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Creating a video montage
I have a sister celebrating a 70th birthday and I wanted to give her
the gift of a video montage. I am compiling 100-150 photos from years past to include with background music and transitions/fades. I have some basic skills with Photoshop CS2. I purchased an Epson 4990 scanner and am planning to scan old prints and 35mm slides, touch them up and crop in Photoshop then transfer the digital files to a CD-ROM. I wanted to take the CD-ROM and music CD's to a videographer for making the final DVD. I contacted a local firm who seemed to discourage me, saying they usually take the raw prints and photos, scan them and make the DVD. I want to do the scanning myself to have greater control on cropping and image adjustments (levels, curves, USM, etc). I may continue looking for a firm which can work with me on this. My question: what file format and file size would be most ideal for transferring to the DVD for a montage? Is JPEG the ideal, and if so what size? Any other considerations? How difficult would it be to do the whole project myself? Is there a software package for making such a montage which is user-friendly and competent? Thanks for any advice......... |
#2
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Creating a video montage
On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 21:12:10 -0500, "jav" wrote:
I have a sister celebrating a 70th birthday and I wanted to give her the gift of a video montage. I am compiling 100-150 photos from years past to include with background music and transitions/fades. I have some basic skills with Photoshop CS2. I purchased an Epson 4990 scanner and am planning to scan old prints and 35mm slides, touch them up and crop in Photoshop then transfer the digital files to a CD-ROM. I wanted to take the CD-ROM and music CD's to a videographer for making the final DVD. I contacted a local firm who seemed to discourage me, saying they usually take the raw prints and photos, scan them and make the DVD. I want to do the scanning myself to have greater control on cropping and image adjustments (levels, curves, USM, etc). I may continue looking for a firm which can work with me on this. My question: what file format and file size would be most ideal for transferring to the DVD for a montage? Is JPEG the ideal, and if so what size? Any other considerations? How difficult would it be to do the whole project myself? Is there a software package for making such a montage which is user-friendly and competent? Thanks for any advice......... You can do this yourself without getting into a big learning curve. I just completed such a project with 700-800 images using Windows Movie Maker. The output was saved to a high quality file which was then converted to DVD video and burned. Pop the disk in a stand alone DVD player and Bob's your uncle. I used VSO Software XVID to DVD for the conversion and burn but there is freeware stuff around. Windows MM is a freebie with XP. Images were jpegs. The movie was pretty fast paced with 3 to 4 images per second. Depending on the resources of the machine and content of the video it may be necessary to make several shorter clips and then import them into WMM and join to a single clip, otherwise things can bog down. Audio - music, narration - can be added after they are joined. WMM is fairly easy to learn and the convert and burn with the VSO app is a one click operation. WMM offers a number of options for saving output files not all of which will convert to DVD. I used AVI which worked fine. The software also burns the AVI original file to the disk by default allowing it to be played on a computer not equipped with DVD player software. |
#3
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Creating a video montage
"jav" wrote in message ... I have a sister celebrating a 70th birthday and I wanted to give her the gift of a video montage. I am compiling 100-150 photos from years past to include with background music and transitions/fades. I have some basic skills with Photoshop CS2. I purchased an Epson 4990 scanner and am planning to scan old prints and 35mm slides, touch them up and crop in Photoshop then transfer the digital files to a CD-ROM. I wanted to take the CD-ROM and music CD's to a videographer for making the final DVD. I contacted a local firm who seemed to discourage me, saying they usually take the raw prints and photos, scan them and make the DVD. I want to do the scanning myself to have greater control on cropping and image adjustments (levels, curves, USM, etc). I may continue looking for a firm which can work with me on this. My question: what file format and file size would be most ideal for transferring to the DVD for a montage? Is JPEG the ideal, and if so what size? Any other considerations? How difficult would it be to do the whole project myself? Is there a software package for making such a montage which is user-friendly and competent? Thanks for any advice......... Get some audio. Your own memories or better yet a bunch of family members talking about the memories that the pictures bring up. You can do the scans yourself but I used a digital camera mounted on a piece of plywood. It is a lot faster and quite good if you have a pretty good digital camera. Positioning the pictures on a scanner and the 30-60 seconds per scan takes a long time while a camera can do the same thing basically at about 3 times the speed in my experience and you don't have