Family Christmas Slideshow

[gullottawa]

Thanks Igor for a wonderful program!

I have just finished producing an 8 minute, 88 slide show of pictures summarizing my family's year in pictures; vacations, graduations, family reunions, and so on ... I normally send out a Christmas newsletter to friends and family but this year used PTE to produce a slideshow instead in both .exe and SVCD formats. I was amazed at the high resolution of the pictures on the screen and the smooth fades, and didn't even notice that the aspect ratio was changed from 3:2 to 4:3 until I thought about it later. It's a convenient and inexpensive way to distribute a large number of images. The feedback I'm getting is very enthusiastic. One young nephew wants to do something with his skateboard images; I just wish the procedure was more straightforward as I just can't imagine a young person jumping through all the hoops I did.

I originally started to create a voice-over narration but quickly realized that synchronizing the images with the words would be a lot of work; (and besides, my voice sounded pretty wimpy when recorded ) So I substituted a couple of 'ambient' mp3 tunes as background music instead.

Technical notes - nothing too fancy here, kept it simple; obtained images from scanned prints, and more recently from my new dSLR; Select, edit and sequence images with Adobe Elements 'Browse'; Slideshow Preview and batch file downsize with Canon's Zoombrowser; SVCD show production in PTE and Ulead DVD Movie Factory; Disc copying with Nero Express, delivery by Canada Post.

Particular thanks to Al Robinson and Ed Overstreet, local PTE enthusiasts, who I met through my local camera club and helped to steer me in the right direction.

Cheers,

Gullottawa

P.S. If you're looking for a quick and dirty way to see how a series of .jpg pics will look on your TV screen before you actually produce your slideshow just get yourself a DVD player that supports .jpg images. You just click on the first filename and they display one after the other at 3 second intervals. You can even pause them and use the other DVD controls on the remote. This is very convenient since I routinely backup my images from computer to CD anyways and now I can view them directly on the TV with no additional steps. It even allows you to listen to mp3's while looking at your pics! (How do they do that? With a buffer, I guess, because surely they don't have 2 read heads?) Useful for trying out different background music to go with your draft slideshow.

[LumenLux]

Thanks for the report. Sounds like a great success for you all.

I like the idea of the DVD play .jpg for TV preview. Though my DVD will play the .jpg files, I had not thought of using it as you suggest. I think (wonder?) if the viewed jpg will not give a preview of the TV screen cropping if the same size images are processed PTE/avi to TV?