Photo Collage synched with mp3

[livi_17]

Hi there...

I need some help. I don't even know if this is possible, but I am hoping it is. I am in the planning process of making a Photo Collage that is synched with an MP3. I am using Flash MX to create this.

What I need to do is set photos of a friend that passed away, to one of his favourite songs. I once saw a very nice tribute to the victims of 9/11 set to music. This however was only about 15 photos, and it was a short looping ambient sound clip.

What I have in mind is much more extensive.

The song is exactly 6:00 minutes in length and weighs in at 14,066 KB. I have roughly 400 photos to show. There will be between 1 and 6 photos being shown at one time, and they will continually alpha fade in and out.. The photos will fade in and out at certain times, synched to the music. (ex. when the drumbeat starts I want certain photos to appear. same as when the song hits its climax)

This presentation will be CD based, so not too worried about size restrictions. I don't want the sound quality to suffer. So the MP3 is ripped at 320kbs.

During the presentation, there will be zero user control... meaning, no play/stop/pause buttons for the music or next/back buttons for the photos.

The user will simply watch and enjoy the show.
(if I can pull this off correctly, I hope)

I do however want photos to synch to the music.

So here is where I've been trying to brain storm...

I suppose the best way to go, is to stream the music to avoid a lengthy load time...

Now... streaming an externally loaded MP3 versus an embedded Mp3... Is there any difference there? Advantages/disadvantages?

Is it possible to put the Photo alpha tweens on the main movie timeline, and synch it to the mp3 as it is being loaded externally? Wouldn't loading externally the Mp3 cut down on the wait time, or would it make a difference.

For the 400+ photos, I am assuming that loading them externally would work much more efficiently also.

I thought that perhaps creating a sort of dummy movie, in which I could add actionscript to load the photos into, then reuse the dummy movie over and over again would be a possibility.

Is there a way to preload an image into the memory? I mean, too keep the presentation running smoothly. Say for instance, image 1 is currently being shown, can I load 2-10 into memory, so that when it gets to the moment in the time line for each image, it appears simultaneuosly without delay. Then say once image 1 is finished, it is unloaded and image 11 takes its spot. same thing, once image 2 is finished, it is unloaded and image 12 is loaded in its place, and so on, and so on...

does that make any sense?

I am average at flash, but a little weak in the actionscript coding dept. So any help at all would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Livi

[Frets]

400 plus is a lot of images.
a lot of images.

I suggest that you break your movie up into smaller
movies use load movie into level 0 to replace
montage1.swf with montage2.swf etc.

or you could simply export your movie to another format
avi/mov/exe.

[hp3]

if you are making a linear presentation, then you will need to include the mp3 within the SWF and not load it as an external MP3.

I think your best solution is, as Frets recommends, make a video and burn it to CD. The overall file size will probably be smaller than having 400 separate photos and audio. Also, if there is no interaction then you wont really need Flash. All you need is video authoring software.