Creating a slide show

surfoutsider wrote on 1/7/2009, 10:57 AM
Newbie here at vegas studio 9.0 platinum. I got this software to do basic video editing but also to create quick n' dirty photo/camera video slide shows. I travel a lot and I mainly want to throw all of the photos and digi cam video together to show family and friends. But I have to say for such a solid and detail rich video editing software, it seems that vegas studio left no easy room to make photo/video slide show. Moving photos around on the timeline has been such a pain and constantly the overlap disappears or overlaps too far. Moving photos from one place to another has not been easy either. There are other issues that seem to plague me as well. For instance, what is the best create movie output settings for a photo slide show? It can't take 6 hours and be 7gigabytes either. When I tried a simple 1.5 gigabyte output video at the DVD NTSC setting the pictures (around 400) were all warped and so under resolution that straight lines were pixelated.
I would be entirely grateful if someone could give a better and more complete tutorial on photo slide shows than the "show me how" on Vegas studio. Otherwise I might have to rely on google's picassa...

THANK YOU!

Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/7/2009, 11:24 AM
Your photos are probably too big so by the time Vegas takes your 10 mega pixel photo and rescales it to a less that 1 mega pixel 720x480 NTSC TV image it looks terrible. I would batch resize the photos to 2x your output quality (1440x960) max. This will make a big difference. In the preferences set your image length and overlap so that all you have to do is drag and drop all of the photos in order on the timeline and they will get laid out and overlapped exactly the way you want. This assumes that you rearrange them in windows explorer before you drag and drop them.

If you had Vegas Pro I'd say there are several script plug-ins that make all of this rather painless. It's too bad Sony doesn't add script support to the Movie Studio line. There is always the option of using a dedicated slide-show tool. Ulead DVD Movie Factory 6 does a nice job of creating slide-shows with music and transitions in just a few clicks. There are lots of other slide-show tools out there. Sometimes it's a question of using the right tool for the job given your budget.

~jr
JackW wrote on 1/7/2009, 11:40 AM
Part of your problem may have to do with work flow. First, resize your photos as JR suggests. Put all the photos on one track. Then create a track above this and begin rearranging the photos using both tracks. Don't worry about overlaps, transitions, etc., at this stage, and don't worry about creating room on the bottom time line to insert slides.

Once you have everything in the sequence you want -- some slides will be on track 1, some on track 2 -- use the "Select Events to End" function to move the slides and create spaces on track 2 to insert the slides from track 1. Continue until you have all the slides in the correct order on track 2.

Then add appropriate transitions.

This should speed things up quite a bit for you.

Jack

Skuzzy wrote on 1/7/2009, 12:45 PM
In converting images to another size (smaller usually), I have had real good luck with Able Batch Converter.

It does a really good job of down-sampling images. Much better than Photoshop, Gimp, or Paint Shop Pro.
RalphM wrote on 1/7/2009, 12:53 PM
For a free batch converter, google Irfanview. It's free and does a very good job.
rs170a wrote on 1/7/2009, 2:05 PM
Put all the photos on one track. Then create a track above this and begin rearranging the photos using both tracks

Remember to turn Auto Ripple off before you start doing this or you'll get really messed up.

Mike
JackW wrote on 1/7/2009, 2:08 PM
Good point, Mike. Should have thought of that.

Jack