Why's gramma all pixelated?

August 2, 2006 6:22 PM

I'm doing a video slideshow for a 50th anniversary. I am a newb at this (but not at digital imagery, so I can at least talk the talk), and I have questions and could use some simple and fast ideas.

This was thrown on me at the last minute as my sister left town - she's returning the day before the party. I'm art-directing, she's provided all the digital scans and the order in which she'd like the pictures presented. The anniversary party is Sunday night. The happy couple are my sisters' inlaws. I'm assembling this slideshow from stills and it's really a peripheral show - it's more of a "side wall display" that will run without narration or titling.
I only have about 250 stills and the celebration is two hours long, so I'm not synching music to it, but there will be a soundtrack (50's, 60's, 70's stuff) that will play through as the slideshow repeats. The authoring tool of choice for this is apparently Adobe Premiere Elements which looks like it will do just fine.

Questions:
I'm composing the show for 720 x 480 and NTSC thinking that it may, at some point, end up with chapters and be a DVD. I'm resizing images so that they are naturally sized for the display, and Premiere isn't attempting to resize on the fly. I'm using Photoshop for resizing. What file format is best for importing these stills? JPG? TIF? Does it matter? Further, does DPI matter? I'm not seeing any glaring differences between 200 DPI and 96 DPI. Is this normal?
One technique I'm thinking of is creating clips from sets of images, then using the clips in chunks - for example, one of their kids wedding photos is one clip, followed by a transition to another clip of that couple's children, etc. Is this appropriate, or should I just run all the slides separately on the timeline with markers/transitions between them?
What's the best output format? I'm intending on an uncompressed AVI which may run to a gig or more in size. Are there any issues with an AVI of this length, and if so, what's a recommended format? I'm presuming I could throw it to QT as an MPG file, but is this a good idea?
Finally, any ideas for backgrounds or tips/tricks you've learned from these kinds of slideshows would be helpful, as I'm familiar enough with family history to know who belongs to who, family-wise, but not familiar enough to know all the inside info - this means my art direction needs to be fairly generic. Thanks, and sorry for the long post!

posted by disclaimer to technology (7 comments total)

Well, *I* would do it with one of the consumer DVD authoring packages like Roxio Media Creator, and burn a DVD; that makes playback a *lot* easier.

And you can just throw the pix in, sequence them ,and say burn.

Picasa can actually do this too, and renders a pretty cool flying slides movie...

If you're gonna to it with Premiere though, what you render to depends a lot on what you're gonna play it back on. Do you know what that is yet?

MPEG2 or XVID are likely more portable...
posted by baylink at 6:31 PM on August 2, 2006

Check out the products at ulead They have some great software to do what you'd like accomplish. Take it from someone who has gone the route of Premiere and Imaginate to not only get frustrated because of render times, etc., but get the same results with DVD Moviefactory as well. The software has a 30 day fully functional demo. The only thing I wasn't happy with DVDMF is sometimes I like to control when the image comes up during certain parts of the music. DVDMF is just a drag, drop and run software. Good Luck with your DVD.
posted by johnd101 at 7:41 PM on August 2, 2006

I've done three 50th anniversary movie/DVD now. The first two with Photoshop/After Effects/Premiere and the last one with PhotoToMovie and a basic movie editor (iMovie).

PhotoToMovie, by far, was easier and better suited to the task than the pricey Adobe stuff.

PhotoToMovie has a downloadable demo.
posted by nightwood at 8:06 PM on August 2, 2006

This is not a technical exercise; it is a rare and wonderful celebration of the heart.

What you have to put up on that wall, is why she looked like a princess to him 50 years ago, and still does. What she wants to be reminded of was that he loved her madly, and promised he would, and has, and does.

All else detracts. They remember, as if it were yesterday, the story as it was 50 years ago, and they will tell you it is the same story now. Your job is to help everyone else see that, and to be forgotten completely in doing that.

Use the photos to tell the story, and let no one remember who told it, or ever forget the human story told.
posted by paulsc at 10:25 PM on August 2, 2006

A couple of years ago, both sets of my grandparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversaries. I created slideshows for both, and learnt alot when the first one. For the first one, we tried to do everything chronologically, and although it showed the timelin of their marriage, it got a bit boring as it played progressively through the night. For the second one, we grouped together a few major events like weddings and such, but had a somewhat 'ordered random' arrangement for the rest of the photos. It worked better for the event because when people watched it randomly, they were getting a snapshot of their entire life rather than just a few years.
Another nice thing I've seen done with something like this, was the person compiling the photos attempted to include photos of the hosts with everbody who was at the party. I don't know the size of what you're doing, but it was a nice touch.
posted by cholly at 10:33 PM on August 2, 2006

I know it is low tech, but I did something similar using Powerpoint of all things.
posted by A189Nut at 1:49 AM on August 3, 2006

I've done a ton of digital slide shows for lots of venues over the past few years.

My favorite packages are Photodex's ProShow Gold and MemoriesOnTV. The latter is probably more appropriate for your show (it's better at making DVDs).

I find the most time is put into retouching and cropping the photos. Laying them out is a cinch, especially if you don't have to sync everything to music.

Memories on TV is great for fast, good-looking layouts. You can essentially dump a bunch of slides into it, randomize transitions (or just make everything use the classic cross-fade), even add random pan/zoom effects to add interest. Preview, tweak, and done within a few hours for hundreds of slides. It even burns everything to a DVD without involving other software -- with a menu, if you like.

A slight downside is that the program occasionally crashes, but this is infrequent and probably fixed in the lates version. Just save often (which you should do, anyway, yes?)

ProShow Gold is better if you need to tweak everything on a timeline, much like Premiere. Its downside is that things take a little longer (adding slides requires some behind-the-scenes caching/resizing, etc.), but your previews look a lot better (and are VERY accurate). With a fast machine (>1.5 GHZ), you'll be fine.

Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but they're far and away the best slideshow software packages out there.
posted by catkins at 9:36 AM on August 4, 2006 [1 favorite]