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.........

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.

"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.

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.........

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.

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