Producer lyrics, font, sweep erratics

[franks]

Importing KTP files works perfectly when played back in kJams tryout ....however when opening the "Producer" try out, three major problems are encountered.

Don't know if it's me on the learning curve or intrinsic basic S/W glitches.

First, the lyrics displayed in the video after opening in Producer are being "stepped on" by succeeding lyric word graphic blocks. In other words many lyric graphics appear incomplete or mispelled. Now, I corrected the overlapping lyric graphics via Producer so that all lyric words appear properly. This is an awkward and time consuming process.

Second, on playing back the Producer file with corrected lyrics the lyrics are complete & don't step on each other, but the font on many opening (initial verse) words is changed to a smaller disconcerting font. This apparently needs another adjustment step in Producer which I don't particulary want to do or know how to do.

Third, on playback the sweep timing stays synchronized as in the KTP file but on the last sentence of the current video frame, it sweeps supersonically to the end. I may have inadvertently introduced something wacky but I don't know what.

I am going to try to send the KTP, XML, and kJams zip. If these problems can be resolved I think then Producer would be an efficient & desired kJams adjunct especially for us Mac users who need to create & produce unavailable karaoke songs.

[dave]

Producer is not for the faint of heart. it is not up to my standard of "user friendly" by any stretch. you really have to know what you're doing.

you'll get a good leg up on how it works by watching all the video tutorials:
http://karaoke.kjams.com/wiki/Producer/Tutorials

and working thru the self-paced tutorial on making your own intro screen:
http://karaoke.kjams.com/wiki/Producer/Intro

1) do not enter the song title/artist info into TunePrompter, ONLY enter actual lyrics. use Producer to add the bells and whistles like intro/outro and song break graphics
1.5) do not use "..." to indicate syllable breaks, use the "- " characters (dash, space) that way kJams knows to stitch the two halves of the words together
2) be very sure you understand about line breaks. this is covered in the video tutorials. i re-flowed your song to have FOUR lines per page, this is important
3) i had to bump the font point size DOWN in TunePrompter, otherwise the text did not flow correctly (this is also in the video tutorials)
4) then i re-sanc your song, and brought it back into kJams, and it all worked as expected. i added an intro screen manually since the auto-fit did not work. kJams did automatically add the outro graphic
5) i added a cute yodeler graphic during the song break, in the middle of the song
6) i manually adjusted the durations of many of the lyrics so they end when the singing ends

to answer each of your questions in order:
1) i did not run into this. perhaps something got messed up for you that did not mess up for me?
2) the small font bug has been fixed in the latest version, be sure you are up to date
3) supersonic lyrics at the end: occasionally this is required to ensure there is enough time in the timeline to get the next page displayed completely before the next lyric must be swept. carefully planning your pages will avoid that.

[franks]

Thanks Dave for replying so quickly, I will follow up on your suggestions & see if I can master Producer a bit better.. but if I can't, I hate to think of the alternatives out there..ie PC/Windows.

PS I have a Mac mini using OS 10.5.8 and trial version of kJams 1.0d50r46...... is this the correct & latest version to be using??

[dave]

you can see if you have the latest version by going "help->check for updates".

did you get the files i sent? did you open them in producer to see them?

[franks]

Yes! Received files and just had 1st chance to open them today......Great!...gives me motivation to press on. Your music interlude screen picture made me chuckle...thanks for including it, Did you draw it yourself or import it from somewhere?

[dave]

i just googled "yodel" and clicked "images"