Comments

rwsjr wrote on 12/15/2001, 10:13 AM
I've been doing those myself with my digital camera pictures. The most simple way is to put images on a track and use transitions just like you would a video. You can also pan and crop within an image and use multiple tracks to split the screen into multiple areas and show different images. It's also possible (and not that hard) to time all the image changes to music.
Cheesehole wrote on 12/16/2001, 3:17 AM
Vegas is great for this. search the forum on 'slide show' and you'll find more posts about it.

- ben (cheesehole)
Control_Z wrote on 12/16/2001, 8:08 AM
I like the easy ability to use background overlays. And the image panning and titling is vastly superior to Premiere.

Right now there seems to be something broke and it takes over an hour to render 25 photos (and another hour if you change even one transition), but I'm hoping that's just a bug and will be fixed soon.
Cheesehole wrote on 12/16/2001, 5:16 PM
make sure you aren't hitting your physical memory limit...

normally VV3 and video editing in general doesn't require very much RAM. video is always streamed off the hard drive, and projects don't take much RAM.

but you can easily top out your system when doing these slide-shows, especially if you are using hi-res images (1600x1200 from a 2.1 megapixel camera). Vegas tries to keep all the images in RAM (at least VV2 did). i used to have 512MB of RAM, but that wasn't enough to make a 5 minute slide-show with a transition every 4 seconds or so. everything get's really really sluggish after you run out of RAM and start swapping everything to the hard drive.

you can easily measure this with Task Manager.

- ben (cheesehole)
HPV wrote on 12/17/2001, 11:17 PM
Right now there seems to be something broke and it takes over an hour to render 25 photos (and another hour if you change even one transition),
----------------
What file format are the photos in? Some file formats are alot slower than others. Also, track motion renders slower than pan/crop at clip level.
Might also try rendering at DV Preview quality. Most things look the same as Good quality. Note that Preview quality doesn't use "resample", so anything you have that selected on won't use it. Resample helps with jitter in motion and reduced speeds.

Craig H.
Cheesehole wrote on 12/18/2001, 2:05 AM
one of my photo montages took 36 minutes in VV2 and 31 minutes in VV3 to render to DV quality. it was 2.5 minutes long. just transitions and pans/crops, but no fx. file format was png and jpg mixed. render settings at 'best'. system is a dual pIII 1GHz with 768MB RAM.
jerryd wrote on 12/18/2001, 6:00 AM
Appears that I may want to stick with RaptorEdit; yesterday I rendered 150 photos with a transistion between each one in less than 10 minutes.
Control_Z wrote on 12/18/2001, 2:02 PM
RaptorEdit? Puhleeze. If speed was the only factor in a photo montage I'd do all mine with StormEdit *in real time*.

At this point I'm waiting out the >1hr/25 photo render in VV3, but I sure hope they get it optimized to at least work as fast as Premiere.
tserface wrote on 12/18/2001, 7:09 PM
This is what I do most with VV and ever since upgrading to VV3 I can't get good quality output any more. VV2 works fine, but the same things done in VV3 produce very jittery output in DV format. My initial reaction is that the new DV CODEC is just not good for doing stills. I don't have any problem doing DV video, but I'm considering moving to another product because I need to be able to do good photo videos. I've tried lots of different settings. It's very frustrating. At this point I'm sorry I upgraded. Friends of mine tell me they don't have any problems with Premiere doing this sort of thing, but I don't have any experience in that regard.

My $.02 - Tom
Control_Z wrote on 12/18/2001, 10:59 PM
It's not the codec because my stills are actually so much sharper I'm thinking of adding a slight blur to some of them.
I'm getting jitter in slo-mo and I think I'll post a question about that, but all my stills, pans, and zooms in my montages are great. Vastly superior image panning compared to Premier. Needs some 3D though.
Sure you don't have your frame rate set to something odd?
jerryd wrote on 12/19/2001, 6:37 AM
When you're doing sometimes a thousand photos a day, yeah, speed is the main factor.
haywire wrote on 12/19/2001, 7:16 AM
I've found that using the resample switch helps smooth out jitter in slow motion clips. Problem is, render takes longer.

Michael
tserface wrote on 12/19/2001, 9:05 AM
I use:

Interpolate Fields
Lower field first
Resample

I tried Progressive and Upper First, but it didn't make much difference. I'm still playing to see if I can get around it. Since it didn't used to happen there must be something that got introduced somewhere. Unfortunately, there is no good place to go to find out what all the options really mean if you don't already know all about how video works. Anyone want to write a book?

Tom
kkolbo wrote on 12/19/2001, 12:27 PM
There is an excellent article on DV.com about still, pans and DV. The new SF CODEC is much sharper and therefore more acurate.

The problem is in the interlacing and the fine details. NTSC will "twitter" on small lines, less than 2 pixels or scan lines (Approx). This is from the interlacing.

The reason you see this in VV3 and not in 2 is the better quality CODEC. The article has some great methods to deal with it, but the skinny is to use a vertical or horizontal blur of one pixel depending on the cause to satisfy NTSC. Color and other values that are allowed in DV also give NTSC some problems. VV has built in solutions for those as well. Please read the article "Taming Stills and Graphics in DV" on DV.com. The one note I will give you is that the author keeps referring to having to prepare the still in Photoshop or using third party plug-ins to accomplish the preparation. That is because he is using Premier and ULead and theifilters are weak. The SF filters with VV3 give you pixel level vertical and horizontal blurs and corrections quite satisfactorally unlike the others. You are lucky to have VV3.

K