to have the same setting for the pictures with the camera as you do with a scanner. I know the math looks kind of questionable but I wouldn't do it any other way now. Any version of PhotoShop will be fine for adjusting the quality of the pictures and the version you have as, I think, most if not all of the previous versions do macros called 'actions'. You can change the saturation and gamma of your pics by setting up some nice little actions. When in button mode that is much easier than using the menus. When you show the video which can be produced by a lot of different programs (I'm thinking about using Adobe Elements for the first cut of my next project) but having the ability to coordinate the pics with the audio once you get it comes with higher end packages. I use Media Studio Pro for that. People here might know of programs that are much cheaper and do the same thing which is to let you mark the audio where you want the pictures to change and it brings them in and sets the duration of the stills to match the audio. You've done the main thing though which is to have the pictures in the first place. Technology and services by others will progress as time goes on and people will have great things that they will take for granted that we can't even imagine but no one will be able to go back and take missed pictures and Audio is so important. I only have one recording of my mother's voice, none of my son's when he was a child and none of my grandson until age six. Good thing to be doing. Don't worry about it being perfect. It will thrill and make your sister and your friends and other family feel warm and apprciated. |
#4
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Creating a video montage
I forgot the most important thing, maybe, which is to have an "in" box where you can keep the photos so they don't get lost, get them scanned and back where they are safe as soon as possible. (This might be me giving myself advice, if you know what I mean). : -) : -) "jav" wrote in message ... I have a sister celebrating a 70th birthday and I wanted to give her the gift of a video montage. I am compiling 100-150 photos from years past to include with background music and transitions/fades. I have some basic skills with Photoshop CS2. I purchased an Epson 4990 scanner and am planning to scan old prints and 35mm slides, touch them up and crop in Photoshop then transfer the digital files to a CD-ROM. I wanted to take the CD-ROM and music CD's to a videographer for making the final DVD. I contacted a local firm who seemed to discourage me, saying they usually take the raw prints and photos, scan them and make the DVD. I want to do the scanning myself to have greater control on cropping and image adjustments (levels, curves, USM, etc). I may continue looking for a firm which can work with me on this. My question: what file format and file size would be most ideal for transferring to the DVD for a montage? Is JPEG the ideal, and if so what size? Any other considerations? How difficult would it be to do the whole project myself? Is there a software package for making such a montage which is user-friendly and competent? Thanks for any advice......... |
#5
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Creating a video montage
jav wrote: I have a sister celebrating a 70th birthday and I wanted to give her the gift of a video montage. I am compiling 100-150 photos from years past to include with background music and transitions/fades. I have some basic skills with Photoshop CS2. I purchased an Epson 4990 scanner and am planning to scan old prints and 35mm slides, touch them up and crop in Photoshop then transfer the digital files to a CD-ROM. I wanted to take the CD-ROM and music CD's to a videographer for making the final DVD. I contacted a local firm who seemed to discourage me, saying they usually take the raw prints and photos, scan them and make the DVD. I want to do the scanning myself to have greater control on cropping and image adjustments (levels, curves, USM, etc). I may continue looking for a firm which can work with me on this. My question: what file format and file size would be most ideal for transferring to the DVD for a montage? Is JPEG the ideal, and if so what size? Any other considerations? How difficult would it be to do the whole project myself? Is there a software package for making such a montage which is user-friendly and competent? Thanks for any advice......... Do a Google search for a program called "Muvee". It is a neat little program that will let you do exactly what you want. In the past week I have prepared three video presentations with it. Just be sure to edit the photos that you want included and save them to a separate directory before hand. After that, it's a piece of cake. |
#6
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Creating a video montage
I've done several of these projects for clients with great results. If
you're just using photos, you won't need to get into using a video editor like MS movie maker. I use MemoriesOnTV which is a slideshow creation software that sets your pictures to music with transitions. You then burn to DVD, playable on any DVD player. Scanning will be your most time-consuming effort, but 100-150 pictures isn't too bad. Try to crop your scans to the same aspect ratio you plan to display them, probably 4:3 would be best. Scan at 200 dpi is fine. MemoriesOnTV can be found at www.codejam.com |
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