How long should a slideshow take to export?

I have found exports in Aperture take very long times to create 1080p files.

Aperture is good though in that you can treat videos the same as stills and make an mp4 file using slideshow ( a much easier process than using iMovie).

I am about to embark on a project to convert many movie clips gathered over the years into organised mp4 files for my Synology NAS drive. But the export times are awful. I may have to live with it though. It is interesting that if you import the file produced by Aperture into Handbrake to export an mp4 file, then file sizes are reduced by a factor of more than 10 with no discernible loss of quality - which implies the Aperture export feature is faulty.

Interesting you have found a way of creating smaller files as I have.

But why doesn't Apple Aperture create smaller files - and therefore much faster!! I need to work at 1080p to preserve quality, and understand that other formats export much quicker.

I have just reduced a 2 min 22 sec slideshow (which took about 20 minutes to export) from 1780 MB to 147 MB using Handbrake - that's about 7% of original size and quality is preserved.. Maybe I am missing something?

I am about to embark on a project to convert many movie clips gathered over the years into organised mp4 files for my Synology NAS drive. But the export times are awful. I may have to live with it though. It is interesting that if you import the file produced by Aperture into Handbrake to export an mp4 file, then file sizes are reduced by a factor of more than 10 with no discernible loss of quality - which implies the Aperture export feature is faulty

When aperture is creating the video from the slides it is not only converting the format, it is rendering transitions and effects. Rendering the animations in high quality is always much slower than simply converting a video to a different format. It is not the file size of the finished movie that matters so much - the rendering time is more determined by the pixel size of the video, the number of slides, and the settings for transitions and special effects.

I am using default transition (Dissolve) and no effects. I notice there is a Transition = "None" which I will try. Not convinced though that this poor performance is anything to do with transitions or effects. Just weak Apple code?

I have now found a much better method of generating a movie from clips. Using the album/slideshow/export feature in Aperture is next to useless because of the long creation times for the mp4 combined movie file and a subsequent (optional) reduction in file size(10x for me) with Handbrake.

I have now hit on another much easier option. It's called QuickTime Pro, costs about 20 GBP. It needs Quicktime Player 7. (Registration is difficult. You have to quit QuickTime after registering and reopen). Any way with QT Pro you can open your first movie, drag the second and third etc (directly out of Aperture even) and save to a new file. This combines all clips together perfectly, and in no time at all. I believe you can do the same thing even with standard Quicktime.

Why not document this properly Apple and save every one a pile of time.

Sorry by movie I meant a "clip" held in Aperture, i.e a video clip.

If you select a clip from an Aperture browser window and drop it into Quicktime Pro it will insert the clip at the position of the pointer in QTP (normally use the extreme right or extreme left position). You can then drag and drop more clips. When done you can "Save as", normally using "Save as a self contained movie".

Very simple and you have a combined movie in no time (by comparison with other methods).

Also of course you can use "Trim" on the clips beforehand to pick the best parts of the clip (use the little wheel on the navigation bar for the clip).

You can also create a slideshow easily. Export or drag required photos from Aperture into a temporary folder. Then from QTP do “Open Image Sequence” having selected the first photo in the temporary folder. Select a “frame rate” of say "5 seconds per frame" (maybe a little less). This is a lot easier than using Aperture (or iPhoto) slideshows and exporting them into a mov file. (I use Handbrake on the resulting mov file to reduce its size and create an mp4 file, without apparent loss in quality, before posing to my NAS).