". The Video part contains the following settings:

- Slide Settings

- Slide Motion

- Slide Text

Figure 2. Video Tab

#### Slide Settings

This section allows you to choose a random transition or to pick one from the drop-down menu. You can set the transition speed choosing among Fast, Normal and Slow and the time in seconds that the slide must remain still. Finally you can see the total time length of the slideshow. Note: at least one slide must be selected for this section to work.

NOTE: When slide has motion applied to it, slide duration field is disabled and cannot be modified, since duration of still part is now calculated as a sum of all stop points' durations and will be automatically updated.

#### Slide Motion

This section allows you to apply the famous Ken Burns effects on a slide. Just begin by zooming in/out and dragging image around with left mouse button to center a detail on the picture. Now click Add button and Imagination will add a new stop point with currently selected zoom level and image position. You can add as many points as you want.

You can see how each stop point looks like by selecting it using left and right arrows or by directly entering point number in proper field. Imagination will update it's preview area to show you your selected stop point.

If you commit a mistake or want to change some point, simply select problematic point, re-adjust your slide and then click the Update button. Now your selected point has it's zoom level and position set to new values.

The Remove button deletes a stop point. Simply select point that should be removed and click Remove button.

Click the Preview button on the toolbar or choose Slideshow → Preview to have a preview of the effect.

NOTE: This section is available only when exactly one slide is selected.

#### Slide Text

Imagination can add some text to your slides. Just start typing in proper field and text will show up in image area. If you wish to have multi line text, click on + sign on the right side of the text field that will expand it a bit.

You can modify text's font size, variant and family using font button below the text field. Color is controlled by color selector button right of the font button (font color can be partially transparent too).

Text can be positioned on the slide in nine locations that can be selected with position selector button. Those positions can be made relative to exported video or original image. What does this mean? For images without Ken Burns effect, both options produce the same result. But if you apply zoom, text that is positioned relative to the original image will be zoomed to, while text positioned relative to exported video will stay of the same size.

Text entrance can also be animated. Simply select animation from combo box, set the duration of the effect and enjoy.

NOTE: If duration of the text animation function exceedes duration of the slide, slide duration is synchronized with it. This is done on two ways: if slide has no motion applied, still part of the slide is simply expanded; if slide has motion applied, last stop point is expanded to fit.

How to have text stand still for a period of time? Just make sure that slide duration is longer than text animation duration. For example, if you want to have 6 seconds of text movement and 4 seconds of still text, you should set text animation duration to 6 seconds and slide duration to 10 seconds (6 seconds of text animation + 4 seconds of still time).

#### Audio Tab

By clicking on the "Audio" tab the background music list is displayed. Here you can see the length of each of the imported audio files along with the total time length of all the compatible audio files (see below for more information about audio file compatibility). Play button allows you to preview selected audio file. The arrow buttons allow you to reorder the audio files and the last one deletes the selected audio files.

Not all files can be concatenated. Imagination will inform you about any incompatibilities when you import your audio files. More detailed information can be obtained from audio files list. Red colored files have incompatible sample rate, while blue colored ones have incompatible number of channels and those orange colored have incompatible sample rate and number of channels. If you hover the mouse over an audio file entry, you'll also get some information about it. At export time, Imagination will again inform you about any incompatible files in music list and ask you if's OK to remove them from the slideshow.

Current state of audio support in Imagination is quite limited. All compatible audio files listed are concatenated together (no cross fading) and truncated to fit slideshow total length (truncation is gradual with 5 second fade-out). If you wish to have nicer audio in slideshows, you should probably create your slideshow in three steps: 1. Create slideshow without audio (this will give you the total duration); 2. Prepare audio file that exactly fits the duration; 3. Add prepared audio to slideshow and export. Please note that Imagination WILL NOT use incompatible audio files to calculate the total Music Duration length.

Figure 3. Audio Tab

### Image Area

This part of Imagination's window previews the slideshow along with stop points and text. Use zoom controls to enlarge or shrink the area.

### Thumbnails Area

Located in the bottom part of Imagination's window the thumbnail area displays the imported slides. Left clicking on one of it displays the slide in the image area along with the slide settings in the working area. Drag and drop is supported so you can import your favorite pictures by dragging them here. Rubber banding is supported too so you can select a group of slides by left clicking on some white space and then by moving the mouse. You can also reorder the slides by holding down left mouse button and by moving them around.

### Status Bar

As the name suggests this area, located under the thumbnails one, displays info about the number of transitions loaded at startup, the number of imported slides, and some info on the slide itself when only one slide is selected (otherwise the total number of selected slides is displayed).

## Imagination's Menus

This section describes in detail Imagination's menus.

### Slideshow Menu

- New

- Open

- Save

- Save As

- Close

- Import pictures

- Import music

- Properties

- Preview

- Export

- Quit

#### New

Figure 4. New Dialog

This menu allows you to create a new slideshow. The slideshow dialog is displayed. You can choose the video format (PAL/NTSC), if to scale the picture so that it covers the whole screen avoiding the black stripes and the background color to be displayed when the picture is too small and the rescaling doesn't succed to cover the whole screen. You can also change these options later.

