Creating a slideshow: Questions and Issues

Question

Greetings Premiere Users-
I am completely new to using Premiere. I have been using iMovie to create slideshows but am completely frustrated by the program's inner workings.
I have my images and audio in bins and now beginning to connect the pieces but am running into some problems.
1. I don't understand how to setup the number of slides to the length of audio. Upon opening the Preferences panel and selecting "General" it appears that I need to enter some value with respect to "Video Transition Default Duration of "30 Frames" and the Still Image Default Duration of "150 Frames". What I don't comprehend is if I have 397 seconds of audio and 129 still images and I want to space them across the audio, what values should I use?
2. My current project has 129 images which currently extends beyond my video. I selected the images, chose "Speed Duration", and entered 3:00 which would put my images well within the audio. The problem is that the first so many images have a space between them rather than being contiguous like the second half of them. I did select the "ripple" checkbox as I have read should be selected.
3. This slideshow is going to be seen on a projector, is there a recommended size that I should create this in, e.g. 800x600, etc...?
Thanks, and sorry to overload all these questions at once.
doug

Answer 1

Hey Doug,
1.)  I assume you're editing on a 30fps sequence.  So you have 397 seconds of audio, which is 397 x 30fps = 11,910 frames worth of audio.  So take 11,910 and divide by 129 (photos) = 92 frames per image.  So in the Premiere Pro preferences, change the frame number to 92 frames.  Keep in mind, this will only affect any future images that you import or create in Premiere once this change has been made.  So you will have to remove your photos from the project bin and re-import them for the timing change to take effect.
2.)  By selecting the ripple edit, shifting trailing clips button, this should take care of your problem.  Were the images at different time durations, or were all of them the same.
3.)  Regarding your projects resolution, you need to find out if you want this project to be a widescreen (16:9) or standard (4:3) ratio.  Personally I would stick with widescreen since this is how 99.9% of video productions are nowadays. If this is what you want, I would create a 720p project.  This is 1280x720 and will playback nicely on your 800x600 projector.  You obviously will have the letterbox effect, black bars on the top and bottom of your screen.  If you would rather fill the projector screen, you can create a custom project and manually enter in your resolution of 800x600 (this will only work is you're going to playback the video file from a computer and not a video DVD, as you may know, DVDs res is locked at 720x480 (NTSF).  You can set up the custom res when creating a new sequence.  Or to keep things a little simplier, just create a DV 720x480 4:3 project. 
Hope this helps.
-Mike
VidMuze