I'm simply looking for new ideas...
I don't know about ideas, but I have one piece of advice:

Make your slideshow follow the pictures.

In other words, choose moves and transitions that are suggested by the pictures themselves.

I've done hundreds of slideshows, including about fifty that were done for three high school graduating classes. For each class, all students (and their parents) submitted 20-30 photos (and videos). I then retouched each picture (several thousand photos), and organized them into twelve to fifteen music videos. I cut much faster than I would for other productions (like funeral tributes, which as you'd expect are very slow). This rapid tempo is dictated by the audience who are accustomed to music video cuts. For the music, I used suggestions from several students.

The following is one of the music videos that resulted from this work. Note the crazy use of transitions, something I normally wouldn't do, but which fitted this situation. I used Excalibur to help create the initial slide show, but I used it mostly to set up the mechanics of the slide overlaps and transitions, and then changed these as I went along.

I did this pretty quickly and this is actually a rough cut (you'll note the duplicated photo near the beginning). You'll also see some strange keyframe motion due to the lousy keyframe interface in Vegas.

See if you can spot where I selected portions of the photo for animation, such as the surf in the background of one picture, or the changing color on certain objects. You'll also see how I dropped out the background in several cases, something that can be used in a number of different ways, including moving the foreground and background at different speeds in order to create a 3D effect.

Hopefully this will provide some inspiration. You will certainly find a lot of different ideas, all in one place.

Here's a slideshow I did for my mom's 50th birthday. I don't use the "bad UI" excuse to say it was a lot of work... because doing something besides simple fade in/outs or a plugin (Excalibur and ScatterShot are awesome at doing nice slideshows automatically) IS A LOT OF WORK. ;)



This one was done in Blender, most likely a faster render then doing it in Vegas, but a heck of a lot more work laying it out & moving the camera. Scattershot 3D renders longer but you save the time in manually setting everything:

I really liked the 50th birthday slideshow. It was a great job of matching the photo moves to the music to create a whimsical, slightly offbeat feeling. Very creative and inventive.

The Blender slideshow looked more like a demo of the software capabilities. I couldn't really see any of the photos and wasn't quite sure what was going on. However, it definitely shows some interesting possibilities.

The 3d motion video done in Blender is actually quite easy to do in Vegas. Put one photo (or video) on each track and then make them child tracks to 3d "controller tracks".

Like this:

Z controller
..X-Y controller
.....Photo 1
........
.....Photo n

Then just use the 3d track motion on the two controller tracks to animate in/out and around the stack of photos. The opening scene for this video used this general technique, albeit for a different end result.

[edit: corrected spacing in text]

/jerry

I've also used Vegas for many slide shows over the years. I love it. Not sure I can offer inspiration but here's my favorite, it's too long (5:12) and the music is loud so watch your volume in the beginning, but there's a bunch of different techniques, although all very straight forward.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13355290/cs28%20handbrake.m4v

If you really want to do fancy slideshows or even work with lots of still images in Vegas, you might consider something like Proshow Producer. http://www.photodex.com/. Producer isn't cheap ($250), but having used it now for a couple of years, I've found it to be well worth the price. If nothing else you might have a look at their website just for some new ideas. I suspect that most everything can be done in Vegas alone, but its just a matter of time and effort to achieve the same effect.

wwaag

The blender one was just to show off it being done. It's a lot easier to get the movement in blender vs Vegas, no matter how well you can handle the 3D track motion. But in Blender each image needed to be a new texture on a material (all setup manually). That was the most time consuming part.

I've got two slideshows being uploaded to youtube right now for the Belle Star Music Fest this weekend.

I've still got the .veg file for my mom's 50th if anyone's interested.

Doing a couple or handful of events for a slideshow with complex 3D track motion is doable, but when you get more complex it gets wayyyyyyyy confusing and you need to plan in advance how things will work.



EDIT: Belle Star slideshow. Just using Excalibur.


EDIT2: this the slideshow (same everything) done with the 3D Vasst plugin:

I have really liked the samples posted here. Lots of good technique and ideas.

Here is something a little different. The first video I ever did.

It is something of a chronological time lapse of sorts on my mountain bike. The ride is over three hours and the time between shots was 5 seconds so it is not a true time lapse but most of the main body of the song is chronological along the trail.

My technique was to heavily cue the photos to the song. Quick cuts but each shot is not so remarkable and only mean anything as a whole.

The target audience is mountain bikers so it may be of limited interest.

Through personal lessons learned and critical feedback, I've decided that too much of a good thing can be really bad. I'm talking specifically about deep & fast Pans & Zooms (generally known as the Ken Burns effect). This technique was pioneered by Ken Burns in his 1990's PBS series on the American Civil War. Through Panning and Zooming he gave "life" to old still photos taken during the 1861 to 1865 war that divided America. After this series aired, the Ken Burns effect began appearing everywhere. And that's the problem.

I've seen too many photo slideshows employ this technique for every slide with far too much and too fast Panning and Zooming. I was guilty of doing this in my shows until I discovered I was falling asleep watching them. Later I found out from others they too were dropping off watching them. It turns out that all that Panning and Zooming was causing a bit of eyestrain on each slide. Put together several hundred slides and suddenly you have a cure for insomnia. It took awhile but I eventually came to the conclusion that subtle pans and zooms are far more pleasing to the eye when used sparingly and in combination with other effects such as quick cuts and random transitional effects that should also be used in moderation.

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to reply and even post some examples for me to view.