#### Open

This menu allows you to open a previously saved slideshow.

#### Save

This menu allows you to save a previously saved slideshow. The filename won't be asked unless you haven't saved your project yet.

#### Save as

This menu allows you save a slideshow with a different filename.

#### Close

This menu closes the slideshow. If the slideshow is not saved yet or you changed something Imagination will ask you to save it first.

#### Import pictures

This menu opens up a file dialog allowing you to choose the pictures to import into Imagination. To select more than one picture, press and hold SHIFT key while clicking on the files. A progress bar is displayed in the status bar notifying you the percentage progress of the pictures' import. Thumbnails won't be shown util the loading completes.

#### Import music

This is the same as the previous only but works for audio files. Please make sure your libsox is able to handle your selected audio formats (on Debian derived distros, you'll most probably want to install libsox-fmt-all package).

#### Properties

This menu displays a dialog with the slideshow properties. Please see the the section called “New” for an explanation of the available settings.

#### Preview

This menu starts the preview of the slideshow in the image area. If you want to start the preview by a specific slide just select it by left clicking on it. The preview quality if affected by the setting in the menu Slide → Preview quality.

#### Export

This submenu allows you to export the slideshow in three different formats: VOB (DVD Video) OGV (Ogg Theora/Vorbis) and FLV (Flash Video). Each format has its own set of preferences that you'll be asked about when you select any of them.

#### Quit

This menu quits Imagination. If the slideshow wasn't saved yet Imagination will prompt you to save it first.

### Slide Menu

- Cut

- Copy

- Paste

- Preview quality

- Zoom

- Add empty slide

- Delete

- Rotate clockwise

- Rotate counter-clockwise

- Select all

- Unselect all

#### Cut

This menu entry allows you to cut a number of selected slides.

#### Copy

This menu entry allows you to copy a number of selected slides.

#### Paste

Before choosing Paste you have to left click on a slide after which you want the previously selected slides to be moved (if you chose Cut) or copied if you chose Copy).

#### Preview quality

This submenu allows you to set different quality for the preview and the image quality in the image area. This option doesn't affect exported video in any way. It's main purpose is to speed-up the creation process, since loading large images from disk at original size may take some time (loading of 4032x3024 image from disk takes cca. 2s on modern system). Be aware, preview might not work properly on slower machines when high quality is selected.

#### Zoom

This submenu allows you to zoom in or out the image area. It was added so that Imagination can be used on notebooks that have limited screen resolution. It does affect also the size of thumbnails when Imagination is in Overview mode (please see the View menu for an explanation of the Overview area).

#### Add empty slide

Figure 5. Create new slide dialog

This menu entry displays the above dialog where you can choose the background color of the empty slide in a three different ways: 1) with a solid color, 2) with a linear gradient, 3) with a radial gradient. This functionality is most useful when you want to separate your images in distinct groups by adding simple text slide in between them. If a slide is selected the empty slide will be added next to the selected slide otherwise it will be added after the last slide.

Slides created this way are in no way different from any other slide. You can still add text to them and enhance them by applying slide motion.

Gradients can be controlled on two levels. One level is selection of start and end color. Second level is position of the endpoints, which are represented by two white squares that can be dragged around the preview area.

#### Delete

This menu entry deletes the selected slides. Hold down the SHIFT key to select more than one slide at once or CTRL to select selectively. Please be aware this action cannot be undone!

#### Rotate Clockwise

This entry allows you to rotate the selected slide in the clockwise sense. The picture on the disk is NOT affected by the rotation so if you save the slideshow and you load it back the slide is displayed to its original state before the rotation.

#### Rotate Counter-Clockwise

This entry allows you to rotate the selected slide in the counter-clockwise sense. The picture on the disk is NOT affected by the rotation so if you save the slideshow and you load it back the slide is displayed to its original state before the rotation.

#### Select All

Should this entry be explained?

#### Unselect All

And this?

### View Menu

- Preview Mode

- Overview Mode

#### Preview mode

This entry allows you to switch to Preview mode; the image area along with the thumbnails area are displayed. The size of the image area can be enlarged or shrinked with the Zoom controls so to allow Imagination to be used on notebooks.

#### Overview mode

This entry allows you to switch to Overview mode; the image area along with the thumbnails area are hidden. This mode allows you to organize the slides in a matrix. The size of the thumbnails can be increased or decreased with the Zoom controls. Cut/Copy/Paste menu entries are supported. The slides can also be arranged by holding left mouse button and by moving them around.

### Help Menu

- Contents

- About

#### Content

This entry allows you to display this HTML documentation in the system installed browser.

#### About

This entry displays the About dialog with the credits.

## License

Imagination is licensed under the GPL2 license.