With Adobe leaning more and more into AI, I decided to leave Lightroom for Darktable, but Darktable doesn't offer the Slideshow feature that Lightroom includes.
There are no real alternatives on linux, but I was already using Blender VSE, and was somewhat familiar with it, so I came up with this add-on.
It creates a Ken Burns style zooming and panning slideshow with optional intro and outro slides, an audio track, and a one-button workflow.
- Create a new project
- Switch to the Video Editing
- Open the DDSlideshow panel on the right side of the timeline
The default setting will give you a slideshow without intro or outro slides, no music, a random zoom in or out with a scale between 1.0 and 1.5, and panning in a random 8-way direction.
- Optionally load intro and outro slides, e.g. with your studio logo
- Optionally load an audio track
- Configure the range of zooming.
- Configure the direction of panning.
See Settings further down this document for details.
Click "Run all", which will open a file browser. Select all images for the slideshow. (In contrast to how other file browsers work, shift- or control-click won't work as expected with Blender. Either filter filenames at the bottom input with a wildcard, or use [shift] B, which will allow you to box select files.
Confirm the dialog and a finished slideshow with all configured settings from above will be created.
You can click the play button below the timeline window to preview it.
Instead of "Run all", you can also follow the individual steps in the workflow tab.
This is a convenience panel, that gives you all basic operations to create a slideshow one after the other. You will also find the various workflow buttons again in the settings section directly with their parameters.
Note: Some workflow steps depend on a proper selection of strips. The individual workflow steps try to set a usable selection, e.g. all images after the image loading, but you might want to modify this selection.
Load images opens the same file browser as in the Run all workflow.
Overlap images applies the Slide duration and Slide crossfade settings
to the selected images. A clean crossfading will happen further down.
Add transforms adds transform strips for each selected image.
Apply zoom adds zoom to all selected transform strips. You might want to deselect the transforms for the intro and outro slide. The Simple workflow above will do that automatically for you.
Apply pan will do exactly that. There are some rules for panning, and it is dependent of the zoom settings. See Settings below. It's best to leave the intro and outro strips deselected here as well.
Add crossfade will crossfade images or transforms, depending on the selection. It makes no sense to crossfade the images, when the transform is on top of them. So the Simple generation workflow will select all transform strips automatically.
If you're selecting the strips manually, you might now want to add the intro and outro strips again in your selection.
Slideshow fade in/out will add a adjustment strip to fade the slideshow in from black at the beginning, and to black at the end.
Audio fade in/out will load the audio track and fade it in and out according to the configured durations at the beginning and end.
If the audio track is longer than the slideshow, it will be shortened and the configured fade out will be applied at the end of the slideshow instead of the end of the track.
Note, that this script has no way do deal with an audio strip that is shorter than the slide show. The options to manually deal with that are:
- Accept the silence until the end of the slideshow
- Provide an audio track with a sufficient length
- Duplicate the audio track, shift it towards the end of the first track and make them blend into each other. In this case, fading the end out also needs to be done manually.
There are FIXME problems that might require manual intervention.
- The script cannot know what the point of interest in an image is, and panning might shift it out of sight.
- The image can have a different aspect ratio than the slideshow, and a
relevant piece might be out of frame if the default scale mode
Fillis used. - The zoom direction was wrong for the best impact of the image
All issues can be fixed with 1 or 2 button clicks.
Scroll through the timeline and find an image you want to modify.
Click on that image to make it the active object. (This is important and I forget it all the time myself.)
Then chose one or more of the fixes below and repeat that for all images in your timeline that need tuning.
To fix the zoom direction, just click the 'Switch zoom direction' button and the image will change from zooming in to zooming out or vice versa.
FIXME is the PAN update still needed?!?
If e.g. the point of interest is in the top left corner, but the image zooms
into the top right corner, just click the NW button in the To: section.
If the aspect ratio of the image is different from the slideshow, it is still possible, that the point of interest is still off screen, or at least too close to the edge, since the upscaled image will always be aligned to the center of the image.
So e.g. if the eyes of a subject are still above the frame, although you have
anchored the panning to N, just press the Top button (or one of the other
options depending on your image) in the Align section.
Finally render the slide show into a movie.
If you're familiar with Blender, you might already have configured your prefered export settings yourself, but in case you're not, here are some sane defaults:
The output is configured in the top right corner at the printer icon.
- In the Format heading, select
HDTV 1080p. - Leave the framerate at 24 fps
Frame endshould be configured automatically by the slideshow generation- After saving the project, type
//your-project-nameinto the output. This will export to the same directory the project's.blendfile is saved in. - Set the file format to
FFmpeg Video - Below
Encoding, set Container tompeg-4. - The
H.264video codec should be good. - Audio is set to
No Audioby default. Set it to eitherAACormp3.
Then save your project again, so no settings can get lost.
Finally export with Render -> Render Animation from the top bar, or by pressing Ctrl-F12.
intro, outro are image slides that will be placed before and after the actual slideshow. Place your studio logo here, or a slide with descriptive text.
audio is a music or voice track to accompany the slideshow
duration is the duration that any slide will be shown unobstrued. Crossfading slides is added to this duration.
crossfade is the duration that 2 images will blend into each other.
The defaults for both should be fine to showcase all images without lingering too long.
Overlap images, Add transforms are the same function as in the Workflow description above.
zoom from, zoom to configure the amount of zooming. The image will zoom
from a scale of zoom from to a scale of zoom to by default. If you want a
zoom out, just switch the values. The default will zoom from an unscaled
image to a scale of 1.5.
Randomize zoom direction will randomly switch between zooming in or out for each slide.
Apply zoom again is the same as the Workflow button above. Note, that even with a single image selected, the direction will be randomized if the option is selected. If you want to force a specific direction, deselect randomize before applying zoom, or use the next button afterwards.
Switch zoom direction will switch the zoom_from and zoom_to values for
the selected strip, to easily toggle a selected image's zoom direction in the
Fine Tuning step.
Force downscaled to center will make sure, an image that is smaller than the screen will always be centered.
From, To define the settings for the start and end of the slide.
NW, N, NE, W, 0, E, SW, S, SE are anchor points that the image will pan from/to.
Randomize will select a random direction from above for every slide.
Clockwise, Counter clockwise will cycle through the anchors in the given direction, starting with N.
The behaviour of panning is dependent of the zoom settings
- A zoom of 1 will disable both zooming and panning, since there is nothing to zoom/pan towards.
- A zoom <= 1 will follow the
force downscaled to centersetting by default. This can be overwritten after the slideshow creation with the Fix workflow. - A zoom > 1 will pan the image towards the configured anchor direction.
Slideshow fade in/out gives the time for the fade in and out effect at the beginning and end of the slideshow.
Audio fade in/out configures the same for the audio track.
The addon is packaged in the new plugin format that came with the Blender 4.2 release.
In this early stage, it's not yet registered on the blender add-ons site, but that will happen a few tests and a bit of auditing down the road.
So currently, either download the release or clone the github repo to create the package yourself.
Download the latest version from the github release page here:
https://github.com/DickerDackel/ddslideshow/releases
Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Get Extensions
Click the arrow in the top right and at the bottom of the menu "Install from disk".
DDslideshow should then appear in the Add-Ons page and already be activated.
git clone https://github.com/dickerdackel/ddslideshow
cd ddslideshow/addon
blender --command extension buildAfter that, there will be a zip file ddslideshow-VERSION.zip in the same directory. You can install that the same as the release package described above.
MIT License
Copyright (c) 2024 Michael Lamertz
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