If you just wished to create a slide show with a simple (pre edited) soundtrack you could try these alternatives to a video editing app;
iPhoto and import your audio through iTunes
Motion Picture - comes as additional software with Roxio Toast v6/7/8 (& maybe earlier versions?). Allows you to fit the duration of the slides to the audio.
Bill,
What is your interest or need for 1024x768? Is it because that's the size of your original images? Is that the size you want to output? If the latter, why that size - for example, are you thinking you need that size to fill the screen when you show the photos?
iPhoto, iMovie, FCE and iDVD can ALL do slideshows of your photos and include a music track. They accept 1024x768 original images. All except iDVD can output a QuickTime file of your finished slideshow, including the music. The video apps will adjust the size of your photos to fit standard DV 4:3 720x480 (or possibly HD dimensions of 1280x720 or 1920x1080 if you work in HD) - but sizing in the video realm is not the same as sizing in the digital photo realm. If your concern is image quality, regular DV 720x480 will give you a very nice quality image on your screen.
iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD can also automatically adjust the onscreen time of each photo so that the complete slideshow matches the length of the music track.
Is that what you were looking for?
Note: I just read your following post and realized you are in the UK, the DV pixel sizes I mentioned above are NTSC, not PAL.
I have an interactive kiosk virtual tour of Tredegar House in Wales, for the disabled.
It's going to be presented on a 1280 x 1024 touch screen. The sound track is a combination of narration with quiet background music.
If I use 768 x 576 (720 x 576 PAL), then the mini-movies are too small. If I use 1280 x 720, then they are too large.
The best I can think of right now is to cut my slides to 1024 x 720, and then stretch them to 1280 wide, to make a 1280 x 720 movie.
Then I'll take the QT movie, and shrink the width to 1024 to recover the correct aspect ratio.
Hack, hack, hack...
I;ve looked at many other apps which make slideshows, but none of them show the waveform, and most of them do not allow variable times between slides...
Have you considered building your slideshow in a standard size, exporting the resulting movie and then using QuickTime Pro to reset the onscreen image (frame) size to the size you find appealing? (You just have to preserve the aspect ratio when you make the adjustment in QTPro).
Have you considered building your slideshow in a standard size, exporting the resulting movie and then using QuickTime Pro to reset the onscreen image (frame) size
Sorry, but isn't that what I just said?
I'm going to try it today.
One problem is that when you squeeze or stretch a movie, you get artifacts.
Exporting the finished movie into 1280 x 720 at 30 fps did NOT optimise the still pictures, so...
I started with a set of audio and still totalling 19.1 MB, and ended up with a video totalling 1.31 GB !!!!
So, not only does FCE not do non-video resolutions, it also does NOT offer non-video-type Export, e.g. stills are converted into full-length-video sequences.
I need to sync the photos to the Audio narration file that I have.
For example, first slide is 33.2 sec duration, second slide is 18.1 sec duration, third slide is........24th slide is 16.1 sec duration, last slide is 34 sec duration.