Wedding Slideshow

July 22, 2004 9:27 AM

WeddingKitschFilter: I have to produce my best friend's rehearsal dinner slideshow montage (baby pictures, soundtrack, awww factor, etc), but I'm not sure what the best software tool is to create it. I'm competent in final cut, flash, powerpoint, hell, even MS movie, but I'm thinking these might be overkill. Does anyone know of a software tool that might be, perhaps, geared specifically for something like this? Or perhaps have any experience you'd like to share using the aforementioned tools in such a setting? Besides the "want to make friend happy" aspect, this might end up turning into a portfolio piece for an upcoming business venture, so I'm hoping not to approach it as a one-off hack job.
posted by Hankins to computers & internet (8 comments total)

If you don't have a Mac, find someone who does and make a slideshow (avec soundtrack) with iDVD.
posted by Robot Johnny at 9:32 AM on July 22, 2004

The iDVD approach may not make the best portfolio piece since the software does all the work, but it would allow you to make several copies of the slideshow as gifts...
posted by Robot Johnny at 9:34 AM on July 22, 2004

If this is to be a portfolio piece, and you are competent in final cut, why not final cut?
posted by jazzkat11 at 10:34 AM on July 22, 2004

I got married recently and my wife and I made a slide show. We used Powerpoint in part because we had it on our home PC and I had on my work PC. Also, some little slide-show specific apps didn't do what we wanted with captions. I didn't have time or money to look into anything more powerful.

The slideshow went off pretty well and Powerpoint was a reasonably easy tool to use. But here are the drawbacks:

1. Powerpoint stores each image as a BMP as part of the Powerpoint file. We had around 200 pictures, which made for a massive file. Even with a fairly robust machine, it took a long time to open the file (5 minutes) and so forth.

2. Powerpoint can automatically move forward to the next slide in a specific period of time (5 secs per slide, or different values for each slide), but the actual time varies. With a big slide show, memory becomes an issue. I put Powerpoint on top priority and closed all other apps, but the time was unpredictable. That made it difficult to coordinate with the music (which we played off a CD from the DJ's separate sound system). Something more predictable that can more easily include music is a better choice.

Good luck to you. I think that a slide show is a really great wedding gift.
posted by cholstro at 11:05 AM on July 22, 2004

Adobe Photoshop Album has some slideshow export stuff that can play back in recent Acrobat Viewers. It's some sort of super-PDF. I don't have Album in front of me now but I remember playing with it and finding it to be pretty straightforward.

I've seen none of the described Powerpoint performance problems when fiddling with export and playback, and Album itself has proven to be quite adept at dealing with a database of more than 25,000 pictures.

The downside is that Album is obscure and costs money.
posted by majick at 11:46 AM on July 22, 2004

I did mine in iPhoto. Scanned, sequenced the photos, output to QuickTime movies. I did the titles in iMovie. Back then you couldn't use iMovie to edit QuickTime movies, or if you could I didn't know how, so I just edited them all together cut'n'paste style in QuickTime Pro.

We played it back at the reception on a borrowed Windows laptop hooked to a video projector [could've just burned it to a VCD and brought our DVD player, but we were offered the laptop]. We ended up having the DJ play the music over his PA and the laptop played the movie a little out of sync [just a skosh too slow], but nobody [else] seemed to notice or care.
posted by britain at 1:14 PM on July 22, 2004

I did this for my sister's wedding using iPhoto -> quicktime -> iMovie for titles. It was then burned to dvd using iDVD as a nice gift.

We also did a couple of the transitions using Still Life from Granted Software (very cool). It allows you to do great zoom and pan transitions on static images. We exported these into quicktime as well, and stitched it in to the iMovie slideshow.

Remember to get a good projector with high lumen output. Most office projectors are fine in a small boardroom but will be dim if blown up on a large screen in a reception hall.

Lots of fun.
posted by kaefer at 6:40 PM on July 22, 2004

I use Macromedia Director to create foolproof, basic, "power point-esque" presentations. They are for my boss when he gives lectures. You can save your presentation as a compressed .exe file (which is great for him because he is not very savvy with computers).

Caveat: I work in a vacuum, so I don't know if anyone is really using Director anymore. But it sounds like your needs are congruent with what I use the application for. Ho hum.
posted by naxosaxur at 7:32 PM on July 22, 2004