I tend to agree with Gary James in that too fast panning and zooming distracts from the show and adds nothing apart from making it less watchable in my humble opinion.

Perhaps what I have been been doing over the last few years is still good enough.

Here's a link to the last slideshow I created late last year:


I would appreciate any comments. Sometimes I think the photos are shown for too long but my wife and others want them that long.

What I try to create is a slideshow that people will want to watch again rather than 'once is enough'!

Cheers.

Edit, the music was quickly thrown together using Cinescore so my apologies for that.

>I tend to agree with Gary James in that too fast panning and zooming distracts from the show and adds nothing apart from making it less watchable in my humble opinion

I think this can be true for certain audiences, not so for others. Here are a few conclusions I have come to after several years of making slideshows:

1. Younger audiences generally like fast paced "MTV" style slideshows with cuts between shots. Proshow Producer excels at making this style.

2. Older audiences tend to prefer slow pan/zoom (ala Ken Burns), or none, with crossfades. Vegas or Producer can do these easily.

3. If you are in the slideshow (physically or emotionally), you can enjoy a longer show, but in general i try to limit the length of my shows to 3-4 minutes. At the insistence of one client I made a "life celebration" slideshow that went nearly 30 minutes. I've never watched it in its entirety since delivering it to the client.

4. If you are not in the slideshow (physically or emotionally) you will need higher quality or more unique material to hold the audience's interest.

Just my .02.

/jerry

Maverick, I find that pan & zoom should be used to draw attention to something of interest in an otherwise busy or cluttered image, or to focus attention to a specific spot of interest in a photo of a single object; for example the head of the bird statue in your show. Or it could be done very slowly to show detail on an object much too large to be seen if the object was zoomed out to fill the frame.

But just slide after slide of pans and zooms gets tedious. If used sparingly it adds much to the overall slideshow.

>But just slide after slide of pans and zooms gets tedious. If used sparingly it adds much to the overall slideshow.

+1

/jerry

I use Proshow producer all the time to create slideshows. Excellent for the purpose - you can then export in a format you can easily import into Vegas to do any additional stuff you want (add video etc. ) which is the way I do it. The best rule to follow is that transitions/zooms etc. should be viewed as punctuation not as the show itself. Too many people tend to create videos (or slide shows) that seem to be an attempt to use all the available transitions and effects. The effects and transitions you should use should (in most cases) be simple. Typically, 2-3 seconds is more than enough for a slide - use more if there is text they need to read etc, but otherwise keep it short and use fairly quick transitions (cut or quick cross fade). Target your audience - a flower show for the old folks home will not keep a bunch of kids watching any more than a kids show would be of interest to the old folks. Check out some of the slide show samples posted by others in the Proshow forum ( http://www.proshowenthusiasts.com/ ) note what works and what doesn't as well as what others have to say.

I have both Proshow Producer as well as Vegas Pro. Both useful tools with a fair amount of overlap, but each has stuff that they do much better than the other. Proshow is great for creating slideshows. Vegas is great for editing video. Together, they make a great combination.
mikey

Slideshows boring? I remember when....

Late 50's (I was a kid) Argus projector with metal slide tray. 36 slides, one after another. Then change trays. At least you could control how long each was shown.

The 70's. My own slide projector. A Bell & Howell with slide cubes. Not quite so boring. Had a remote control. Still 36 slides, but it would jam every 10 slides or so giving the audience (family) time to talk.

The 80's at work. Two Kodak Carousels that would even dissolve between slides. Amazing.

Today, virtually unlimited ways of presenting images with all kinds of effects and fancy transitions, yet the feeling among many (myself included) that simpler is usually better. I think we tend to forget that the two most important things are content and audience. If the audience is interested in the content, then presentation, while important, is not paramount. If the audience has no interest, then it really doesn't matter. Regardless of presentation, it will be boring to them. Bottom line--never invite your relatives to see a slideshow or video for that matter of that amazing trip you just took to Yellowstone. Even if its short and well-crafted, they'll be bored. Just my nickels worth.

wwaag

Late 50's (I was a kid) Argus projector with metal slide tray. 36 slides, one after another.I totally identify with your description of the progression of slideshow technology. The picture below may look like an advertising photo, but was actually taken at my house in 1961 when someone brought his slides to show at one of my parents' parties.

I'm not sure that anyone under fifty can believe how simple things were back then, and that something like this could be considered rollicking good fun.



P.S. Note the open windows in the background: Chicago in the middle of summer, with no air conditioning.

Great picture--obviously not taken with a Brownie.


P.S. Note the open windows in the background: Chicago in the middle of summer, with no air conditioning.

I grew up in Houston. Same thing. We got a single room air conditioner in the mid-60's. Thought I was living in the Ritz.

That's the problem with the modern slideshow, where's all the witty banter, those people are rollicking with laughter.

Like wow man - I think I just had an instant flashback - although the slideshows were not as bad as the 10 reels of 8mm very shakey footage of whatever we sometimes sat through. Worst case was movies AND a slideshow :-)

mikey (who is feeling older by the second)

People laughed because it wasn't a slide MOVIE, it was a slide and a 20 minute story about the slide.

Yes, I'm not that old but we did that all the time at my grandparents house, alone with the 8mm projector.

With some old photos and stock sounds of a Slide projector fan, and the projector cycling between slides, just add some gaps between your images and sounds and .... presto, a retro slide show.

[I]Great picture--obviously not taken with a Brownie.[/I]Yup: Leica M3 which I still have and need to sell on eBay while it still has value to someone (along with my pre-war Contax).