Diascope takes a text file with the description of your
slideshow: images, durations, transitions, audio etc. After
processing the description diascope creates a shell script
containing the necessary commands to generate a slideshow, and then
executes the script. You can watch the progress indicators
and wait for your slideshow.
Diascope renders all frames and sounds to the harddisk and
keeps track of its files. If you modify the slideshow description
file diascope will
only reprocess the changes and save you waiting time. The
downside is, of course, that you need free harddisk space:
approximately 1.7 GB for one minute of PAL video.
To determine what has changed, diascope compares the
current description file to the one used for the previous run.
It attempts to map as many of your previous actions and transitions
to the new slideshow as possible to avoid unnecessary re-rendering.
The underlying algorithm tries to find the best matches but it is not very clever.
